Eastern Washington, South Alabama, New Mexico State and Florida State. That’s who Florida loses off its schedule with the SEC moving to a 10-game in-conference slate in light of COVID-19.
The AP Poll released today indicates that the Gators will now have to play teams ranked 4th, 6th, 13th and 25th. But a big part of that spread is because of the recruiting in the conference and how the SEC tends to beat up on itself.
If we look at recruiting rankings (using 247Sports 2019 roster rankings), the Gators will face the 3rd, 5th, 12th, 16th, 21st, 25th, 26th, 34th, 40th, and 52nd ranked teams. Now, obviously these are last year’s rankings, but they’re a pretty good proxy for what a gauntlet the SEC truly is.
And Dan Mullen has struggled in that gauntlet at times.
Dan Mullen’s record vs. the SEC versus out-of-conference opponents. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)
The above chart shows Mullen’s record in the SEC and out of conference. He has been a .500 coach in-conference and an absolute stud out of conference. He’s been much better at Florida in-conference, which is to be expected because the Gators have more talent and he’s no longer in the SEC West.
Still, his 11-5 record in-conference with the Gators is only better than one of the last five Gator head coaches (Will Muschamp: 10-6). It’s behind the first two seasons for Urban Meyer (12-4) and Steve Spurrier (13-1). It’s even behind Ron Zook (12-4) and the immortal Jim McElwain (13-5, with two of those losses to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game).
This isn’t to say Mullen’s a bad coach. It’s to say that the SEC is a really difficult league and everyone loses games.
One of the reasons I liked Florida’s chances this year was that not only did they have really easy cupcake games, but they also drew Georgia and LSU with new QBs and Missouri and Ole Miss with new head coaches. I figured that the probability that Florida could run that slate was pretty high.
Indeed, I’ve written previously about how Mullen has outperformed his peers against teams with more talent (going .500 when we would expect him to win ~30% of those games) and how he has won games against less talented opponents at a higher rate as well (83%).
This is really simplistic, but if we use those probabilities based on talent (50 win % for less talent, 83 win % for more talent), but assume 99% certainty that Florida would be able to handle Eastern Washington, South Alabama and New Mexico State, the Gators had a 4.8 percent chance of going undefeated and a 9.6 percent chance of getting through with only one loss to either LSU, Georgia or Florida State.
Using the same math, but replacing the four out-of-conference foes (one with less and one with more talent), Florida’s chance of going undefeated drops to 4.1 percent and chance of one loss drops to 8.2 percent.
I actually think it’s less than that because a lot of Mullen’s winning percentage against less talented teams is those cupcake games. Mullen has won 63 percent of his games the past four seasons against Top-25 talented teams, which is really good. But when you’re facing six top-25 talented teams in a 10-game schedule, the probability that you’re going to get out of that unscathed is only 6.3 percent.
If you assume that the other four games (Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Missouri) are won at his normal 83 percent clip, that brings the Gators chances of an undefeated season down to 3.0 percent.
None of this is to say Florida can’t do it. They certainly can. But the margin for error just went down.
The good news is that it also went down for every other team in the SEC as well. I seriously doubt that we have an undefeated SEC Champion this year. In fact, I think it’s more likely we have a three-loss champion than an undefeated one.
But make no mistake, 2020 was an opportunity for Dan Mullen to take over the SEC East and potentially the conference. He may still be able to do it.
But the schedule changes have made it more difficult.