There is never a dull moment around the Gator football team these days. I saw an aunt and uncle yesterday and then later had my family’s weekly video chat with my in-laws. None of these people are that into sports, but both encounters included requests for me to explain what exactly happened to have Florida defeating Samford by the basketball score of 70-52. My mother-in-law doesn’t care for football and probably couldn’t name a position other than quarterback, but she knew the final score exactly.
The short answer is that a lot of problems came home to roost, and in doing so they raised other ones. Effort was not an issue when the team was pushing Alabama it the limit or even falling on the road at Kentucky due to a confluence of weird events on top of Dan Mullen coaching as conservatively as possible. It has been increasingly so as the losses have piled up.
After the game I saw one headline go by that suggested that maybe Todd Grantham wasn’t the problem after all. That’s true as far as it goes; as I just noted, he by far wasn’t the one and only problem. He wasn’t even the one and only assistant coach to be fired after South Carolina.
But make no mistake: the defensive issues on display against Samford were in large part Grantham’s fault. No, he wasn’t present. However the architecture of the thing, from personnel to scheme, are what they are because of his vision and direction. They are Dan Mullen’s fault too in a The Buck Stops Here sense, but he trusts his defensive coordinators to run the show on that side.
You can’t change a scheme mid-season, even with an open date. That’s my way of saying that no, things wouldn’t be better right now had they fired Grantham after LSU. Mullen was a part of a schematic overhaul in 2005 after LSU’s defense essentially broke Urban Meyer’s vision for bringing his Bowling Green/Utah offense to the SEC in an unaltered state. The changes netted all of two good drives in the post-bye week game against Georgia and fewer than 30 offensive points against both a decaying FSU and a limited Iowa in the bowl. The new scheme wouldn’t hit its stride until the 13th game of the following season.
There was never a shot of a big change given that we now know that Christian Robinson was going to be the pick for interim DC. He could be legitimately described as a Grantham protege. And the scheme that’s there is just unsound. It is too complex, which keeps players thinking instead of reacting. Everyone tries to disguise things, but Grantham tried so much to do so that he would just put players out of position to make the plays he asked them to. A desire for versatility ended up netting the team a lot of tweeners in recruiting too.
And thanks to those and other personnel issues, I’m not sure what could be done to fix the defense this year anyway. They’re pedestrian at defensive tackle when Gervon Dexter isn’t personally wrecking everything. They haven’t had an elite edge player since Jonathan Greenard. Three of the four guys in the non-Buck linebacker rotation converted from other positions and so don’t have good linebacker instincts. There is only one traditional run-stuffing linebacker among the oldest few classes, and he’s been out injured almost the whole year. Much of the secondary is young and/or inexperienced and therefore prone to mistakes.
I think it’s safe to say that Grantham is better at calling the defense they have than Robinson is, and he should be given the vast experience gap between them. There’s definitely a segment of the fan base that’s convinced that things turned around the the second half because Paul Pasqualoni either took over or at least played a stronger role. I don’t know anything one way or the other on that, but the first half was always going to be a disaster no matter who called plays because of the complete lack of effort.
The Samford defense was so outmatched physically — and the Florida offense tried so much harder than its defense did — that there wasn’t as strong a proof that Hevesy needed to go. I do think he was overrated as an on-field coach, but he wasn’t Grantham-bad at that aspect of the job. He needed to go for recruiting purposes more than anything, and that wasn’t on display. UF’s players looked bigger, stronger, and faster everywhere, just like they should against an FCS opponent. The rest of this season, plus the final two games, are more that arena.
Anyway, I’ll close with this. One of the co-founders of Pixar is a guy named Ed Catmull. He has a favorite saying that others also use, but few put it as bluntly as he does: success hides problems. It’s an aphorism that’s in line with Nick Saban’s process-over-outcome thinking. Or if you prefer something more folksy, there’s Warren Buffett phrase, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
No Florida fan needs to be convinced that success hides problems. We all can point to the 2009 team’s 13-1 record that hid a ton of problems that were revealed when the tide went out the next season.
The 2019 defense was successful, helping get Mullen to his best record as Florida head coach. The unit pitched three shutouts on the season and was statistically Grantham’s best ever. However that success partially hid problems. I say “partially” because the third down issues against Georgia and inability to get a stop against LSU were the problems finding their way to some daylight. Then for as good as the 2020 offense was, even it was incapable of hiding the defensive problems.
You don’t need me to re-convince you that Grantham needed to go or that it should’ve happened last winter. All I’m trying to get at here is that the state of the defense really is his fault. Don’t listen to anyone who says he’s vindicated in any way because the defense was still bad after he was gone. It really is the result of things he did and didn’t do to get them here, and one week with largely the same voices in the room except for Pasqualoni being more present was never going to change things much.
One can hope the effort turned a corner at halftime, but all bets are off once staff starts getting fired. There is nothing left to hide the problems anymore. It all comes down to whether enough players have the want-to anymore.