Everybody keeps looking at Florida's offseason grade from ESPN and talking about portal rankings or recruiting stars. Fine. Whatever. The real story nobody wants to touch is the schedule and it is brutal. The Gators draw Georgia from the East plus Texas and Oklahoma from the old Big 12. That is three teams that finished top 10 in SP+ last season. On top of that they have Tennessee which finished 7th in yards per play allowed and LSU which had the 12th best passing efficiency defense in the country. That is five games against top 25 caliber defenses minimum.
The home slate looks manageable on paper but Texas A&M finished 4th in the SEC in defensive havoc rate last year and Auburn returns 8 starters on a unit that held Florida to 17 points. The road games at Ole Miss and at Missouri are traps because those offenses ranked 3rd and 8th in the SEC in explosive play rate respectively. Florida's defensive backfield is replacing three NFL draft picks and has to face four quarterbacks who threw for over 3,000 yards last season. The analytics say Florida's win total projection sits at 6.5 and that feels generous when you look at the opponents.