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g8rdome
Growing old on the VS
(50.88.255.220) on 7/14/2016 - 12:14 p.m. says: ( 300 views
, 11 likes
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"My $0.02...I will call this my "blink"" |
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Message Replied To ========== Why the perception of the Gator football for 2016 is lower than we think... Vegas, Steele, ESPN, and all pundits work off each other to rate teams. They all have to begin with a system that makes sense of a league with 127 teams that mostly don't play each other. Really making predictions out of guesswork. I think most start with some sort of simple rating system- who did you beat and by how much on down to how did the teams you played do in their games. You may notice some of this in Sagarin's ratings (ELO for example). Going into 2015 UF was sitting at a fairly low rating based on recent on the field results. If you recall the expectations for 2015 were not great, even worse than now. 2015 S&P+ projectios had UF as only the 11th best team in the SEC. Opening lines in Vegas a year ago were UF vs UGA +12, vs Ole Miss +6, vs LSU +12, vs FSU +4, vs Tenn +2.5, vs Missouri +10, and vs South Carolina +2.5. The perception in Vegas had UF as an underdog in 7 games and presumebly a 5-7 record. After ranking the teams most pundits will then look at returning production (players) and recruiting inpact usually broken down over the past 5 years and the past two years. For UF, I think the perception of the team took a hit from the three stink bombs that closed out last season. Here is one statistical breakdown of last season:
From Bill Connelley- Percentiles. One of the biggest changes I made within the S&P+ ratings was adherence to normal distributions. College football straps itself pretty closely to the bell curve -- even more than I realized until recently -- and because of that, I found it a pretty good idea to communicate where teams fall on a bell curve more frequently. So you'll see "average percentile performance" emerging as a primary way for me to talk about teams' previous performances. Because of everyone's history with standardized tests, this is a pretty easy concept to understand and communicate. As you can see UF played as a percentile of their ability below 30% in the last three games (I did not help that their opponets all played typically good games vs UF). On the plus side UGA played a terrible game vs the Gators last year and Tenn only hit 50% when they played UF. How UF has performed over the past 5 years gets some weight in people's opinions. Offense has to be better than this:
On the other hand the defense has been consitantly very good:
Returning production: Biggest question remains QB, nothing returning with Treon's position change.
It looks like a minus if you go just by the numbers and that there is no returning starter, but is UF really worse off at QB? UF is definately deeper at the position in 2016. I guess it comes down to how you feel about Luke Del Rio as a starter- slightly better than a walk-on or a better upside as a game manager in the McElwain mold. Rushing:
Again for 2016 on paper only 41% of the yards return. But is UF really worse at the running back position? UF again I would say is deeper. Taylor had a good season but is he irreplacable as a back? Receiving
Probably just average returning numbers but a big unknown in Callaway. UF has a lot of quality guys coming in maybe one of them excels as a freshman. WR is a pretty hard position to learn in college. Defense returning numbers are good:
Next recruiting. A combination of the recruiting services looks like this:
A slip in recruiting the past two seasons is again hurting UF's perception for 2016 even though most of these guys have not played.
So you get to 2016 and you make a prediction. Here is the SEC East according to S&P+. Everybody in the division is predicted to be better in 2016 than 2015 but UF by not so much. But what is you take out those three games at the end, especially the bowl where UF barely showed up...
There is more that goes into these things for sure. College football has some luck. S&P correlates to winning percentage at about 75-80%. So some questions to think about... Will UF once again go 7-17 on FGs? Is UF's depth better than a year ago? Is their more experience in the two-deep than a year ago? Does McElwain have a track record as a coach? Who in the Saban coaching tree is more likely to come closer to duplicting "the process"? Who did UF lose that can not be replaced on the 2016 roster. Is their replacement better or worse? Is 2016 schedule harder or easier than a year ago? It looks like the narrative is; this is the time for Tennessee, look at all the returning players and production. Look at the recruiting. Ignore that Butch can't coach in a game, UT actually hasn't improved every season, and their QB can't throw good enough. Of course who knows for sure- improvement isn't always linear and Dobbs could make the leap as a passer. Georgia's narrative seems to be new coach-new attitude and a 5-star QB waiting in the wings. It was Richt's fault- everything bad. I'm not sure about the O or D line and their off season for them has not been the best. Still Eason may turn out to be a stud and Smart may turn out to be the Saban clone teams have been searching for. What is Florida's narrative? I don't even know- under the radar?
