There was something from yesterday’s fall camp opening press conference that caught my eye. It was not from the head coach, though in an indirect way it was about him.
The speaker was new special teams analyst Joe Houston, and he talked about getting more creative on blocking punts and kicks. The reason he gave for doing that was that those kinds of blocks increase your chance of winning.
Now, in a vacuum, the statement is unremarkable. A special teams coach wants to dial it up on special teams? Who’d have thunk it. And blocking punts and kicks can help you win more games? You don’t say.
However, it sticks out to me because I can’t recall anyone in the Napier era saying such a thing in public. Maybe someone did and I missed it, but it’s certainly not a regular talking point.
The thing is, the importance of special teams and specifically blocks was a constant talking point when Urban Meyer was in Gainesville. He famously was a special teams coach before becoming a head coach, and he still personally coached that unit even after ascending to the big chair. I tried to avoid paying attention to his Jacksonville stop as much as possible, but he was still sitting in on special teams meetings at Ohio State.
Meyer used to like to cite a statistic that was something along the lines of, a team that blocks a punt or a kick wins the game 90% of the time. I strangely can’t find the exact quote now, but anyone who followed the team back then will have heard that chestnut. It wasn’t exact and probably overstated the percentage — and anyway, the better team is more likely to block something and also more likely to win the game — but he’d say it and also act like he believed it.
It was all the more strange that Dan Mullen didn’t emphasize special teams much considering that he worked under Meyer for nearly a decade and remained close after getting his own head job. When I essentially pre-wrote the obit for Mullen’s tenure at Florida, I focused on the way that Mullen didn’t create margin of error for himself in nearly any ways. Special teams was one of the areas in which he could’ve tried to do that but didn’t much.
Napier hasn’t been terrific at creating margin of error for himself either. He has tried it in one arena, that being recruiting. He goes for top shelf talent even though it requires more time and effort, rather than often settling for developmental guys that are easy to sign because their next-best offer is from someone like Pitt like Mullen used to.
But Napier’s game day strategy has eroded that margin of error that he built up during the recruiting process. The Tennessee game last year might be the most obvious example, as he built up a big lead and then called runs on all but four plays in the second half. He is risk-averse, content to park the bus as soon as he thinks he can ride a lead to the finish rather than keep trying to dominate to the end.
Special teams is another area where he’s not just failed to build margin of error but has thrown it away. Special teams problems have haunted the team throughout his tenure, from a ton of flags to sending fewer than 11 guys out to the side change snafu against Arkansas last year to the infamous two-number-threes problem against Utah.
Napier has tried to defend both himself and his longtime special teams guy Chris Couch by citing some nice statistics, and they are decent stats. If you know where to look, you can find that the special teams unit has done well in a lot of ways. The problem is that those stats don’t include things like penalties or lining up with nine or ten men. It’s a way for Napier and his critics to talk past each other.
Florida does actually have three blocks under Napier’s time, but they haven’t dovetailed with Meyer’s famous stat. The first was a field goal block in the Las Vegas Bowl in which UF was wholly uncompetitive against Oregon State. The third was an ultimately inconsequential PAT block against Kentucky last year in a game in which the defense’s strategy appeared to be to make Ray Davis tired out by letting him run for hundreds of yards. The only one that came in a win was a punt block against Charlotte, which falls in the “of course the better team is more likely to block something” bucket.
Napier’s Louisiana teams had four blocks in four years, but three of them came in his last year of 2021. One was in a comfortable 45-0 win over Texas State, but the other two came in one-score wins over South Alabama and Georgia Southern. He’s experienced blocks helping out in tight contests… when his eventual 12-1 team squeaked out wins over a 5-7 team (South AL) and a 3-9 team (GA Southern).
Listen, I am all for being more creative in order to get more of an edge from special teams. It’s long past due. But as some of us have been saying for a while, he has to be more aggressive in all facets in order to max out what he can get from the Florida program. Finding new ways to block kicks and punts is a good thing, but it needs to be a part of a full suite of changes to really help move the needle.