Mississippi/Florida Preview – Why the Gators prevail

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The college football season is finally here.

Florida opens up with ‘Ole Miss, which feels weird because it’s just odd to open with an SEC opponent. It also feels weird because Florida is opening with a true road game. But what is familiar is that Florida is a big favorite in its opener, currently by 13.5 points.

That makes a lot of sense on its face. After all, Mississippi is coming off of a 4-8 season and has changed head coaches to Lane Kiffin, while Florida is coming off of an 11-2 season where it found a QB who could make the passing offense hum.

It seems too simple to just point towards an 11am local start time and believe that will be enough to make Florida struggle. After all, usually those early starts on the road are games that even us fans look at and don’t really look forward to. There’s not going to be any player who isn’t jacked to open up the season.

Mississippi Offense

The big question for Lane Kiffin is who is going to be his quarterback?

Mississippi ranked 7th in yards per rush attempt in 2019 against FBS opponents. That was largely due to the play of John Rhys Plumlee, as the QB ran for 1023 yards at a 6.6 yards per attempt clip. However, we shouldn’t discount Jerrion Ealy and Snoop Connor, who combined for 1234 yards and 6.7 yards per attempt during their freshman seasons.

The path for the Rebels to win this game is to control the game on the ground, limit Florida’s possessions and not turn the ball over. That’s why it’s been a little bit surprising to me to hear reports that Kiffin is leaning towards starting former Florida commit Matt Corral.

Corral isn’t a statue behind the line of scrimmage, but he is definitely not Plumlee. He is a much better passer than Plumlee, which was reflected in his 7.7 yards per attempt average last season (compared to 6.1 for Plumlee). But Plumlee, well…..

I love statistics. They often tell an underlying story that you may be missing by just using the “eye test”. But Plumlee scares the hell out of me and Corral is just another QB. If he hits a big run or two early to help the Rebels get a lead and Florida starts pressing, this could be much closer than the experts think.

Ole Miss Defense

This is where Florida needs to take advantage.

The Rebels defense ranked 76th in yards per play last season, but were particularly bad through the air (86th). That’s after ranking 99th, 76th and 66th against the pass in 2018, 2017 and 2016. Basically, they haven’t been able to stop anybody in a while.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that the defense improved from giving up 36.2 points per game in 2018 to 26.5 points per game in 2019. That was significantly outperforming its underlying statistics.

The defensive backfield took its lumps last year, but does have quite a few players returning. Keidron Smith, Jaylon Jones, Jon Haynes, Deantre Prince and Jakorey Hawkins all return, with Prince and Hawkins getting a ton of playing time during last year as true freshmen.

But the issue is that the defensive line has been decimated. Benito Jones, Josiah Coatney, Qaadir Sheppard, Austrian Robinson, Brenden Williams and Charles Wiley are all gone. That’s 183 tackles, 23 tackles for loss and 12.5 sacks. Yes, defensive end and leading sacker (6) Sam Williams is back, but that’s a lot of production to lose up-front.

Combine a back-end of the defense that wasn’t very good and a pass rush that likely is going to be worse, and you can see how opposing offenses might be licking their chops.

Florida Offense

And that’s why Florida is a bad matchup for ‘Ole Miss.

The Gators ranked 23rd in the country in yards per pass attempt but only 80th in yards per rush. The Rebels ranked 44th against the run but 86th against the pass. So Florida’s strengths mirror Mississippi’s weaknesses.

Obviously, all eyes will be on Kyle Trask to see if he can replicate or build on his 2019 campaign. But there’s one place where I think all Gators fans should be looking, especially early on: center.

This is a great (or awful, depending on your rooting interests) example of how the offensive line works in tandem. Center Nick Buchanan (#66) gets pushed back upon the snap. That trips up left guard Brett Heggie (#61), who is pulling across the formation. Heggie being slow getting across means he gets in the way of Kyle Pitts (#84), who is also pulling across the formation. Pitts and Heggie makes their blocks, but Pitts is unable to seal safety Grant Delpit (#8) to the outside, allowing him to make the tackle.

