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I find that one of the more amusing things the media tends to focus on every year for our game with Florida is the âmental hurdleâ. I think itâs all psychobabble. The real issue is that year in and year out for the past 11 years Florida has had the better defense and defense wins games. The low rent teams in our conference, the ones who canât afford to build on both sides of the ball, tend to focus on offense because that excites the fans and sells tickets. Obviously, youâd prefer to be strong on both sides of the ball but some teams in the league canât pull that off as well as the elite of the elite.
The following table shows the scoring offenses of UF & UT against conference competition and the scoring defense against conference competition. The table looks at the differences between the offenses and the differences between the defenses and then shows the net difference between the two teams. That net difference fairly well aligns with the outcome of the game between UF and UT every year up until the last two. In the last two years since we both had coaching changes Florida has started to pull away from the tight spread that frequently existed between the two teams.
Obviously weâve been beyond inept on offense the last couple of years, with turnovers, stupid penalties, and costly mistakes, that have doomed our competitiveness in those two matchups. The thing is other than 2015 & 16 with Dobbs I donât think weâve put an offense on the field in most years capable of competing against an elite defense. I mean I liked Bray and I donât fault him for not having a defense but his offense couldnât really perform all that well against elite defenses either. He did, however, beat the UF defense by 8.1 points in 2012. Dobbs beat the UF defense by 11.8 points in 2015 and by 18.3 points in 2016, the latter of which was enough to finally get us a victory in the series.
We lost in 2012 because we had no defensive coaching whatsoever that year and gave up 40 points a game on average to all conference opponents. In 2015 we had over the top stupid play calling on defense that allowed UF to convert over 17.8 million 4th downs in the 4th quarter to come back and win. In 2016, in the second half, between Dobbs, Barnett, Jennings, Malone, TKjr, Hurd, Wolf, and others, they said, hell no, not this time.
The most celebrated analysts in all of college football are expecting us to have the 7th best defense in the country this year. That suggests we will be giving up on average less than 17 points per game to the opposing teams. Now Florida lost more production on both sides of the ball than we did and they lost key guys to the NFL from all three levels of their defense. Would it really be too much to ask that we score at least 24 points against their guys this year. I donât think so. jmo.
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