NIL has intruded a lot on this year’s offseason coverage, and for good reason since it’s one of the biggest changes in college athletics in decades. However, it means I haven’t spent as much time doing retrospectives on the 2021 team analytically.
I know that a lot of folks are just ready to be done with last season and don’t want to look back. It was a frustrating team to watch, and they clearly gave up down the stretch. Every frustration with Dan Mullen manifested in some way in the back half of the year: lack of discipline, occasional lack of preparation, recruiting (via Kirby Smart roasting him in the postgame), unwillingness to admit shortcomings or take accountability, and so on.
That said, in college football one of the highest correlations to win percentage is previous year’s win percentage. In other words, how you do in one year is one of the best predictors of how you’ll do the next. It’s not a 1:1 correlation, as some teams’ records can and do fluctuate quite a bit. Still, if you want to know where a team is going, knowing where it’s been recently is a key piece of information.
Today I’m going to run through the components of the offensive half of the Fremeau Efficiency Index, or FEI. While many analytic systems are play-by-play based, such as Bill Connelly’s SP+, Brian Fremeau based his system on drives. Though I have traditionally hewed to play-by-play systems, drives tell truths in a different kind of way that has value too. FEI excludes FCS games and garbage time.
Much like you, FEI didn’t love UF’s offense last year. It gave the Gators a rank of 58th, which if you want to throw up in your mouth a little bit is 13 spots behind FSU. It was almost a tie with Texas A&M, so the team had that going for them.
The basic takeaway is that 2021 was the lowest-rated Mullen offense overall and in every single component of FEI. It’s not particularly close either.
UF was 13th, 13th, and 10th in the offensive FEI across 2018-20 before falling to the middle of the pack nationally. In drive efficiency, Florida was in the 30s in 2018-19 and tenth in 2020 but 67th last year. In touchdown rate, or percentage of drives ending in the end zone, again Mullen guided the Gators to the 30s for a couple of years before spiking to 11th and then falling to 56th. In first down rate, or percentage of drives that moved the sticks at least once, Florida actually fell from 17th to 45th from 2018 to 2019. I suspect a lot of that has to do with the poor ’19 rushing game. It rebounded to fifth in 2020 before plummeting to 84th last fall. Right about one-in-three 2021 drives ended before getting a first down.
Ah, but it gets even worse. In busted drive rate, or percentage of series that gained zero or fewer yards, UF was 106th last year. The actual rate was 14.6%, which is about one-in-seven. The best mark in the Mullen era was of course in 2020, when the rate was 7.8% or one-in-13.
The good/bad news is that Florida ended up 114th in turnover rate. Yes, that’s very bad. It’s also the same 14.6% rate that the 2019 team had, so it’s not unprecedented.
The nature of the turnovers was different, however. The ’19 team had a mix of ten interceptions and eight lost fumbles. In 2021, the team only lost three fumbles but had 18 interceptions.
Fumble recoveries are generally thought to be random because the ball bounces unpredictably and the mix of players near a given fumble can vary greatly. Interceptions are also random. Putting the ball into dangerous spots is less so, though the rate at which bad balls get picked off is again pretty random.
Emory Jones and Anthony Richardson put the ball into a lot of dangerous spots last year, so getting that rate down is a priority. That said, regression to the mean would suggest that fewer bad passes will get picked off this year versus last. After all, in 2020 Kyle Trask threw the ball straight to defenders a noticeable number of times after anticipating coverage incorrectly pre-snap, but very few of them were picked off.
The impact of turnovers is not to be discounted. I looked at the same FEI metrics for Billy Napier’s Lousiana across the same four years. The Ragin’ Cajuns’ 2021 offense registered either the lowest or essentially tied for the lowest ranks of all of Napier’s seasons in Lafayette in every FEI category except one: turnovers.
UL finally broke through and won the Sun Belt after finishing second in the country in turnover rate with a giveaway on just five percent of drives. That’s an unsustainably low rate, though Napier’s worst team in the category (2020, 10.4%) was roughly the same as Mullen’s best (2018, 10.1%).
But Napier’s teams overall were consistently less generous with the ball, which reflects something about play choice and training. Running more tends to push turnover rate down since sacks are high likelihood times for fumbles, not to mention that there can’t be an interception without a pass. Having a mobile quarterback helps avoid sacks, and Napier had one as his starter for three years with Levi Lewis. Mullen only heavily used one for one year, and not surprisingly fumbles were quite low that year. Ball security is also a skill, and it’s one that Florida ball carriers didn’t always have.
For all these reasons, I think it’s reasonable to expect an uptick in offensive performance in 2022. Turnovers were unsustainably high last year, and Napier calls a turnover-light game to begin with. UF may be down on explosive playmakers at receiver, but the chances for efficiency are high with a veteran offensive line. I don’t expect points per game in the 40s or anything, but it should be a better product on the field.