“You’re not on the inside. You would never understand.”
That’s how Andrew Chatfield responded when asked about Todd Grantham’s defense on Tuesday night. The redshirt junior lineman went to bat for his defensive coordinator, just as many Florida Gators players have since last season.
After continuous breakdowns and communication issues for Florida’s defense in 2020, the outside assessment was that Grantham’s scheme was too complicated or not a good fit for his personnel. Chatfield sees it from a very different perspective.
“His defense is actually really great to me,” Chatfield said. “I love the play calling he calls. I love, like, everything he does. I love the way he planned out things, you know, especially how he like calls certain calls for us. And, you know, I guess people have problems with it.”
Defenses struggled around the country last season while many offenses (including Florida’s) flourished. In Chatfield’s mind, 2020 will go down as an anomaly.
COVID-19 hit the Gators hard and took away the opportunity to develop and learn in the spring.
“It was just a lot going on,” he said. “People were like, trying to be there for their families and all this and that, so it’s really tough to say, like, was this defense good or not. I think this defense was actually great, wonderful. It was just, we had a lot going on. That was it.”
Head coach Dan Mullen echoed that, maintaining his belief that the defense will benefit greatly from a normal offseason schedule this year. After all, this is the first time a majority of the Gators’ roster is experiencing a traditional spring.
“They didn’t have the ability to watch themselves on film,” Mullen said. “They didn’t have the ability to go learn and try to physically go do it. And then, you’re trying to figure out how to do all the Zoom stuff and learn through Zoom and not in person. I think there’s a lot more opportunity to develop at a much, much better rate this year.”
Despite the infamous sideline altercation between Mullen and Grantham during the Kentucky game last season, both coaches have noted the strong relationship they share.
After receiving NFL and other interest in previous offseasons, Grantham chose to stay with Mullen at Florida. And despite severe criticism and the fanbase calling for Grantham’s head after 2020, Mullen kept him on staff.
He has confidence in the embattled defensive coordinator to turn it around.
“We just work really well together,” Mullen said. “We have great communication, and spend a lot of time on the checks and balances. Are we putting guys in positions to be successful? You can look at anything, you can statistically look at anything the way you want to look at it.”
Following that, Mullen pointed out that people will likely look at his offense next season and say it’s taken a huge step back in passing, when that is actually due to the added ability to run the ball. Just as he said that people did not think the Gators could run effectively last year, but maintains the argument that they simply chose not to.
Still, Mullen’s offseason changes to the defensive staff prove that he saw issues that needed to be fixed for Florida to find success. Instead of completely rebooting the defense from the top, he started by replacing assistants in the secondary.
While the secondary was a key weakness for Florida, and Mullen’s actions fell in line with that, he did not see a need to point any position group out directly.
“I don’t want to pin it on one area,” he said. “There were probably multiple, a bunch of things that we needed to kind of tweak and change and improve on. I think obviously certainly having a spring practice and hopefully a little bit more of a normal year will help us do that.”
After all that transpired over the last several months, it would be interesting to know what is going through Grantham’s mind as he enters a season that will be crucial for the future of his career at Florida and beyond.
Just like a player preparing for his final opportunity to earn draft stock, Grantham has to come into 2021 with some added fire. Then again, he is about as intense as they come. Mullen has not seen any of it phase him.
“I’ve always had a lot of confidence in Todd,” Mullen said. “Todd’s a great football coach. I think part of that, I don’t know that it’s a new edge or different, I think he’s as competitive now as he was last year, the year before that, and the year before that. That’s who he is.”