College football is very much mean reverting, volatile as **** week-to-week. I can't tell you I know what to expect from this Gator team, other than they will be up for this game as their entire season is riding on it.
What they can't afford is an early avalanche and a quarterback who melts down before he even gets started.
Offensively, I expect they start conservative with a lot of throws to the outside and everything they've got in the playbook on the ground game. Try to establish some positive drives while they assess how much their defense can hang. They will have to throw some balls downfield and see if they can get any cheap chunk plays to back us off a little.
Their defense isn't bad at all, I think they're actually pretty decent and they have athletes. We are not going to get into condensed formations and just run right over them. We also aren't going to have WR smoking people out of every break. I bet they take a few gambles on defense and see if some key down blitzes get home.
When we have the ball, I would use Beck's maturity and experience to our advantage. I would use a lot of RPO, and show them a few variations and personnel groupings we haven't shown as yet. They are going to be keying heavily on 7 and 10, so someone at TE needs to step-up in the middle of the field. Beck, keep hitting those checkdowns for easy money, baby, your NFL career depends on it.
Defensively, we're going to give up some frustrating 3rd downs to this kid's scrambling ability, and that's fine, but show him an absurdly heavy amount of pre-snap looks and keep him guessing on man vs. zone. Heck go Bud Foster and blend the two, I don't care, keep him seeing ghosts. QBs coming off a game like he just had don't have a lot to lose, don't let him play loose. He has major happy feet, so use some speed off the edge to get him dancing around. Happy feet + zone coverage will = INTs.
