GC VIP Stadium Road Audibles — 10/28/19 Edition

When my sort-of former colleague from our SB Nation days Bill Connelly tweeted out his new SP+ ratings yesterday, he first put up his top 12 before sending out the full list. Florida was not in the top 12, and that fact made a lot of Gator fans mad.

Some important things to remember that Connelly pointed out are that SP+ is based on data and not opinion and that the Gators didn’t look terrific against either Miami or South Carolina. The system’s rating number is how many points better a team is than a perfectly average team on a neutral field, and that has Florida just 0.6 points out of tenth place. The teams from 10th to 14th are basically in a dead heat.

The upcoming game against Georgia will be a season narrative-setter whether the Gators win or lose, so it’s worth taking stock of what they’ve been so far before we get lost in that result.

Florida shut out two FCS opponents to the tune of a combined 83-0. Towson probably should’ve scored, though, but it had an unforced fumble deep in UF territory and also missed a field goal. The Gator defense was so lacking in its ability to get off the field against Towson as well that the UF offense only got to run eight real drives all game. Dan Mullen rotated a ton of guys on both sides of the ball in those games, and they shouldn’t count for a whole lot. In the SP+ system, they don’t.

Beyond those, they did not look good in the sloppy opener over SP+ No. 30 Miami. The Hurricanes missed a 27-yard field goal in the fourth quarter that would’ve made it a 24-23 UF lead. At that point, they could’ve gone for another field goal in either or both of their final two drives that ended in turnovers on downs instead and easily won the game.

Florida also only led SP+ No. 36 South Carolina by three through three quarters. The Gamecocks outgained the Gators on the day and ran for over six yards per carry when sacks are removed. The teams were almost dead-even in success rate and efficiency, and they were even in turnovers. Those are three of the five factors that go into SP+.

Field position in the fourth quarter decided the game. It wasn’t luck; Florida generated that good field position. However, decisively winning just one small phase of the game won’t impress an analytics system, especially when the Gamecocks were above 50% in success rate in the final frame.

Then there’s Kentucky. Let’s face it: the Wildcats missing a late field goal is as big a reason as any as to why the Gators won that game. Again UF won field position while the efficiency and explosiveness factors were about even.

UK has looked pretty bad since then; they lost by 15 to an underwhelming Mississippi State team, lost by three scores to South Carolina, and were blanked by Georgia. They beat Arkansas by just three, and the Razorbacks are godawful. Kentucky has fallen to 54th in SP+, but yet the Gators played them even.

Yes, Florida beat Auburn. That was a case of the UF defense looking a little better and offense looking a little less-bad than AU’s. You can read the advanced stats story on that game to see it roughly how SP+ saw it here.

The Gators also outperformed some expectations on the road at LSU despite the final margin being about what the Vegas point spread was. The thing is, LSU’s offense completely eviscerated the Florida defense. I wrote about that in the advanced stats review and then did a film study on it. LSU’s offense is very, very good, but Florida didn’t come close to slowing it down as Auburn did over the weekend. It was a horrible defensive performance from UF, and the analytics don’t care about expectations.

I know that UF has been missing some guys. Kadarius Toney’s been out, CJ Henderson’s only played in four games, Jabari Zuniga’s barely played, and they missed Jonathan Greenard badly in the last two. Analytics systems don’t account for injuries. They look at the plays and drives as they happened.

So, SP+ is not alone at having Florida outside the top ten but in a cluster that includes at least one top ten team. Massey-Peabody has them 11th in a bunch spanning 9th to 11th, and Sagarin has them 12th in a bunch spanning 9th to 12th.

Some systems are higher on Florida. The Massey Ratings (different than Massey-Peabody) that you may remember the BCS days has the Gators in its 7th-place spot.

Some systems aren’t so keen. The Colley Matrix, another component of the old BCS formula, has Florida 12th but in a tier that stretches from 12th down to 14th. And the drive-based FEI, which hasn’t been updated after Week 9 yet, had UF down at 26th after the South Carolina win.

This year’s Florida team has some real, glaring flaws.

The run game is terrible. Excluding garbage time, Florida’s rushing success rate is 38.6%, compared to a national average of 42.5%. One out of every five carries goes for no gain or a loss. Three long runs — 88 yards by Lamical Perine, 76 yards by Josh Hammond, and 75 yards by Dameon Pierce — are keeping the figures afloat.

Excluding sacks, UF has run for 1,243 yards on 249 carries for an average of 4.99 yards per carry. Take out the three long runs and it’s 1,004 yards on 246 carries for an average of 4.08. Those runs account for 19.2% of the season-long rushing yards, so basically one in every five net yards came from them. They push the team’s yards per carry rate up by nearly a full yard.

The Gators have also turned the ball over a ton. They’ve lost 15 turnovers on the year, and only 15 teams have given it away more often.

The defense has also been iffy-to-bad at getting the opponent off the field in six of the eight games, something that keeps the offense from scoring more and pushes the volume of yards and points allowed up. That’s a big reason why the analytics system that uses drives as its basis had the Gators outside its top 25 as recently as last week.

Mullen has made the most of what he has, but make no mistake: he’s making the most of a roster with a ceiling that’s lower than elite. He’s used chewing gum, baling wire, and missed opponent field goals to get the team to 7-1. I’m not complaining; that’s better than the alternative of 5-3 with losses to Miami and Kentucky.

But this isn’t an elite Florida team, and Mullen is nevertheless getting a near-elite record out of it. Florida doesn’t have to impress algorithms. It has to win games, and it’s doing that. Even beating Georgia may not vault UF into the stratosphere if the Bulldogs show the same flaws that led them to losing to South Carolina and going into the half 0-0 with Kentucky.

The Gators are good but not great, and they probably shouldn’t have the record they do. Incredible work by Kyle Trask during his career as a backup and by the coaching staff to hold things together are the reason they do have that gaudy record with a real chance at 11-1 if they win this weekend. In some ways, that can be more satisfying than watching a superlatively talented team roll over inferior competition. They’re maxing out what they have and using heart, hustle, and ingenuity to try to force their way into the sport’s top tier.

The problems Jim McElwain left behind were always going to need more than two years to solve, so I will absolutely take this. The Gators are ahead of schedule.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2