Florida’s 2021 defense is starting to take shape. Thanks to the pandemic eligibility mulligan, there’s never been an offseason like this one where we have to go player by player to piece together the roster for the following season.
Some players like Kyree Campbell, Tedarrell Slaton, and Marco Wilson are going pro, and Chester Kimbrough and CJ McWilliams have hit the portal. Zachary Carter is returning, and the Gators have added from the portal with Antonio Shelton and DaQuan Newkirk.
We are still waiting for the final count however, and I don’t know when we will get it. And once we do know the players who will and won’t be in Gainesville, we will still need spring practice to find out who will start and otherwise contribute. The secondary will be of particular interest since the program has two brand new position coaches back there.
But despite all that uncertainty, I will confidently guarantee that Florida’s defense will be better statistically in 2021. Guarantee it.
For one thing, the schedule will help a lot. Consider the upcoming regular season slate versus the 12 games the team played in 2020.
Eight of the 12 teams will be the same, including new West division rotation opponent Alabama. After them though, UF drops Arkansas, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, and Texas A&M and adds FAU, FSU, USF, and Samford. The departing teams scored at minimum 35 points against the Gators. If any of the new ones hit 35, it will be a real shock.
In fact, let’s do it this way. Take every opponent score and clone it to 2021. South Carolina scores 24 again, Georgia scores 28 again, and so on. Now, drop in the new opponents. We’ll be generous and give FAU and Samford ten points each. We’ll give USF 17, and be really generous and assign 24 points to Florida State.
How many points does Florida allow per game in 2021 with those results? It comes out to 21.8 per game. It’s still worse than the 20.0 per game the Gators allowed in 2018 and well behind the 15.5 per game in 2019, but it’s nine points better than the 30.8 points per game they allowed in 2020.
Now, I do expect for instance Missouri to have a better offense next year in its second run with promising young QB Connor Bazelak behind center, and Kentucky should improve with its new NFL-bred offensive coordinator. Florida making no improvement on defense would give up more than that 21.8 per game. But even giving Mizzouri 30 and bumping Georgia up to 35 with J.T. Daniels and granting Kentucky 28 points, UF still gives up 25.0 points per game. It’s almost a six-point improvement over the headline number from 2020.
I also think there will be an amount of regression to the mean. I covered some of this in my case for retaining Todd Grantham article — a case I don’t really subscribe to but wanted to see if it could be made — and UF will almost certainly improve.
Relative to the rest of the conference, the Gators were about as low as they ever get on defense last fall. They were seventh in points per game allowed in SEC play, which is actually a slight bit better than the eighth they were in 2018 and 2014. Grantham tossing up an eighth and seventh in his first two years is not helping the case for retaining him, but those figures aren’t adjusted for non-offensive scores. I digress.
UF has been fourth or better in eight of 14 seasons since 2007. The six teams that were worse than that consisted of teams moving from a 4-3 to a 3-4 (2011, 2018), ones with the head coach fired partway through (2014, 2017), a super young defense (2007), and a pandemic year (2020). I don’t think any of those will apply again, though we’ll see on the last point. Vaccines are getting out, and bubbling for spring practice seems like a likely strategy to me.
Guys in new positions like Trey Dean at safety and Mohamoud Diabate at non-Buck linebacker visibly improved over the course of the year as they figured out what they were doing. The talent level on defense by recruiting ranking has been climbing steadily as the McElwain staff signed a lot more 3-stars instead of 4-stars in comparison to Mullen’s staff. Just getting the communication down straight will do a lot given how disorganized the unit looked for much of the season.
UF has too many good players to do worse than they did last year. They have bigger, stronger, and faster players than most of the teams they’ll face. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll be in the right places doing the right things, but sheer athleticism will overcome sometimes.
So again, Florida will absolutely put up a better statistical defensive performance than it did last year. I have no doubts about that. The key to evaluating the defense, then, is not to get suckered into things like “well, they’re giving up a touchdown per game less than last year”. Merely being a touchdown better per game than 2020 would rank the team eighth in the SEC in 2018 and tenth in 2019.
I think they can and will do a lot better, and it won’t necessarily come from correcting a lot of the problems with Grantham’s schemes and play-calling decision making. It’ll come from going back to a normal schedule and regression to the expected performance for the talent on hand.
When we get to the annual arguing about Grantham towards the end of this year, don’t rely on statistical improvements alone. They should be baked into your expectations. Look to those who go beyond just the numbers, because the numbers we’ll have to look at will look an awful lot better.