All of us Gators have heard – 3rd and Grantham. We certainly feel it each week, but is it backed up by data? Yep.
Using EPA has a measure of whether a play was won or lost, I took a look at how each SEC team has performed thus far in 2020. Definitely not a good finding for UF, and confirms what a lot of us Gators already knew. Now we know it even more (if that is a thing).
In the above table, we can see that Florida is winning on 3rd down (overall) 45.8% of the time, 8th in the SEC in 2020. However, they are only winning 46.3% of the time on 3rd and 7 or longer. That is 12th in the SEC, better than only Vanderbilt and Arkansas.
In this bar graph, you can see a visual of just how poorly UF has performed on 3rd down.
The Fair Catch 