Offense was up and defense was down across the board last year. The general consensus is that it turns out after all that tackling and coverage are skills that require practice. While many offensive players could still do their own reps against air once they all got to campus, defenders couldn’t go around hitting people.
For perspective, in most years the SEC leader allows 13-15 points per game in league play. In the worst years, it goes up to almost 17. Last year, Bama was first at 19.5 allowed per game with Georgia right behind at 19.9. It was a noticeably bad year for defense everywhere.
I’ve always suspected that the pandemic was the single biggest factor in Florida’s defensive plunge last year, and I still think it is. However quotes coming out of fall camp are finally shedding some more light on things.
Take this one from Mohamoud Diabate about his realization from spring this year: “Sitting down and watching film on my own, I was like, ‘OK, we didn’t even have this last year.’ That really showed me a lot. It had a big negative effect on our play and the whole defense’s ability to learn the scheme.”
They couldn’t do a full install last year without spring practice, which makes sense. I think everyone probably knew that intuitively. We could probably criticize the coaches’ ability to deal with that fact, given they had all summer to try to figure out how to maximize the time they still had in fall. Whatever new things they tried, if they did try new things and not just do a truncated version of the normal routine, they didn’t work all that well.
Kaiir Elam had this to say: “I feel like last year we looked a little out of whack, not communicating like we should, not everyone on the same page.” Again, this is baseline stuff. If the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, well, this qualifies as identifying and admitting it.
The really good stuff came Zach Carter, who as a fifth-year senior who’s been through a lot in his career has the standing to say something like this: “You got to think about it, you’re gone four months. No spring ball. We show and work out for like a month and a half before the season and go right into camp. Some guys might have that individual mindset because we really haven’t been building that team and working together and training together.”
It certainly is a bigger challenge to cultivate team culture when everyone is not in the same place. Nevertheless, it can actually be done, as evidenced by better team cultures on other teams last season. Or, for that matter, on Florida’s own offense.
I therefore would put this problem squarely on the coaches. It’s literally in their job description to inculcate a positive team culture. Plenty of football coaches go running around to conferences and seminars and talk about how it’s the most important aspect to the vocation.
It’s not surprising and maybe should’ve been predicted ahead of time that there could be poor team culture last year. One constant thing I read at Gator Country and elsewhere is that the UF staff under Mullen is much better at in-person recruiting than the remote contact stuff of texting, calls, video chats, and so forth. I heard over and over as the ’21 class took shape that it would’ve helped out tremendously to get prospects on campus.
It follows, then, that they’re having real trouble putting together a top-notch 2022 class. The usual rhythm is that coaches generally build relationships with juniors and close the deal when they become seniors. There are always guys who commit sooner or later than that, but that’s the approximate routine.
Without a chance to build any relationships with on-campus visits until two months ago, the ’22 class is on pace to have the lowest Composite average player rating in the Mullen era. There’s still time for the visits of this summer and fall to get that number up, but that’s where they’re at. It’s notable, too, that the of the 11 commits at present, only one of them doesn’t have either a known recruiting ace (Tim Brewster, Christian Robinson) or one of the three new coaches as a primary recruiter. The guys who earned that reputation I described above are by and large not landing any fish yet.
Anyway, Carter was not finished: “Guys are thinking, I’m just trying to get through this season and get to the next level, or I’m just trying to get through this season and do what I can do for me.”
I walk a fine line when it comes to criticizing college athletes. I try to keep it to on-field things that I (think I) understand and documented off-field matters. It looked to me last year like there might be some of this very thing that Carter describes going on, but as I don’t know any players personally and don’t interview any of them, I didn’t want to accuse anyone of playing to protect their futures instead of giving it their all during the season.
I still won’t name any names because Carter didn’t, though I do know who chose to stick around for this season and who didn’t. It’s pretty clear-cut in that way because everyone could’ve come back thanks to the COVID eligibility mulligan. I don’t think every defensive player who went pro or transferred was among those Carter is talking about; guys might’ve been ready to be done with college or just wanted or needed a fresh start. I can guess at some of who he might be describing, though, based on what I saw out of, say, the secondary last year.
Given how many players were back from the generally good 2019 defense, there was no reason the 2020 defense should’ve been so bad. The scheme was part of it, but they played too-soft coverages in ’19 as well (see: LSU, third down against UGA) and didn’t get a full install last year.
The culture problems go a long way to explaining why it collapsed so suddenly. The pandemic realities were part of it, but the lack of remote team building from the coaches and bad attitudes from some players tell the rest of the story. I feel better about the chances of the 2021 defense knowing that these facts are known among the team and that the lack of face-to-face interactions that led to the ’20 defensive slide aren’t around anymore.