Last year, Grier was coming on and we started looking better and better, with an ailing and almost non-functioning O-line, few playmakers, and a painful-to-watch kicking game. Even our players that showed promise or needed to be leaders obviously had issues (Callaway and Treon). That is very disheartening and often very detrimental to the team. So, lets; look at where were are today.1. A former Gator QB or two said that if Del Rio was eligible, then Grier or Treon wouldn't be playing. If we get ANYTHING close to Grier's numbers out of the gate this season, we will have a very successful season. I thin the Del Rio is well beyond where Grier was at this time last year...WELL BEYOND! 2. Last year we had what 6 starts total for the returning O-lineman? Sure, it is obvious that we will not be where we need to be yet, but we will be better, and we should be deeper. We played everyone we had to play last year AND they have had another off season to get better, bigger and stronger. 3. This leads to three very important and related items: a. Can Del Rio get rid of the ball and move through his checks quickly? b. Can we effectively throw the ball and loosen up the run game with three punishing backs? Or vise-versa? c. Can we give up fewer sacks? I think the answer to all of these will be yes. Not only because of improved line play, but also because of improved QB play. 4. We have many more weapons than last year. I love our three backs and throwing out of the backfield will likely be featured more this year.. This will put considerably more pressure vertically with our substantial improvement in skill on the outside. Combine that with better line and QB play and we should score points this year. Many points. 5. Now to those three bruiser backs...We saw considerable raw talent from this group last year and now they are joined by a monster! They were decent blockers last year. They will improve this year in that respect. That was often their primary role last year. Add that to our tight end and improved line and that should mean less tackles for a loss and sacks. While most of us are looking at the passing, it would not surprise me to see this trio gain something 2000-2500 yds on the ground this year. We will definite be in that area next year. That is compared to about 1400yds from our trio last year. Yes, I really do expect us to run for about 50-60 more yards per game this year. I really think that it will be closer to 75 ypg. On a finer note, our trio of backs only produced about 250 receiving yards last year -- TOTAL! 150 of those were from Kelvin and almost a 1/3 of those came on a single catch. This likely come from two factors: (a) we didn't feel like we could afford not having the extra blocker in the backfield, or (b) we didn't feature it in the offense because of some other reason. We saw much more of this in the spring game. 6. We have considerably more talent in the skill positions. If we get Callaway back, this could be the beginning of something just silly in the outside skill positions, especially with improved line, back and QB play. Again we saw flashes of tis with an ailing line and horrific inconsistencies at QB. Last year we had about 1800 yds from the trio outside. Nobody else had more than 69. OUCH! Two of those are back and with the addition of Massey and the new incredible freshman talent...oh boy! We should get between 2500-3000 from the main players this year and I would expect to see 4 or 5 major contributors in this area, not 3. So let me sum it up this way...a much more mature QB than we had last year, a much more mature line, AND playmakers catching the ball from the backfield, TE spot, and wide positions means that 5 playmakers are on the field at ANY TIME with that more mature QB and O-line. We simply DID NOT HAVE THIS LAST YEAR AT ANY TIME!!!! Oh, and did I say that we can now kick field goals from 1/2 of the field? Yeah, we also play defense which will be BETTER since they are not out on the field 3/4 of the game. We win 11 games this year. 175 ypg rushing. 300+ ypg passing with a completion rate of 65+%. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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-- Starred by: G8rSid Mudlizard ChompEmGators Native slide Swamp Lizard SWAMP Fever Beachmaster Orange and Brew gatorvette1012 FreoGator -- In a world surrounded by tools, you bring me a wingnut? |
My $0.02...I will call this my "blink" g8rdome 7/14/2016 - 12:14 p.m.
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