Defense searching for more precision, Grantham not concerned about future

It’s been 10 days since the Gators last played a game, and there’s still one prevailing question on the minds of everybody who bleeds orange and blue: How in the world did an LSU offense that ranked 127th in the country in rushing at the time gash Florida’s defense for 321 rushing yards and 49 points?

For those that are suffering from post-trauma memory loss and need a refresher, the Tigers’ Tyrion Davis-Price rushed for a school-record 287 yards, which also represented the most yards ever gained by a UF opponent in program history. It felt like about 230 of those yards came on the same counter play that the Gators never adjusted to.

Defensive coordinator Todd Grantham admits that he could’ve done a better job of adjusting to LSU’s rushing scheme but also believes that a multitude of small mistakes by the players led to that nightmarish day in Tiger Stadium. He’s eager to see how his unit responds against No. 1 Georgia on Saturday.

“Well, obviously, we didn’t do a good enough job on [the counter play], so we’ve worked on it, and, hopefully, we’ll be able to play those plays as we move forward through the season because we’ll see them again,” Grantham said. “Basically, it gets down to, like I said before, the margins for error and your ability to be exact can go from holding a team like Alabama to the lowest total in a long, long time to not playing the way we wanted to two weeks ago. So, we understand that, and we’re excited about the opportunity to go showcase it on Saturday.”

Defensive end Zachary Carter echoed Grantham’s assessment.

“When you look back on that LSU film, obviously, up front as a whole and as a group, we weren’t playing as consistent up front as we were to start the year off,” he said. “And it’s just one of those things, it happened. We’ve got to clean it up and keep it moving. We’re still in the middle of the season, so we’ve got no time to look back.”

Grantham said that the most frustrating part about how they played against LSU is that he felt like they had played much better in the first six games of this season than they did last year when they ranked among the worst defenses in school history.

They only gave up 10 points over the final three quarters against Alabama and held them to their fewest yards in a game since 2018. They held a Tennessee team that has since proven to be one of the most explosive offenses in the SEC to just 14 points. The defense kept the Gators in the game at Kentucky while the offense sputtered.

And, just like that, any progress that they made was negated by the way they played against LSU.

“We probably were playing our best football in a long, long time,” Grantham said.

“We were feeling really good about ourselves. That’s this league. That’s no different than the National Football League. If you’re not exact in what you’re doing, you’re going to have a bad performance. With our expectations the way they were and the way we’ve been playing, it was certainly disappointing.”

And with that disappointment comes speculation about Grantham’s future with the program. Many fans wanted Dan Mullen to fire him after last season, but he opted to stick with him. With Grantham’s contract set to expire after the season and the fans starting to turn against Mullen as well, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Grantham is on the Florida sideline next season.

Grantham, though, isn’t worried.

“I’m confident with where we are,” he said. “If you look at how we played leading up to that game, we played pretty good. If you look at just SEC games in general, we’re either second or third in most major stats. I’m confident with where we are, and I’m confident that we’ll continue to play well and do the things we’ve got to do to be successful.”

Defensive tackle Antonio Valentino, a transfer from Penn State, has seen some of the criticism of Grantham on social media, and he clearly isn’t going to give up on this coaching staff any time soon. He understands why the fans are frustrated, but he doesn’t like turning on his phone and getting notifications of negative tweets about Grantham that people have tagged him in.

He said that he does a better job of controlling his emotions when it comes to social media critics now than he did earlier in his career.

“When I was at Penn State, people would go, ‘Penn State’s defense is awful,’” Valentino said. “I used to get so mad about that because I didn’t understand ‘Who are these people? Like, what do you know? You weren’t in there with us all winter workouts doing mat drills, and you weren’t with us all summer running hills and dying in the heat and putting in all this work to go out there and earn the right to play the game.’

“As I grew older, I understood that these people, for the most part, don’t know football on the level that we do. They haven’t spent the time breaking down film. They haven’t put in a game plan and practiced against it.

“I don’t like it when people come at the coaches because this is not an easy job whatsoever. I can’t tell an astronaut how to do his job because I’m not an astronaut.”

Valentino later clarified that he loves the way that Gators fans have embraced him since he transferred in and the passion that they show for the team. He just thinks that passion causes some fans to cross the line sometimes.

“You can say whatever you want to on the Internet, bro, but, once I see it in my mentions and I get notifications on my phone, that’s when I start to have a problem with it,” he said. “It’s like ‘What do you want me to do, agree with you?’ Like, ‘Yeah, our coaches are awful.’ Well, no, they’re not. I wouldn’t have come to the University of Florida if I didn’t believe this defense wasn’t a good defense. I watched all the games last year while I was in the transfer portal. I wasn’t just sitting home doing nothing.”

Valentino said that the defense’s poor performance against LSU ultimately falls on the players. They didn’t execute the plays that Grantham called as well as they needed to.

“You’re allowed to have your opinions; that’s fine,” he said. “But how we see it and how we respond, at least how I take it and the message that I give my teammates is just, ‘Hey, bro, we’ve just got to do our job.’ It don’t matter what Coach calls. If Coach goes out there and calls base defense for four quarters, we need to be able to execute base defense for four quarters. Coach can go out there and call inside zone for four quarters; we’ve just got to be able to do it.”

Valentino’s fellow transfer, Daquan Newkirk, holds a different opinion about what went wrong at LSU.

“I wouldn’t say it was lack of focus or missed assignments,” Newkirk said. “They kind of just out-schemed [us] in a way. But we were in our gaps, we were fit, but it’s just little stuff, just tiny little things, little adjustments. I would say that.”

Regardless of whether the issues were primarily with Grantham’s play-calling or the players’ execution, all that they can do at this point is try to make the most of the final five games of the regular season.

Grantham said that his approach to fixing the defense is rather simple. He shows them clips of plays that they did well on and plays that they struggled on. He uses the contrast between the good plays and the bad plays as a teaching tool.

“When things maybe don’t go the way you planned, [you] say what’s the reasons and you show the examples and you show how you can get better through our preparation, through our work ethic and working together and do that with the approach that I’m going to get better every day in practice, and I’m going to be there for my teammates,” he said.

“I’m going to make sure that we play as a unit, and we play as a team and continue that way. I really like our energy. I like our effort and our preparation. We’ve just got to continue to work so that we can have a good showing on Saturday.”

Consistency has been an issue for the Gators all season in all three phases of the game. Grantham wants to see the defense play with the same intensity and attention to detail all the time and stop riding this roller coaster of emotions.

“We did a really good job through the Bama game, Kentucky and Tennessee of keeping our edge even though we were playing well,” Grantham said. “When you have a setback like we had, it’s a matter of refocus, regroup and remember the things that allow us to play the way we did early in the year. That’s our plan.”

Ethan Hughes
Ethan was born in Gainesville and has lived in the Starke, Florida, area his entire life. He played basketball for five years and knew he wanted to be a sportswriter when he was in middle school. He’s attended countless Gators athletic events since his early childhood, with baseball being his favorite sport to attend. He’s a proud 2019 graduate of the University of Florida and a 2017 graduate of Santa Fe College. He interned with the University Athletic Association’s communications department for 1 ½ years as a student and also wrote for InsideTheGators.com for two years before joining Gator Country in 2021. He is a long-suffering fan of the Jacksonville Jaguars. You can follow him on Twitter @ethanhughes97.