How much will Feleipe Franks improve as a passer in 2019? It’s a simple question, and thanks to Dan Mullen having an extensive history before his time at Florida, it’s one that we can take educated guesses at.
At Mississippi State, Mullen had a returning starting quarterback five times. That gives us five examples of a returning starter’s change over the prior year to draw from. Those starters were: senior Chris Relf in 2011, senior Tyler Russell in 2013, junior Dak Prescott in 2014, senior Prescott in 2015, and junior Nick Fitzgerald in 2017.
Now, Relf and Russell’s senior years were disrupted some due to them missing time to injury. That’s why I included Prescott’s junior year in 2014 right after Russell’s senior year in 2013. Relf played in 11 games versus Russell only appearing in seven in their senior years, so I do not include Russell’s junior year as a returning starter year.
Because of those injuries plus other factors like pace of play and depth (or not) at running back and receiver, the rate statistics are the ones to focus on rather than the raw numbers. Russell attempted 285 more passes as a junior than a senior, for instance, and that’s just not helpful in projecting forward.
Here are how the major rate statistics changed in these five returning starter instances for Mullen along with the average change in each:
| Player | Comp. Pct. | Yards/Att | Pass Eff. | Att/G |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Relf | 1.0% | -1.8 | -18.98 | 0.6 |
| Tyler Russell | 6.5% | 0.6 | 6.8 | -14.7 |
| JR Dak Prescott | 3.2% | 1.4 | 25.14 | 6.2 |
| SR Dak Prescott | 4.6% | -0.7 | -0.71 | 6.2 |
| Nick Fitzgerald | 1.3% | -0.5 | -6.78 | -4 |
| Average | 3.3% | -0.2 | 1.1 | -1.1 |
The one constant is that each time the player’s completion percentage increased. That’s definitely good news for Franks, who’s yet to crack 60% in his career yet. There’s nothing magic about the nice, round number of 60%, but it’s generally thought of as a threshold that a good quarterback should be on the north side of.
The rest of the figures aren’t changed very much in the averages. The plunge in yards per attempt for Relf, the least talented passer in this bunch, does drag that category down to -0.2 from positive 0.2 on its own, but either way it’s still pretty close to zero.
More pressing are the attempts per game for Russell and the junior Prescott. Not only did Russell miss time to injury but he split time with Prescott in some games. If you take those two out, the average moves to a positive 0.9 attempts per game. Slightly more, but not a lot.
Because these are rates, we can fill in the blanks of every other major passing stat using them. Assuming another 13-game season, here is what Franks’s line would look like using the averages as seen above with the adjusted attempts per game.
| Name | Att | Comp | Pct. | Yards | Yards/Att | TD | Int | Pass Eff. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feleipe Franks | 335 | 206 | 61.7% | 2,476 | 7.4 | 27 | 10 | 144.5 |
That’s a decent, if unspectacular improvement. Franks here gets above the 60% line, but he doesn’t quite hit 2,500 yards and almost doubles his interceptions rate. To make the change in passing efficiency work correctly, a combination of 24 touchdowns and five picks also works. That’d make his touchdown rate (TDs divided by attempts) fall slightly, but four of the five returning starter situations had slightly lowered touchdown rates too. With the Gators likely to have a strong rushing game again next season, Mullen can live with slightly fewer touchdowns through the air if they’re coming on the ground instead.
But what if we wanted to get aggressive, and maybe even a little misleading? Here’s how the projection works out for Franks if he sees the improvements that Prescott did from his sophomore to junior year — even thought the sophomore Prescott didn’t always play full games and sometimes just faced backups in garbage time as the occasional second-string quarterback.
| Name | Att | Comp | Pct. | Yards | Yards/Att | TD | Int | Pass Eff. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feleipe Franks | 403 | 248 | 61.6% | 3,627 | 9.0 | 42 | 6 | 168.5 |
This… this seems unlikely to me. I would definitely take it, don’t get me wrong. But, this is Franks as an All-SEC candidate right here.
This would be more yards in a season since Rex Grossman threw for 3,896 in 11 games in 2001 (that was before bowls counted in official NCAA stats). It’d be the most yards per attempt since John Brantley had 8.5 in 2011 and Tim Tebow broke 9 in each of his starting years. The touchdowns and interceptions are calculated based on Prescott’s improvement in touchdown rate and passing efficiency, and that would match Danny Wuerffel’s touchdown passes in 1996 (he had 39 officially before throwing three more in the Sugar Bowl).
In short, this is a Spurrier-era passing line. I just don’t think we’ll see that because Mullen doesn’t run a Spurrier-style offense. Wherever Franks’s statistical ceiling is, it’s necessarily lower than this because Mullen will lean on the run — including with Franks himself — more than Spurrier did.
Prescott did throw for more attempts than that projection (477) as a senior, but Mississippi State had an uninspiring running back rotation that year. Micro-back Brandon Holloway and mediocre big dude Ashton Shumpert were the top two tailbacks in 2015, with the former having 92 rushing attempts and the latter 59. Lamical Perine had 17 fewer rushes in 2018 than the two of them had combined then. The Gators are absolutely stacked at running back, and those guys will need to be fed.
Franks will almost certainly end up closer to the first projection I gave there, but it is nice to imagine a Fun ‘n Gun-level output for the quarterback again. Franks will have the arsenal to have a special season, but the rest depends on his ability to improve and the play calling come fall.