This was going to be a big play if executed correctly. Instead, it’s a relatively ho-hum 3-yard gain.

That’s why the injury to Sophomore Ethan White may be significant. It’s not necessarily that just White is out. It’s that all reports out of camp were that he was really driving the defensive line back. If we want to see the line take a real step forward, it’s going to start at center.

But that doesn’t matter very much against Mississippi.

One thing that I really appreciated about Dan Mullen last season is he looked at what his team did well and decided to alter his play-calling accordingly. His 2018 offense averaged 40.3 rushes to 28.0 passes. His 2019 offense was the exact opposite, averaging 30.4 rushes to 35.9 passes.

So if Mississippi isn’t going to be able to generate a pass rush, and if Mississippi has been poor in coverage over the past few seasons, then Mullen is going to design his game plan to take advantage of it.

Florida Defense

If you asked me what my biggest concern about this game is going in, I can answer that simply with one player’s name: David Reese.

Reese led the team in tackles with 92 last season, but if you want to really ascertain his value, you have to look at 2018. That season, Reese missed the Kentucky game – with mobile QB Terry Wilson – and Florida got absolutely torched. He came back and the entire defense stabilized.

Enter Ventrell Miller and Amari Burney.

Both are more skilled than Reese. But whether they are going to be able to be in the right spot, at the right time, all the time is something we just can’t know. I already showed you the clip above of Plumlee, and you’ll notice that both the linebackers and the safeties end up getting out of their gaps, which is what frees him up for the long run.

Florida’s safeties were guilty of that last season as well. Particularly in the games against LSU and South Carolina last season, angles were poor and so Florida gave up over 200 yards rushing in both of those contests.

That means Tedarrell Slaton becomes really important.

On this play, you can see Slaton get blown back from the line of scrimmage. If that happens, he puts his linebackers and safeties in a really vulnerable position.

But a switch seemed to come on for Slaton after the South Carolina game. 19 of his 29 tackles came in the last five games, as did 1.5 of his 2 sacks and 2.5 of his 3.5 tackles for loss.

So just like fans should be watching the center of the lines on offense, the same is true for defense. Mississippi is going to want to run the ball, and Slaton is going to be a key to whether Florida can stop the run or not.

Takeaway

Florida’s the better team, and it’s not particularly close.

That’s true whether you look at offensive and defensive stats from last year. That’s true whether you look at returning experience from last year. And despite the Lane Kiffin hype, that’s true at the head coaching position as well.

Dan Mullen has a 90-51 record as a head coach, a winning percentage of 63.8 percent. Kiffin has a record as a head coach in college of 61-34, a winning percentage of 64.2 percent. Yes, that percentage is slightly higher.

But we have to acknowledge that Kiffin had significantly more talent at USC than Mullen ever had at Mississippi State. In his time at USC – which I think we can all agree has at least equivalent talent to Florida – Kiffin had a 26-13 record (66.7%) compared to Mullen’s 21-5 record (80.7%) at Florida.

Typically, elite-level coaches who win big do so early. The fact that Kiffin didn’t win big at USC makes me think he’s going to struggle at Mississippi way more than Mullen struggled at Mississippi State. He’s entertaining, so the media has mostly overlooked his weaknesses, but his resume just isn’t that strong.

So Florida’s offense is better than Mississippi’s defense. Florida’s defense is better that Mississippi’s offense. And Florida’s coach is better than Mississippi’s coach.

Earlier in the week, Florida was a 14.5-point favorite. That spread made me nervous because early in the year, there could be some turnovers that keeps the game close. But now that the spread has moved to 13.5, I’m much more comfortable taking Florida because it will only take a two touchdown victory to cover.

I think Florida jumps on top of Ole Miss by a couple of touchdowns early and then just matches from there.

Florida wins, 34-20.

Last Season: 11-1 straight-up, 7-5-1 against the spread

Featured image used under Creative Commons license courtesy Pilot MKN