On Tuesday’s edition of Swain’s podcast he and Josh discussed the scrimmage. Jayson watched the scrimmage with Troy Fleming. Jayson didn’t say a lot but he did seem impressed with a number of players, Small most of all. He was also impressed with Sampson, Hooker, and Merrill. I haven’t heard a whole lot about Merrill but I remember Jayson being early on the Josh Palmer bandwagon so I thought that was notable. He seemed to suggest we’d be okay at left tackle which ever guy wins the job. He’s big on Hadden even though he didn’t get to scrimmage and has been out for most of fall camp.
In the 2nd hour of his podcast he and Josh welcomed Bill Connelly to the show. Bill said Tennessee played better than our record last year (I have a chart on that below). He said when his final preseason rankings come out in the next few days we may drop a little bit (#9 in his May update) but will still be borderline top 10.
He talked about Pitt and the strength of the Pitt team is the line of scrimmage. If we can win that we win the game. He said Florida was thin at the skill positions on offense but he was high on Anthony Richardson. He said Florida would have a sophomore defense this year. He said the issue LSU has to deal with is they lost a lot of guys from last year and have rebuilt their roster with the transfer portal. He thinks all of these new guys at LSU this year may require some time to get used to playing with each other. He thought it was to our advantage that we get both Florida and LSU early in the season and with a bye week in between.
Connelly said the key to whether we win 6 or 7 games versus 9 or 10 games hangs on how well we’re able to solve our depth issues from last year on defense. (side note: I’ve read from a number of analysts that say the key to a Briles type offense aside from having the right QB is defensive depth). He talked about the fact that for the first half of the season last year we had a top 20 defense but with a lack of depth in the back half of the season we sort of wilted especially in the latter part of our games.
This first chart is 1D+TD efficiencies (% of plays that end in a 1D or TD) for offense and defense for Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, from last year. It suggests that we marginally outplayed Pitt and significantly outplayed Ole Miss. It also suggests that Florida outplayed Alabama but Emory Jones threw an interception in the 1Q that gave Alabama the ball on Florida’s 38 yard line. The Tide scored a TD off of that mistake and went on to win the game by 2 points. That Florida team is the one we played last year not the one that finished the season with essentially a don’t care attitude.
This second chart is how we’ve matched up with Georgia last year and in 2016, our last win against them. It also looks at how Georgia has fared in each of the other years since Kirby took over in Athens. I expect Georgia to regress this year and so does most other analysts. The question is by how much. Holding teams to 24.56% for 1D+TD for the season is pretty unreal and likely not sustainable season to season. We probably need Georgia's defense this year to get back above 30.00% at least, which I think is realistic. jmo.
In 2019 Heupel had a decent defense at UCF. He went 10-3.
I think with our offense if our defense can perform similar to the UCF defense in 2019 we would have a good shot at winning at least 10 games in the regular season. Also I'd take Heupel's offense over the Gus offense any day. jmo.