Todd Grantham had no intention of discussing what exactly went wrong with the Florida Gators defense in 2020 when he spoke with the media on Wednesday.
Instead, the embattled defensive coordinator only wished to look to the future.
“I want to talk about this year and moving forward,” Grantham said. “We have spring practice now. The issues and reasons before are really irrelevant now in the sense that it is what it is. We’re going to play good this year, and with the young players we have we’re going to continue to develop and grow.”
While Grantham did not want to reopen old wounds, the problems of last season are still very much relevant. It is impossible to successfully move forward without understanding the failures of the past and intentionally working to correct them.
Whether players and coaches are willing to share much about it or not, it is certainly still at the forefront of their minds early in spring practice.
But right now, Grantham’s biggest focus is on developing a competitive edge. That is something Florida’s defense lacked a season ago, possibly due to the loss of spring ball.
The Gators (as well as most other teams around the country) missed out on the pivotal development of spring and the crucial grind of summer in 2020.
“The thing we always strive in spring, which we didn’t have last year, is you’re developing your competitive toughness,” he said. “The first thing you gotta do is as you develop your players and identify their roles, you want to make sure you develop their competitive toughness to make sure they understand competition, understand doing things when things are tough and developing that relentless attitude from when the ball is snapped to the whistle blows to finish. This young group, I like where they are right now.”
As he went on, Grantham continued to bring up Florida’s youth. While the Gators lost some contributors, they also returned veterans including Zach Carter, Brenton Cox and Ventrell Miller, and added seasoned transfers Antonio Shelton and Daquan Newkirk.
This coaching staff is notorious for giving the nod to the veteran nine times out of 10. That might just be a change they are ready to make.
The secondary will feature plenty of fresh faces while depth across the defense is inexperienced as well. Youth is not always a good thing, but Florida could benefit from a partial reset.
Grantham laid out his expectations for his players young and old in 2021.
“We want to make sure we’re hard to run on,” he said. “We want to make sure that we can find ways to affect the quarterback and make him play not to his strength or his ability, and we want to hold people to low numbers. We’ve done that in the past and we’ll continue to work to do that this year. Like I said, we have a lot of young players that will continue to develop and reach those goals.”
After a historically bad season, up is the only way this defense can go. That is the widely held assumption, anyway.
Through four spring practices, the Gators believe they are headed in the right direction.
“I think with our youth we’ve got to continue to get better every day,” Grantham said. “I like our attitude. I like our conscious effort to improve from Day 1 to Day 2, Day 3 to Day 4. I think that’s got to continue to stack on top of itself to get where we want to get at the end.”