There are plenty of obvious worries about this year’s Florida team so far, whether it be the run game or the offensive line in general or the early rate of injuries. The one I want to focus on for the moment is the defense’s seeming inability to get off the field.
To that end, I will compare the first five games of this year to the first five of 2018. In each set of games, Florida played Kentucky, Tennessee, a third offensively challenged Power 5 team (Miami this year, Mississippi State last year), and two cupcakes. Last year Colorado State was about as good as some of the best FCS teams while Charleston Southern was terrible even by FCS standards, so the paycheck opponents come out as a near wash.
When you hear about a defense that can’t get off the field, the first place your mind probably goes to is third down defense. As it happens, UF’s defense has been slightly stingier this year than last. The Gators have allowed opponents to convert 26/69 (37.7%) on third down in 2019, which compares to 30/77 (39.0%) in the first five games of 2018.
Another obvious place to look is allowing long drives. There are two ways to judge those: by plays and by time. For the plays component, I looked at drives of at least seven plays. I picked that number because a team must gain at least two first downs to hit seven plays by the standard football strategy employed by nearly everyone.
Again, some of this may not come out the you expect. Florida’s defense allowed 22 drives of at least seven plays in the first five games of last year. This year? Just 20, two fewer. The defense has faced fewer drives (50) than last year (58), excluding drives that ran out the clock at the ends of the halves. However, the rates work out to 40% of opponent drives going 7+ plays this year versus 38% last year. That small difference shouldn’t be noticeable.
Looking at time though, we have our first clue. I chose to look at drives of at least five minutes, because that’s a full third of a quarter. Last year, the Gators only allowed six such drives in the first five games. This year they’ve allowed nine, which is 50% more.
No team in these games, Florida or its foes, managed to run five minutes of clock without running at least seven plays in a drive. So while opponents may not be getting to seven plays at that much higher of a rate, when they do, they have managed to chew up more clock.
Running the ball tends to run clock. Are opponents rushing more against the Gator defense this year? Not even close. Last year, counting sacks as pass plays, opponents ran a combined 58.6% of the time in the first five games. This year, they have run just 44.2% of the time. This, despite UF being better in 2019 at racking up sacks.
So what is happening? Well, think about that last bit. Running the ball runs clock because the only way for the clock to stop is briefly for first downs and out of bounds (unless it’s near the end of a half). With the passing game, the clock stops on incompletions.
And therein lies a huge difference. In the first five games of 2018, UF opponents completed 48.4% of their passes. This year it’s 60.1%, an improvement of almost 12 percentage points. The clock is stopping for balls hitting the turf much less frequently.
The same is true but even more so for the Gators. They completed 58.8% of passes in the first five games last year and 74.8% this year. That’s an improvement of 16 percentage points. Feleipe Franks nearly matched the school record for consecutive completions against UT-Martin, and then Kyle Trask broke it across the Tennessee and Towson games.
The higher completion rate creates a strange dynamic. Florida has 21 offensive drives of at least seven plays this year compared to 15 in the first five last year, a healthy improvement. Yet, they only have seven drives of at least five minutes compared to six from a year ago. The true hurry-up hasn’t been seen much this year, but the Gators have picked up the pace when succeeding. They can possess the ball for more snaps without using a ton more clock.
Yet, Florida has run a play every 27.3 seconds of possession this year compared to 26.2 seconds of possession last year. They grade out as slower in seconds per play even as they’re cranking out more long drives of shorter duration because they’re completing so many more passes. Last year the short drives that died early had a lot of incompletions; indeed, the incompletions often precipitated the punts. This year, the drives that die quickly have short completions that are functioning as substitutes for the underwhelming run game.
Florida’s defense has played a lot of soft coverage this year, and it wasn’t just after CJ Henderson went down. The Gators went soft a lot against Miami, probably betting that the pass rush could get to the quarterback before anything opened up downfield (spoiler: it did). That could’ve been the bet in subsequent games as well.
Maybe it’s just the games I’m choosing to watch, but it seems like there’s an epidemic of soft coverage in college football this year. Maybe the fact that explosiveness is the most important of the Five Factors of Winning finally spread around the coaching profession last offseason. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the Gator defense will continue to struggle to get off the field as long as they’re playing a lot of that soft coverage. And as long as both teams complete a high rate of passes, Florida will continue to play in quick games with low drive counts. Towson was the most extreme example, with the first quarter taking under a half hour to complete and each team only having eight real possessions.
I know Dan Mullen wants the offense on the field more to run more plays, but to make that happen, he will need to tell Todd Grantham to tighten things up and not allow so many short completions underneath. Teams are taking what Florida is giving them. Nothing will change if the Gator defense continues to be generous in that way.