As he did after the Gators’ first scrimmage last week, coach Billy Napier said that his team needs more depth following their second scrimmage inside the Swamp on Saturday.
But, when Napier says that they need to create more depth, he’s not just talking about adding players to the roster that will upgrade the talent level, though he figures to do that a bit as well.
He thinks that his team has some very good athletes that have potential to be good players, but raw ability is only a part of the equation. If you don’t know what to do or the proper way to do it, then being able to run really fast doesn’t do you any good.
So, with his first spring camp at UF winding down, Napier is looking for more players to earn the coaches’ trust through their mental approach to the game.
“It’s more about learning what to do, how to do it and doing it more consistently, being loyal, being dependable and accountable, playing winning football,” Napier said. “You can do your job for the team every single time. I think the reality is, as we get closer to the [spring] game, we get to put 11 out there every play, and, to run between the lines for the Florida Gators, you have to be dependable and accountable, and you’ve got to be consistent.”
The shortage of disciplined and accountable players showed up big time in the penalty department on Saturday, according to Napier. His goal is for his teams to commit fewer than one penalty for every 30 plays during a game. They only committed two penalties in 120 snaps last week. The second scrimmage was substantially worse.
Napier is willing to live with some occasional aggressive mistakes like a pass interference penalty or a holding call, but the procedural mistakes need to be eliminated.
“There’s no excuse,” he said. “They’re all technical. They’re all relative to coaching, and that’s what I told the players. ‘That’s a reflection of me, and I’ve got to do a better job for you guys as a coach, and we’ll work hard at it and get it fixed.’”
Their sloppy scrimmage on Saturday was a continuation of where the Gators left off in 2021 when they ranked 120th in the country in penalty yards per game. They also made a plethora of other mental errors last season, such as poor decisions by the quarterbacks and busted coverages in the secondary.
Obviously, they’ve still got a long way to go in those areas before the season starts.
“I think the first way you win is you don’t beat yourself,” Napier said. “You completely control the things that have nothing to do with the opponent. We’re talking about undisciplined penalties. We’re talking about taking care of the ball. We’re talking about mental errors. From a coaching perspective, we’re talking about positioning the players to have success, having a really sound concept, making sure that, when we watch the tape, we have the answers to the test.
“That’s where you start when you’re building a football team. We’ve always taken great pride in not giving the other team anything. They’ve got to earn every single thing that they get.”
As could be expected from the man who divides the football calendar into eight phases and has more depth in his staff meeting room than he does in his locker room, Napier has a very detailed and process-oriented approach to developing players mentally.
There are four different dimensions that a player can be categorized under. The goal is to have as many multi-dimensional players as possible.
“The first dimension is you know what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “The second dimension is you know what every player in your position room is supposed to do. So, you play Z receiver, you know what the H and the X have. You play left guard, you know what all five linemen are supposed to do when you play. Third dimension is you understand all 11 players on offense or defense or on special teams. And then a four-dimensional player, which is really rare, he understands all 11 on this side of the ball, and he knows and can comprehend and discuss what the 11 other people on the other side of the ball are doing.
“How do you get to that point? You do that by evaluating, recruiting, retaining and executing your year-round plan over and over and over, and we’re in the first year. Listen, we’re two-thirds of the way through phase three. I’m hopeful here we’ll look up in a couple of years and have my own four-dimensional players here playing for the University of Florida.”
If the Gators were to play a real game on Thursday instead of just the spring game, they wouldn’t play very many guys at some positions, at least based on the way that Napier has described the situation throughout the spring.
The coaches likely aren’t going to play a certain number of players just because they feel like they have to. They’re only going to play the guys who have earned the coaches’ trust. The players and coaches have until September to increase that number.
“The energy’s good,” Napier said. “The effort is good. I like the physicality. I think we need better execution, and we need to make better decisions at the point of contact and post-whistle when it comes to discipline. I think in life, sometimes, we learn as we go here. If you do just the things that are easy, your life is hard. If we can do the hard things on a consistent basis, embrace the work and decide that we want to be a little bit different, then life gets easier.
“It is a privilege to represent the University of Florida and run between the lines and play. We get to put 11 out there at a time. We need more players to make progress and get in that group. We’ve got a lot of players that I trust and we will put out there, but we’ve got a lot of work to do to create depth and add more players to that list.”