Florida is reportedly going to hire Joe Houston as an additional special teams analyst for the 2024 season. He’s a former kicker who’s worked in college at Iowa State and most recently in the NFL for New England. He’ll work alongside GameChangers coordinator, i.e., special teams coordinator, and fellow analyst Chris Couch.
There is still time for Billy Napier to hire or name one of his ten main assistant coaches as special teams coordinator, or special teams coach, or executive head coach for special teams, or whatever title he can come up with. Last year’s staff saw turnover in February, so it’s not unprecedented for changes this late in the coaching cycle.
Special teams was a constant source of frustration last year, from the two No. 3s issue against Utah almost to the end of the year. The close loss to Arkansas was particularly bad since the Gators had had yet another case of ten guys on field goal block, their own field goal unit running on the field when the offense was trying to clock the ball, and multiple missed kicks including after that aforementioned snafu and ensuing penalty. All those problems came in November too, after the team’s open date. There were no excuses then, and there aren’t any now.
The problems were puzzling to a degree since Florida didn’t have these same problems in 2022. It could just be that the team was playing more first and second-year players and transfers on special teams, which made communication tougher. I don’t know. What I do know is that doing nothing to adjust the staff would’ve been a tough thing for Napier to sell going into a critical Year 3 of running the program.
If special teams does end up the domain of Couch and Houston, then Florida will continue to be one of a minority of teams out there without an assistant coach officially running the third unit. Let’s dig into what that really means for a bit.
First off, the NCAA has jargon for a program’s main coaches, because of course it does: “countable coaches”. In FBS, these are your head coach and ten full-on assistants.
I found an official NCAA PowerPoint presentation, because of course they have those, that describes some of what makes a coach countable. Instruction to an athlete, whether technical or tactical, is one such thing. So is making tactical decisions in practice or in competition, as is off-campus recruiting.
Other staffers are covered by NCAA bylaw 11.7.2, “Noncoaching Staff Member with Sport-Specific Responsibilities”. The part of this bylaw that’s most important here is that such an individual “is prohibited from participating in on-court or on-field activities (e.g., assist with drills, throw batting practice, signal plays)”. This is the classification that “analysts” fall under. Couch and Houston are Noncoaching Staff Members with Sport-Specific Responsibilities.
A fact that some fans aren’t aware of is that pretty much everywhere, all assistant coaches do some kind of special teams coaching. If your special teams coach is also the linebackers coach, you probably don’t want him teaching blocking technique. If it’s instead the tight ends coach, then maybe he’s not the best guy to teach gunners how to corral and tackle returners while running at full speed.
But when every assistant coach is doing a piece here and there, you really need someone to coordinate the efforts. A… “coordinator”, if you will, hence the common job title.
Special teams also requires the same kinds of nuts-and-bolts work as offense and defense do. Someone still needs to work on creating schemes, drawing up effective fakes, and choosing when and how to audible into a fake. Someone still needs to scout opponents to assess strengths and weaknesses. Someone needs to craft the personnel groupings, decide who’s first string in which scenarios, how to deal with unexpected injury fill-ins, and evaluate how well the various assistants are doing at teaching their areas of responsibility.
Having an analyst as the guy in charge of special teams can work. Georgia hasn’t had a countable coach with a special teams title since 2021, but it won the national title in 2022 and finished in the top five in 2023. Also if an analyst is the one in charge of schemes and scouting, then one of the countable coaches is not having to do that on top of his position responsibilities and recruiting.
However it does require some extra planning for game day, since analysts aren’t allowed to give instruction or make those tactical decisions that the slide deck mentioned. An analyst can talk to a countable assistant who can then relay information to players, but doing it that way risks slowing things down or getting messages mixed up in a short game of telephone.
Overhauling that piece is the most pressing issue for the Gators heading into next fall. In a lot of the statistical categories for special teams, Florida was decent or better within the SEC. The Gators have even led the conference in punting average each of the last two years thanks to Jeremy Crawshaw. But these stats don’t account for things like having fewer than 11 guys on the field because someone on the field goal block unit got hurt on the last play before the attempt and his backup spaced on getting ready — a real explanation Napier used when talking about an incident during the loss to the Razorbacks.
It could just be bad luck that so many problems happened all at once. The 2023 season was Couch’s ninth working in special teams, and Napier had him coordinating the unit from an analyst’s position without near as many mishaps in 2021 and 2022.
Even if it was merely a rash of misfortune, it still was proof of the brittleness of the system as it had been implemented. Maybe it works fine most of the time, but it was also more unreliable than its designers appear to have thought it was.
Houston’s track record is quite positive, so perhaps he’ll be the missing piece in getting the problems ironed out. The man’s hire hasn’t even been officially announced though, so it’s far too early to draw any conclusions on that.
Regardless, adding another primary special teams guy of some sort is further evidence of the fact that Napier is trying to make changes this offseason. He’s been methodically and deliberately working his way through the staff, both on-field and off, and Houston is like many of the new faces in that he’s coming from the NFL rather than another college program. We’ll all find out in eight months whether all of the shuffling was sufficient to cure 2023’s ills, but special teams makes one fewer place where Napier has stood pat this offseason.