On Friday, I listed four keys to the game for the Gators. They largely came through on each one.
The first was stopping the Auburn rushing attack. Gus Malzahn’s offense is based on running to set up the pass, but the Tigers never ran well enough to get the pass going. There was only one drive where it felt like they got cooking, but it ended just before the third quarter ended when Donovan Stiner picked off a pass in the end zone.
Boobee Whitlow (4.5 yards per carry) and Kam Martin (5.8 YPC) had decent averages, but they never broke anything big. Whitlow’s longest run was 16 yards while Martin’s was 15. Between controlling field position and not giving up many explosive plays, Florida forced Auburn to have to sustain long drives to score for most of the game. Save the one series snuffed out by Stiner, AU couldn’t.
The second key was to pressure Nix and then succeed at one-on-one tackles. The Gators checked both of those boxes. The pass rush hassled Nix starting from the first play of the game — which I still think should’ve been intentional grounding — and got a pair of sacks on him once the pressure mounted on the true freshman in the fourth quarter.
Plus, this game was easily the best the defense has been at those solo tackles this year. For all the talk about the Gators using swings and screens to get the ball out of Kyle Trask’s hands quickly, Auburn did the same thing on offense with Nix. The safeties in particular were excellent at coming up and stopping those plays before the Tigers could make any headway with them.
The third key was committing to throwing the ball and only running enough to keep the pass open. Florida did that despite never trailing and Trask’s alarming habit of fumbling while being sacked. Counting those sacks as pass plays, which they are, the Gators went with 43 passes to 29 rushes.
I rolled my eyes at them running Lamical Perine up the middle for a predictable stuff on the first play of the game, but that set up the pass on the next play. Auburn got away with having a linebacker lined up over Freddie Swain in the slot on first down, so it did it again on second. Swain cashed in the mismatch for a 64-yard touchdown.
Even when Emory Jones subbed in for Trask, Dan Mullen called only one more run (7) than pass (6). There was no more attempting to prove a point about being tough enough to run the ball. Mullen knows what works and went with it.
The fourth key was to get third down straightened out, by which I meant convert more 3rd and shorts on offense and allow fewer conversions on 3rd & long on defense. UF hasn’t been good in either department, so that will need to get cleaned up for them to beat good teams.
Well, they converted 2-of-4 (50%) on 3rd and three or fewer yards to go, which is a slight improvement over their rate in the first five games of 46.2%. One conversion was a Jones run and the other was Lucas Krull’s pass to Trask, so the “normal” offense actually went 0-2. It still needs work.
On the flip side, the defense allowed only one conversion in nine instances of 3rd and seven or more yards to go. The one success was Nix’s 13-yard pass to Will Hastings on 3rd & 7 on the Tigers’ second field goal drive. The 3rd & long conversion rate in this game of 11.1% is a marked improvement over the 25.5% they were allowing heading into this one. On this final factor, the Gators got it half right.
Of course, there is more to the game than just those things.
Everyone has said it, but I will reiterate: Florida can’t keep turning the ball over this much and still win. The Gators turned it over four times against Miami, twice against Kentucky, three times against Tennessee, and another four times against Auburn. The defense’s nation-leading 12 interceptions have bailed out the offense for giving it away so much.
For perspective, UF turned the ball over 14 times in all of 2018. They lost eight fumbles, while Feleipe Franks threw six interceptions.
This year, the team has already committed 13 turnovers. They’ve lost the same eight fumbles already, while Franks hit half his pick total in the first three games and Trask added two more against the Vols.
To be fair, it’s bad luck that the Gators have lost so many fumbles. Analytics research has determined that fumble recoveries are essentially random — the shape of the football and how it bounces is the main culprit — although there are pockets of advantage. For instance, offenses tend to recover strip-sacks more often than open-field fumbles because the offense typically has more players around the ball (at least five linemen and the quarterback) the defense does (generally only four guys rush, maybe five if it’s a blitz).
The Gators have lost eight of their nine fumbles, which is not close to the 50-50 nature of fumble recoveries in aggregate. Furthermore, they’ve lost five of the six strip-sack fumbles, and two more — Feleipe Franks’s botched mesh point against Miami and Dameon Pierce’s fumble against Auburn — were fumbled near the line of scrimmage where there were plenty of Gator players around.
Fumble luck regressing to the mean may help in the future, but the team absolutely cannot count on that. They need to take care of the ball better, and a lot of that is on Trask getting better at accounting for the defenders around him in the pocket. His not having started any games since his freshman year of high school really shows in his lack of pocket awareness. He did at least pull it down and take a sack without fumbling in the third quarter, but he lost a fumble while being sacked again in the fourth.
If they can keep up the high rate of turning opponents but cut down on their own giveaways, the Gators will be in great shape going forward. The (almost) full-strength defense was nasty on Saturday night, and it didn’t even have Jabari Zuniga. If the offense can avoid the big mistakes, there’s not a team on the schedule that Florida can’t beat.