Florida Football: Path to victory over Georgia starts with explosive plays

Florida football enters this Saturday as underdogs against Georgia. This is not a surprise, and one could argue that the line only being 13 points is a bit of a surprise.

Because even if one thinks that the offense for Georgia is stoppable, especially now that Brock Bowers will be out, the Gators still have to find a way to get through the Bulldog defense. While their weakness isn’t as glaring as Florida’s, Georgia has one trend similar to the Gator defense.

Florida Football: Explode with the ball

Pick almost any metric, and Georgia is probably elite at it on defense. The Bulldogs’s defense are top ten in:

• Yards per play
• Yards per passing attempt
• Yards per completion
• Points per game

There are a bunch of other metrics like yards per rushing attempt, points per play, and sack percentage where they are not quite top ten but still high. But keeping in mind that Georgia also has had one of the easiest schedules in the country to this point, coming in with the 99th best schedule, there is a small grain of salt that comes with those metrics.

This also makes the fact that they are prone to explosive plays a little bit intriguing when coming up with a plan on how to move the ball.

Georgia’s success rate on defense is at 66%, which is top 15 in the country. As a reminder, a play is deemed successful for the offense if:

• It gains at least 50% of the yards required to move the chains on first down
• 70% of yards to gain on second down
• 100% of yards to gain on third or fourth down

This is a metric that Florida football is also very good at, with a success rate on defense hovering around 66% as well.

The problem, as we have documented, is that on the 34% of plays that are successful, opposing offenses are picking up huge chucks of yards. On each successful play, opposing offenses are adding about 1.6 expected points per play, the highest rate in the country.

When Georgia gives up an explosive play, it is doing better to limit the damage, with opponents adding 1.2 expected points per explosive play. It is still far from the elite and puts Georgia in the middle of the pack. South Carolina also gives up 1.2 expected points per explosive play; they just give up more of them.

Teams like Ohio State, Penn State, UCF, Washington, Arizona State, and Texas Tech all give up lower expected points per explosive play than Georgia.

The translation to all of this is that Florida football shouldn’t come into Saturday with the expectation of moving the ball on a steady play-by-play basis. It will have to find opportunities to pick up their yards in chunks and look for ways to pop a couple of big plays if it hopes to pull off the upset.