The best defense the Florida Gators saw on Saturday afternoon may have been Will Muschamp and Mike Bobo dialing up an 18-play, 7:23 drive while down two possessions with just over 8 minutes on the clock, essentially icing the game for Florida.
It’s going to be really hard to justify firing coaches given what’s going on in the country but Will Muschamp is really trying to test Ray Tanner’s patience with that theory.
The Gators’ defense didn’t take the step forward we thought they would after getting gashed by a good Ole Miss offense. This South Carolina offense won’t finish in the half of the league and Florida’s defense should have feared on Saturday, instead, they allowed 11 conversions on third and fourth downs. The stats show that South Carolina only averaged four yards-per-play but that number is eschewed by a handful of really bad, wide-open, drops by its receivers.
Florida really struggled to get off the field against South Carolina. Against Ole Miss, it was big plays. Both games had the same glaring issue, tackling.
“I’d say tackling,” linebacker Ventrell Miller said when asked where the defense needs to improve. “Making sure we’re bringing our feet, being like the hammer and not the nail, stuff like that. Running to the ball, getting off on third down. We need to get off the field and get the ball back to the offense.”
Dan Mullen isn’t calling defensive plays, he’s not going over scheme or building the gameplan on that side of the ball but he did take some credit, or blame, for the defense.
“I think the offense, we had two turnovers on the plus side of the field. You can’t do that. That really puts the defense in some tough positions at times. That was really on the offense. It’s really situations that the offense not doing what they’re supposed to do. If they don’t score at least don’t turn the ball over on the plus field position like we did a couple of times today.”
What is the issue on defense? Mullen can’t put his finger on just one thing.
“Execution, effort. There were a couple mistakes out there on the field. Some of the calls; I think we still have got to tackle better,” he said. “We’ve got to strain to the ball a little bit better. With the attention to detail on all the little things, we’re still catching up on defensively.”
There was a mild improvement from week one to week two but not enough and the Gators defense is looking decidedly un-Gator like. The offense next week from Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M will be a challenge, certainly much more so than South Carolina. The question will become when will the defense figure it out and will they figure it out before the offense has a hiccup game? Right now it looks like Florida could score 35 with its eyes closed, but one bad game on offense and they’ll need the defense to pick them up. Can they?
“I think we try to be, try to have a shutout every game, and I think we have a long ways to go with everything, offense, defense,” cornerback Kaiir Elam said. “I think we have a long ways to go, but I’m happy we had a nice team win. But there’s a lot to improve on.”