Billy Napier was right to focus on defense changes first
Florida announced the hire of Ron Roberts as the new grandiosely titled “executive head coach”, co-defensive coordinator, and linebackers coach. The best case scenario here is that UF can experience a smaller but similar effect as LSU did on offense in 2019.
Everyone knows Joe Brady was the brains behind the Tigers’ all-everything attack that year… except that Steve Ensminger was the primary offensive coordinator and play caller. Ensminger certainly worked closely with Brady to import a lot of new ideas and to make decisions in the booth together er if Roberts’s experience and Armstrong’s precociousness can dovetail in a similar fashion to those of Ensminger and Brady, then maybe large defensive gains can be had by the fall.
Roberts’s hire closes a phase of overhauling the defensive staff. Billy Napier fired co-DC Sean Spencer and DBs coach Corey Raymond in short order following season’s end, and later LBs coach Jay Bateman returned to the coordinator ranks at Texas A&M. Replacements for the former two came in December, and now Roberts is aboard.
I won’t speculate why there were changes on the defensive side of the house but not the offensive. Some assistant contracts expire at January’s end, and the staff experienced turnover in February of last year. The changes may not be done.
Regardless, fixing the defense is by far the more pressing issue. A lot of Gator fans have spent time the past two years grousing about this, that, or the other thing about the offense because offensive excellence has been the expectation for a long time in Gainesville. The general makeup of recruits available in-state backs that expectation up.
However, UF has lost six games while scoring 30+ points on Napier’s watch. Six. They are, in order: 38-33 to Tennessee, 45-35 to LSU, and 45-38 to FSU in 2022; and 39-36 to Arkansas, 52-35 to LSU, and 33-31 to Missouri in 2023.
Counting the number of losses when scoring at least 30 is not a complete stat on its own. The easiest way to avoid such a loss is simply to avoid scoring 30+ points all that often. It will surprise no one to learn that neither Will Muschamp nor Jim McElwain ever lost a game while scoring 30 or more. However, the former only topped that threshold 4.25 times a season on average, and the latter only beat it three times a season. The majority of those occurrences came against either cupcakes or below-.500 Kentucky or Vandy teams.
That said, Dan Mullen only lost four such games in his four years, with three of them coming in 2020 when the bottom truly fell out of the Gator defense — and against a schedule entirely of SEC competition. Urban Meyer only lost three in six years, two in 2007 and then the Ole Miss loss in 2008 that spawned The Promise. Even Ron Zook only lost four of them in three years, and Steve Spurrier, despite scoring more than 30 points quite often, only dropped eight of them in a dozen seasons.
Last summer, I brushed off the idea of UF missing a bowl game after using an estimation formula to calculate expected wins given a variety of points-scored and points-allowed scenarios. I thought the offense would fall some but not too far in its scoring output — spoiler: that was right, as UF dropped less than four points a game — but I figured that the defense had to at least be a field goal a game better than 2022. Things were so bad in ’22, how could it not improve by a measly three points a contest?
Well, the defense didn’t get a field goal a game better. It was merely 1.2 points per game better, which wasn’t enough to move the needle much.
Following that formula with the ’23 team’s actual points scored and allowed, Florida ends up with an expected count of 6.2 wins. The Gators underperformed that by 1.2 wins, ending up with only five. By comparison, the 2022 team had an expected regular season win count of 6.7 and got six, so it also underperformed but not by as much. Had the defense gotten a field goal a game better, the ’23 team is right back at an expected win count of 6.7.
I remain unconvinced that Napier’s offensive design and game day play calling is good enough to get the Gators where they want to go. A team that struggles to average 30 points per game is not going to bring home any trophies, and the sunniest thing you can say in that regard is the ’22 team averaged 31.8 per game before the opt-out-palooza of the bowl game.
But if the offense is rickety, the defense has been on fire for most of the past four years. The best scoring defense figure belongs to the 2021 team at 26.8 points per game allowed. Breaching the 25 PPG barrier used to be something only the defensive disaster years like 2007 or 2017 saw. In short, disaster has been the status of the defense for the entire length of a standard presidential term.
At Napier’s December signing day presser, someone asked a question about offensive staff changes. His answer, in part, was: “Much like we discussed before, we’re in the middle of that. We’re going to go through — it’s one box at a time here, right?” It suggests that he felt he couldn’t evaluate the entire staff all at once, and his actions to that point along with that answer showed he was focused on the defense first before the offense.
The offense shouldn’t escape scrutiny, and one of Napier’s favorite things to say is that everything gets evaluated after every season. But if he truly had to check one box at a time for whatever reason, and that answer wasn’t just a dodge, then starting with the defense was the right call.