Florida reportedly is in the process of making tight ends coach Russ Callaway into its new co-offensive coordinator. Jacob Rudner of 247Sports was first with the news.
It’s worth starting with what we still don’t know.
We don’t know if Callaway will have play-calling duties. I would bet against it for a few reasons, one of which I’ll get into later. Principally, Napier told the voice of the Gators Sean Kelley earlier this month that he wants to keep being the play caller. Napier also told Andy Staples at SEC Media Days last summer that calling plays is “as close as I can get to playing the game”, and, “I really believe it’s a way to keep a hand on the identity of your team”.
We also don’t know what, exactly, “co-offensive coordinator” will mean yet. The more senior of the two offensive line coaches, Rob Sale, had an OC title the past two seasons but didn’t call plays. During that same span, former defensive line coach Sean Spencer had a co-defensive coordinator title but also didn’t call plays. Patrick Toney had a co-DC title from his hiring in early December 2021, about a month and a half before Spencer’s hire, but then Austin Armstrong was just plain DC with no “co-” last year. Napier also recently hired Ron Roberts as, among other titles, co-DC but then said at his February signing day presser that Roberts would be “head coach of the defense”.
So yeah, reading into job titles without an explanation is a dicey proposition.
A reasonable assumption at this point is that functionally, Sale will be the running game coordinator with Callaway the passing game coordinator. It’s a setup that’s not uncommon when head coaches are the primary offensive architect. In 2020, Dan Mullen actually had three coordinators according to the titles: Brian Johnson was offensive coordinator, John Hevesy was running game coordinator, and Billy Gonzales was passing game coordinator. Mullen, of course, was still the primary play caller and the visionary behind the offense.
The theme of Napier’s staff moves this offseason is delegation. He also said at this month’s NSD presser that Callaway would have a larger role, though at that point it hadn’t been defined well enough yet to make any moves like this reported promotion.
If Napier still wanted to call plays, which he said two-and-a-half weeks ago that he does, then the only real option for adding an OC-titled coach was promoting Callaway. The reason is simple. Callaway is the only person on the staff who’s been a play-calling offensive coordinator before aside from Napier himself. It’s why some fans have been guessing for months that Callaway might see an expanded role in the future. An outside hire is possible with former line coach Darnell Stapleton off to the NFL, but hiring a non-play calling co-OC in the middle of the offseason would be an odd move. As would having two offensive line coaches both with OC titles.
But while Callaway’s elevation makes sense from that standpoint, it’s also curious when you look at what Callaway’s experience with calling plays actually was.
Rudner’s report mentions that Samford led FCS in passing yards per game in 2018 with Callaway at the helm. That is true. However, those same Bulldogs were 97th out of 124 teams in rushing yards per game once you take sacks out of the run stats. That’s because they were an Air Raid team.
The head coach at Samford then and now is Chris Hatcher. He played quarterback for Hal Mumme and Mike Leach at Valdosta State. He’s not from the Air Raid Extended Universe; he got his training at the source.
The primary hallmark of the Air Raid is that it uses a lot of passing, with much of it being short and safe throws. Those easy tosses put the ball into space better than handoffs do without sacrificing much in the way of ball security.
Graham Mertz drove some Gator fans batty with all of his throws at or behind the line of scrimmage in 2023, but his 8.1 yards per pass was almost a half yard more than the 7.7 that the 2018 Samford team had. The Bulldogs may have led the country in passing yards per game, but they were 37th in yards per attempt. They got to the top spot by simply passing a ton without spending a lot of time running the ball.
Napier’s offense is very different from the Air Raid. Napier doesn’t like to use a lot of short passes in place of the run game, he likes to use the run game as the run game. He wants to pound the rock to then hit passes over the top. He wants the offense to help out the defense, but Air Raid teams often end up in interminably long contests that tax everyone’s stamina. Napier famously likes two-tight end sets more than most, but 2018 Samford had two listed tight ends on the entire roster.
To be clear, it’s not like Air Raid is all Callaway knows. His father, Neil Callaway, is a longtime football coach who worked, among many other places, as an offensive line coach at Auburn under Pat Dye for a decade. He was OC/OL coach for Mark Richt at Georgia while Russ was in high school. Presumably Russ’s dad taught him a thing or two about more traditional offenses.
Callaway was also an analyst at Nick Saban’s Alabama in 2011, which is when he first met a fellow analyst by the name of Billy Napier. After his high-flying Samford days, Callaway worked for LSU in 2020, the New York Giants in 2021, and then of course at Florida as an analyst in 2022 and TEs coach in 2023. None of those recent stops ran Air Raid attacks.
But if you’re going to hang your hat on his past play-calling experience, the fact is that he called a very different kind of offense than what Napier runs in Gainesville. That’s the other reason why I don’t anticipate Callaway getting play calling responsibilities. His past work doesn’t map neatly onto what UF has been doing for two years, and the roster is in no shape to make the hard pivot into Air Raid territory — not that Napier has ever said or done anything to make himself sound amenable to such a drastic change.
Callaway can draw on his experience to help more fully develop the passing game, which would address some grousing I’ve heard from some of the more Xs-and-Os oriented Gator commentators for two years running. I’m not qualified to assess how founded those complaints are, but I’ve heard it too many times from too many corners to think there’s nothing to it at all.
A co-offensive coordinator title for Callaway would be news, since coordinators are a big deal in SEC football. It’s also kind of not news, since Napier tipped his hand to a change of this sort for Callaway weeks ago and the head coach is likely to keep calling the plays on Saturdays. If the play calling duties change hands as a part of this move, then obviously that resets the notability much higher.
But even without such a shift, it’s yet another piece of evidence on the pile that Napier is formally changing the leadership structure to hand off more matters of importance to others on the staff. We already learned that Roberts will be the head coach of the defense, Mark Robinson is a new figure in the program’s nascent NFL-esque front office who will deal with NIL issues among other things, and new analyst Joe Houston will help address special teams problems. Now, a job title is signaling the growing importance of Callaway’s influence on the offense as a little bit more leaves Napier’s plate.