Numbers don't lie, Mullen revamps offense in one season

What a difference a year can make. What a difference a new coach can make.

In Dan Mullen’s first year as Florida's head coach, he’s seemingly fixed an offense that was more dysfunctional and inconsistent than the McFlurry machine at McDonald’s.

There were certainly times this season where it looked like the offense of a year ago (the Missouri, Kentucky and Georgia games notably), but for the majority of the 2018 campaign, quarterback Feleipe Franks and the rest of the offense looked competent.

Let’s look at this from a numbers stand point.

The 2018 Gators offense averaged 34.5 points per game. That’s up from 22.1 ppg in 2017, which ranked 103rd out of 130 teams in the country. This season the team ranked 31st. This was also the first time a Florida football team averaged more than 30 points a game since 2009.

Yardage wise, the Gators were equally impressive. Overall, Florida averaged 426 yards of total offense a game - that’s up by almost 100 yards from 2017 when the team averaged only 335 yards a game.

Points and yardage are the two most important statistics for an offense and the drastic improvement in only a year, with essentially the same offensive personal, is a testament to Mullen and offensive coordinators John Hevesy and Billy Gonzalez.

From an individual standpoint, no one improved more than quarterback Feleipe Franks. Franks has been criticized, and rightly so at times, but comparing 2018 Franks to 2017 Franks isn’t even a comparison anymore. He was just statistically better this year by a mile.

Franks finished the regular season with 2,284 yards. In 2017 he threw for 1,438 yards. What makes this stat even more impressive is it only took him 70 more attempts to throw for 846 more yards. For the season, Franks finished with a completion percentage of 58.5 percent. That’s not overly impressive, but it’s a 4 percent jump from 2017.

The stat form Franks that stands out more than anything is his decrease in turnovers. In 2017, he threw eight interceptions to nine touchdowns. His touchdown to interception ratio was 1.125:1. Abysmal, to say the least.

It was a different story in 2018. The redshirt-sophomore quarterback finished with 23 touchdown passes to only six interceptions, making a TD-INT ratio of 3.83:1. That is a drastic improvement.

Would those numbers be considered amazing, generally speaking, for a quarterback? No. But Franks did exactly what he needed to do in the offense for most of the season and that was simply to be a game manager and not turn the ball over. It got the Gators nine, and possibly 10, wins on the year.

Franks had plenty of help on offense though, primarily in the run game.

The Gators truly established its identity as a running football team. This put the ball in the hands of two of the Gators best overall athletes, Jordan Scarlett and Lamical Perine, and took tremendous amounts of pressure off Franks.

The run game was impressive this season. Florida averaged 209.5 rushing yards per game, ranking 3rd in the SEC and 26th in the nation, respectively. That’s over 50 yards more on the ground than 2017 when the Gators averaged 156 yards per game.

Breaking the rushing numbers down to an individual level makes the run game look even more impressive. Florida didn’t have a single running back break 1,000 yards on the year, let alone 800 yards. The Gators also didn’t have a single player average over 70 rushing yards a game. This shows how evenly distributed that nearly 210 rushing yards a game was distributed.

Junior Lamical Perine lead the team in rushing with 750 yards on the season while punching in six touchdowns. He averaged 62.5 yards a game and 5.9 yards a carry. He and Jordan Scarlett split carries all season long and it helped keep both backs fresh and healthy as the season progressed.

Scarlett finished the season with 717 yards on the ground and averaged 60 yards a game. He also averaged 5.9 yards a carry on the season while reaching the endzone four times on the ground.

What might be most impressive about these two backs is that combined, they only lost a total of 17 yards. This is a testament to both backs down-hill running style and the offensive line. The front five for the Gators went from being one of the early season red-flags of the team, to being hardly talked about which, for an offensive lineman, is almost always a good thing.

There are plenty of other team stats that show just how drastic the offense improved from 2017 to 2018. Florida increased the amount of first downs it averaged per game from 16 a game in 2017 to 22 a game in 2018. The Gators also increased its yards per play average by a full yard, going from 5.2 in last season to 6.2 this year.

Third-down conversion percentage was also a number that was bumped up under Mullen. The 2018 Gators converted on 41 percent of third-down attempts, up four percent from a season ago.

One stat that may have been improved on more than any is the amount of sacks allowed. In 2017, the Florida quarterbacks, primarily Franks, were pulverized every single game as if they were crash test dummies in a Mercedes commercial.

Last year, the Florida offensive line allowed 37 sacks. This year, that number was cut in more than half. Florida’s offensive line allowed only 15 sacks in 12 games. If that isn’t improvement than I don’t know what is.

All these numbers from the 2018 season, and how improved they were form a year ago, show what a difference a new coaching staff makes. This is, for the most part, the same offensive personal as last season. The only differences really being the addition of wide receivers Trevon Grimes and Van Jefferson.

The offense is trending in the right direction, and it’s only year one. It’ll be fascinating to see what Mullen and his offensive coordinators can do when they have another year to develop Franks and Emory Jones.

One thing is for sure though, hiring Mullen has, so far, fixed the offensive woes that have haunted the Gators since Tim Tebow took his last snap as a Florida Gator football player.