Tennessee vs. Florida point spread: Picking Volunteers vs. Gators

The Florida Gators (1-1) and No. 11 ranked Tennessee Volunteers (2-0) will get to settle the score in one of the biggest rivalries in all of college football this weekend. The two rivals are set to tangle in The Swamp on Saturday night in Gainesville, Florida.

The Vols are currently 6.5-point favorites in the game. On Wednesday evening, On3’s Andy Staples had Parker Fleming on his podcast to share their thoughts on the contest.

The biggest thing Parker Fleming wants to see from Vols’ quarterback Joe Milton is something that’s been hyped up about him all offseason long — more deep balls.

Where are the deep balls from Tennessee QB Joe Milton?

“The first thought that jumped out at me here is Joe Milton. Where are the deep balls, my man? We talked about it all offseason. “Fleming said. We talked about the arm strength. I saw you throw that orange. You’ve thrown nine deep balls and eight of them have been over the middle of the field. That’s not the PI, outside , go get it.

“Either it’s a touchdown or we get 15 (yards) with the flag offense that we’ve come to expect out of Heupel there. So, I need to see more downfield from Joe Milton here and I’m wondering if Tennessee is not an example of maybe holding things back knowing they have this game early here.”

But he’s also interested in how Florida defends the pass considering what he wants out of Milton.

“Looking at the preview here, Florida’s defense 76th in EPA per rush. That does include some scrambles against that Utah team. 72nd in EPA per pass. So not much better there, either way. One thing that I’m really looking at, Florida is good at the success rate. I’m a little bit more conservative early with those success rate numbers,” Fleming said.

“We regress those to the mean, but, Florida doing alright with the information we have, but they’re allowing the big play. That’s what’s wrong with EPA. When you have an EPA higher than success rate, it means, giving up those big plays.”

Naturally, Flemming is curious to see how it all plays out:

“I’m really interested in how Florida’s defense can stand up if Tennessee is going to test them. If Tennessee’s going to try to spread them out and put them in that PI or TD kind of scenario there.”

In their first two games, Florida has only allowed 115.5 yards per game through the air. But that’s a small sample size. If you break it down to yards per attempt, they’ve allowed 6.2 yards per attempt, ranking them in a tie for 45th in the nation in that stat category.

On the other side for the Florida offense, Fleming has plenty of questions about Gators’ signal-caller Graham Mertz.

“On the other side, I don’t know what to make of Graham Mertz. A lot of big volume numbers but if you look at that. He was down three scores and most of those yards, I think 60 percent of yards came on the last three drives of the game against Utah,” Fleming said.

“A lot of that was kind of a losing effort, just kind of putting up some stats. I’m not really optimistic about it. 23rd in EPA per rush. 74th in EPA per pass for Florida. I really am not sure they’re going to be able to score enough to really outpace themselves if this Tennessee offense can get into that high gear.”

Through his first two games, Mertz has completed 73.8 percent of his passes for 526 yards, while tossing in two touchdowns and one interception. He’ll face a stiff test on Saturday in the Tennessee pass rushers of James Pearce, Jr. and Tyler Baron, who have combined for six sacks through their first two games.

Since the game is being played at The Swamp, Fleming’s still not totally counting out the Gators.

“That being said, the voodoo of The Swamp is not something you can mitigate, you can forget about, you can just write off. We know that a rivalry game, especially with Billy Napier needing it. There’s going to be a lot of competition here,” the analytics expert said.

Florida and Tennessee are set to kick off on Saturday, Sept. 16 at 7 p.m. EST. The game will be nationally televised on ESPN.