Florida had its first spring scrimmage on Friday. It wasn’t open to the public, so information is only getting out in drips and drabs to various people. Andrew Spivey had a nice summary of the major themes from it on the GC message board, and there was another insider who dropped some tidbits as well. I’d recommend you check it out if you haven’t yet.
I did a brief survey of what I can see from elsewhere and it confirmed a lot of what Andrew said. The bottom-line takeaway is that the defense had a terrific outing while the offense suffered in a lot of regards.
In response, there at Gator fans in several corners of the Internet fretting about what that outcome could imply. UF lost a record-setting quarterback in Kyle Trask along with his top three targets. Offensive line has been an issue for a couple of years running, and it needs to improve with a more run-heavy attack coming this year. Florida is also coming off one of its worst defensive performances in memory and has in Todd Grantham’s reckoning a young group over there. So, what does it say that the offense struggled against the defense?
What it says is this: it’s a normal spring practice session.
The recency bias of the 2020 season has scrambled some folks’ expectations about how football teams develop. Almost no one had a full spring practice session last year, and offenses were ahead of defenses from the first games.
That dynamic is exactly the opposite of what happens in spring practice, though. Offenses always look better in the fall than they do in the spring because the players take time over the summer to drill things on their own. A big reason why offenses start out behind in spring is that their timing is off. This is especially true when there is a new starting quarterback, and Florida’s new one throws a very different ball than his predecessor did.
Remember that disorder favors a defense. To be reductive about it, think about the four possibilities when the offense and defense could either make a good play or a bad play. When the offense makes a good play and the defense makes a bad one, the offense wins. When both make a good play, let’s say for now that it’s about 50-50 which wins out.
However when the offense makes a bad play, it generally loses whether the defense makes a good play or not. Before the snap even happens in this simplified model, there’s a 62.5% chance the defense wins and a 37.5% chance the offense wins on any given play. The offense has to outperform the defense just to even up the odds, and this early in spring, an offense is far more likely to be underperforming than overperforming.
It also doesn’t help for scrimmage success purposes that John Hevesy has reportedly been trying out a lot of different players so far on the line. At his press availability last week, he mentioned five different names of players who’d gotten work at center alone: Ethan White, Stewart Reese, Kingsley Eguakun, Griffin McDowell, and Riley Simonds. They weren’t all necessarily getting work there with the ones, but that’s still a lot of churn in the middle.
This much should be encouraging to you, as UF really does need to improve. Florida has ten scholarship linemen who are entering their third years or later. There are plenty of options who’ve been around long enough to learn enough to compete for playing time.
The tradeoff is that the offensive line will suffer when it’s scrimmage time. As I mentioned last week, offensive linemen need time working together to do their best. They need to be able to read each others’ minds, more or less. They will not get there with lots of players trying out at different positions.
Besides, it’s very good to hear that defensive tackle appears to be a real strength this year. It was not last year, as UF’s ability to get a stop hinged, to a certain approximation, on whether Kyree Campbell was available and in the game. If the entire unit is that dependent on one particular player, that’s a bad sign. Especially when that one particular player missed the first three games for undisclosed reasons.
UF desperately needed the help it got from the portal with Daquan Newkirk and Antonio Shelton, and them combined with the promising 2020 signees of Gervon Dexter, Jalen Lee, and Lamar Goods allow the Gators to go at least five deep there. You want to be able to rotate those big dudes because they only have so many quality snaps in them per game. Health allowing, Florida will be able to do that in 2021.
In short, there is absolutely no reason to fret about the defense being ahead of the offense at this stage in spring practice. Generally, there’s no reason to fret about the defense finishing spring practice ahead of the offense either. As we see with Hevesy doing his relatively open competition, the offensive side of the ball isn’t even trying to optimize for scrimmage success right now. It’s not clear why they’d ever want to since scrimmage outcomes never count for anything.
After a topsy-turvy 2020, welcome back to normal, friends. This is how it’s supposed to work.