Strange to say, but I am less worried about the defense now than I was over the weekend. Really. Will Miles and the GNFP showed me through some film stuff what happened with the bad defensive showing, and I can be sanguine about some parts of it.
Why did Florida look small against Kentucky? Well, Liam Coen designed a bunch of run plays for Ray Davis to get him one-on-one with defensive backs. Corners, if possible. Davis is only listed at 5’10”, but he’s a sturdy 216 pounds. Jalen Kimber gives up 31 pounds to him. Jason Marshall gives up 16. Miguel Mitchell is only a pound off, but he’s had something of a reputation from his first spring practice of being a guy who gets run over. He doesn’t know how to use leverage, in other words.
So if you get these guys lighter guys near the ball carrier a lot, it’s going to make the defense look small. The corners at least clearly don’t relish the contact of run support, so they didn’t always try their hardest to make a stop. They don’t even need to make solo tackles, as slowing Davis up so help could arrive would’ve been really useful on some plays.
And then, Scooby Williams had a regression game where he looked like his old 2022 self instead of his new 2023 self. He has legitimately made big gains this year, but I could only speculate as to why he gave them up over the weekend. Shemar James said afterwards that they came out flat because of the early start time, and maybe that was it.
In short, though, Austin Armstrong called a good game. Perfect? No, and that’s unattainable anyway. But, his calls were fine on a lot of key big plays. The focus and execution just weren’t there. It wasn’t a case of the tradeoff of an aggressive DC being big plays allowed. The calls really were fine. The players just couldn’t do it right.
I worried some during the game that maybe the Armstrong success was a mirage. Utah was shorthanded and has looked terrible on offense this year against everyone as a result. McNeese and Charlotte were outmanned, and Tennessee’s offense is pretty simple. Coen has more tools in his toolbox with his NFL pedigree and more sophisticated system, so maybe Armstrong was getting exposed? I am certain that’s not the case now. Schematically, the defense was sound.
This is where it just gets so frustrating because Billy Napier couldn’t get his team up for the game. It’s a pattern, and it’s not getting better.
Beyond that, from the outside there just seems to be a failure of ambition on Napier’s part. I went over this a little bit in the newsletter after Utah, but Napier just isn’t in the mindset of trying to destroy the opponent.
Napier’s watchword this year is “complementary football”. It’s a bit of a misnomer, since he’s really only talking about the offense here. No one ever talks about a defense complementing an offense, even though it can do that through getting quick stops and turnovers. He must not mean it about special teams because the next clean game they play in that phase will be the first.
It means play a ball control offense that doesn’t put the defense in a bad spot. That’s what he means. You don’t go hurry up, you don’t go deep too often, you try to chew up clock on every drive, and you try not to turn it over.
The upshot is that you get an offense that runs on first down too much, runs on 2nd and long too much, runs on 3rd and long too much, and does a ton of routes at or before the sticks.
Napier said at SEC Media Days that he likes to call plays because it lets him vicariously play quarterback again. Either he secretly loved handing the ball off the most of any part of that job, or he’s overly, maniacally focused on making things easy for the quarterback because it’s fun to do the easy stuff.
When a team can power run a lot, the defense eventually may put an extra man in the box, which means one less guy covering passes. Hence, they run a lot, even in passing situations.
The most distinctive element to his offense is an abundance of hitch routes, which are when a receiver runs to a spot, turns to face the quarterback, and stops moving. Hitches have their place, especially in exploiting holes in zones, but they neutralize what should be any Florida offense’s advantage in speed because the guy isn’t moving when he receives the ball.
Napier likes bootlegs and roll outs so much that defenses expect them in the red zone. Graham Mertz does like throwing on the run to his right and is good at it, but Napier did these a lot with Anthony Richardson too. And what does that kind of play do for you? Simplify things because it removes half of the field from the equation.
Napier also loves to use motion and misdirection, but the upshot is that sometimes even when he goes four or five wide, there are only two or three real routes. You’ll get things where motion and play design are trying to get one specific guy open, and if the defense covers that one guy, Mertz has nowhere to go except a check down because everyone else was just a decoy. And if that check down is covered, it’s either scramble or sack time.
I came up with a thought experiment back during the McElwain days. It goes like this. If Mike Leach could take the personnel from an offense, run his original Air Raid that has a million hours of tape on it by now, and substantially outscore the present scheme, then the present scheme is broken and/or it just isn’t trying hard enough to gain yards and score points. Back then I applied it to the then-present Mac attack and the freshly remembered Muschamp days, and for most of those years it was a solid maybe at best. Offensive talent really was lacking.
This year, I think the late Pirate of Key West would absolutely do much better. He took lines no better than the present one, with quarterbacks with less physical talent than Mertz, and a bunch of anonymous receivers with maybe one potential pro and score tons of points. Eugene Wilson being out hasn’t helped, but give Leach this line, Mertz, Ricky Pearsall, Caleb Douglas, Marcus Burke, Andy Jean, and occasionally Wilson, and that’s a 30+ point offense for sure. UF is averaging 25 per game so far, and 19 if you take out FCS McNeese.
I absolutely know that Napier would bristle at this line of thinking given his rather testy press conferences since the Charlotte game. You can tell that he’s starting to feel the infamous heat that his job catches. Last year there was always the fact it was a transitional year to fall back on, but now the roster is more than half his players via recruiting or transfer, and everyone should know the processes by now.
As I said prior, I don’t want a pure Air Raid because it has not and will never win a national championship. I do want a mentality of never letting up, however.
Napier’s idea of never letting up is getting a two or three score lead and then running the ball ad nauseum to seal the deal. My idea of never letting up is maximizing the margin for error in every possible way. Those are not the same thing, and my idea is much more aligned with what the UF fan base generally wants than his is. As long as his vision and the fans’ don’t align, he’s going to keep feeling that heat unless he somehow lucks into an SEC or national title.
Because you can’t win the SEC or national title with his strategy without luck. Georgia won’t let him as long as Kirby Smart is there, and he has no discernible NFL ambitions. Napier’s vision works when you can recruit a clearly better team than everyone else in the Sun Belt. It doesn’t so much in the SEC while Smart and Saban are around. Whether Napier will realize that or not will calibrate how long his tenure is.