Spend just 10 minutes around the Florida Gators football team and you’ll probably hear somebody, player or coach, talk about giving “relentless effort.” Throughout spring camp the new Florida Gators coaching staff has unanimously stated they like the effort that the players are showing but with spring winding down they’re looking for something more now.
There are only five more practices before the spring game on Aril 14, which means the coaches won’t be able to be as hands on with players until summer they want to hammer in consistency with the team in everything that they do.
The staff knows that persistence and effort will get the team where they want to go but consistency is what will keep them there.
“So much is about consistency of performance. We expect the guys to be able to make great plays, but can you play at a high level consistently? That’s one of the big things moving forward that we want to see.”
Sal Sunseri said much of the same on Wednesday. Sunseri has coached six first round picks; he’s even coached in a Super Bowl. He knows what kind of consistent effort and attention to detail it takes to be successful and he’s trying to instill that into his defensive players now.
Take big T.J. Slaton, for example. Sunseri coached Terrance Cody who has a similar size as Slaton. Both of them are incredibly agile for their size and Slaton has shown flashes of the kind of player he can be. It’s up to Sunseri to try and get that out of him every play and not just in spurts.
“When you watch him you see a big man like that move around and, you know he has some great intangibles that you just want to bottle and say we need it every play,” Sunseri said of Slaton. “If we can get that consistency with that quickness, the speed and the athleticism on every play, boom it’s gonna be pretty good.”
So the team is where they need to be. They’ve been through Nick Savage’s weight program and the changes were visible and in some instances remarkable. They bought into the program and they’re playing hard. The next step is just bringing that every play and every rep. It’s up to the coaching staff to find ways to bring that out of them and get them to the next step.
“I think that right now we’re in the consistency phase from the standpoint of you might see one play that, yea that’s pretty good but the next two or three are not. So it’s a matter of continuing to work,” Todd Grantham said. “I like our progress, I like the way we’re moving forward. We just got to continue to work and grind.”