Florida safeties coach Chuck Heater remembers what it was like before the 2008 season. Any healthy safety was a potential starter.
Now the veteran assistant coach looks out at his safeties and sees an embarrassment of riches. He returns Major Wright and Ahmad Black, who both started all of the 2008 season for the Gators. They seem to be the favorites to retain their positions but they will be pushed
With the highly touted Will Hill back for his sophomore season, Dorian Munroe after healing from a knee injury and promising Dee Finley an early freshman enrollee, Wright and Black will need to stay focused.
You can never have too many safeties and Florida always will recruit that way under head coach Urban Meyer.
“They like each other and they’re a good group of guys,” Heater said. “They realize that type of a situation should make them better players. It doesn’t let them relax for a moment, mentally or physically. It’s good, but ultimately someone is going to be playing and someone will be watching. My conversation with them is to earn the right to play and be the kind of player to help us win a championship, and it’s my job to make sure you get on the football field.”
Heater’s job may actually be more difficult than it was in 2008. Last year, it was fairly simple. Wright and Black were the only two safeties with any type of experience, so he threw them out on the field to make plays. Now he almost has too much depth. The Florida coaches will have to find creative ways to utilize all of the talented safeties on the board.
“It’s the first time we’ve had depth,” Heater said. “I had a bunch of safeties last spring and a few months later they were all gone for various reasons. On the surface it appears that we’ve got some guys who are able to compete with one another and some may be interchangeable.”
The first player who makes it more difficult for Heater is Munroe. He is a senior who has proved to be an accountable, trustworthy athlete on and off the field. It’s those type of players that Coach Meyer usually tries to reward.
Munroe burst on the scene as a redshirt freshman in the 2006 SEC Championship Game against Arkansas. Tony Joiner got hurt early in the game, and Munroe lined up next to Reggie Nelson to hold down the back end of the defense, leading the Gators to an SEC Championship and a berth in the National Championship Game.
Now no one has any idea where his time on the field will come from, but the first hurdle of his health has been crossed.
“He’s done really well for that type of an injury,” Heater said. “Some guys have an injury and it looks like they’ll be protecting it or carrying their leg, and he doesn’t appear to be doing that. In his mind I’m sure he’s still a little engaged in that process. He’s doing a great job.”
A newcomer joining the Florida safeties is freshman Dee Finley. The safety from Auburn, Ala., originally signed with the Gators in the 2008 recruting class. He didn’t qualify academically and was forced to attend prep school at Milford Academy in New Berlin, N.Y. Finley now joins the Gators this spring and is already beginning to turn some heads thanks to his 6-foot-2, 211-pound frame.
“He’s got a lot of football in him,” Finley said. “He was kind of out of shape when he came in, and he’s working hard to get there. I thought when we put the pads on he’d be a guy who would just show football. The football quotient you can’t evaluate in the weight room or on a track. In pads, he’s a guy that puts himself in position to play. It’s the way Ahmad Black is. You knew Ahmad had some football in him. It seems like Dee has that. He’s been real responsive and he’s getting better.”
Ahmad Black has plenty of football in him, but it’s his stature that will never blow anyone away. The hard work he has to put in during the offseason is more than most, as he has to constantly watch his weight to make sure it stays high enough for Black to remain a playmaker.
“Physically, he has to continue to prove himself by getting stronger and keeping his weight up,” Heater said. “He’s not a natural guy weight-wise. All of those things will help him be a better player. He’s obviously a very good football player. He just needs to continue improving.”
Add freshman phenom Will Hill to the mix and there are five healthy bodies that would start for just about any team in the country. It’s hard for Heater to call it an open competition with both of his starting safeties returning, but he knows that if either of the two starters let up, he could have two new ones in 2009.
“It feels that way,” Heater said about an open competition. “There are enough guys to mix in there and compete against each other. I think you can never have enough guys because the season is so long. I told our guys that we’re still going to be playing in January around here. Almost always, you need every guy. If guys earn the right to play, you’ll certainly manufacture a method by which they will play. We’ve always done that. There are some guys that have earned the right to play.”
The search for the two starters has already begun. It started once the first foot hit the spring practice field Wednesday. And it’s going to continue until the final practice before the opener against Charleston Southern on Sept. 5.
To get there, it’s back to the focusing on the fundamentals for the secondary. The experience they gained last season was important, but it’s the basics they can’t forget.
“You’ve got to start at fundamental one because sometimes you can zoom in too much,” Heater said. “We go right back and start where we began with them and build from that. You move on much quicker and they play much faster because they know what they’re doing and they’re playing with confidence. All of that is incredibly helpful for them and for us as a team.”
And it sure helped last year.