New seasons mean new opportunities for the two heavyweight fighters stepping into the ring this Thursday. Utah is ascendant, returning a nationally relevant defense and most of their offensive production. Florida has question marks almost all the way down, with few returning starters and new playmakers at countless positions.

Florida had a rough season in 2022, by their standards. The Gators finished under .500 and ranked outside the top 25 in advanced metrics as well. Their upset of Utah in the first game of the season was their best win and the Utes’ worst loss by ESPN’s FPI metric, and Florida fell on hard times shortly after. If the Utes played that Florida team again, especially in Salt Lake City, you’d expect a comfortable win for the reigning Pac-12 champions.

But this isn’t the 2022 Gators, and we know little about the team visiting Rice Eccles Stadium in August. The team is starting a transfer at quarterback and lost critical offensive pieces along the line and at wide receiver, and bid farewell to crucial parts of their defense as well. Gators Coach Napier responded by hitting the transfer portal hard- fully a third of Florida’s 2023 recruiting class has collegiate playing experience.

Utah, by contrast, has really only one question mark — who is starting at quarterback. That’s a big missing piece, but with stability at nearly every other position on both sides of the ball there’s a lot of confidence that the Utah of 2023 will look and play a whole lot like the Utah of 2022.

The tendency is to favor the team you know more about, and Florida’s down year in 2022 provides an appealing recent data point to confirm a hefty advantage to Utah. But the rule in statistics is that the less you know, the closer to the average you get. And on average, year over year, the Florida Gators promise to give the Utes a serious run for their money.

In the twelve seasons since Urban Meyer packed his bags and left Gainesville, the Gators have had ups and downs, but have been thirteen points better than an average football team — top 15-20 or so. Utah is projected to be better than that, but not by much, and a few missed beats at quarterback could easily throw this game into serious uncertainty. Just like a real gator, the less of these Gators you can see the more you have to be worried about.

Utah 33, Florida 28