SI Article: Billy Napier on Strength of Florida's Roster: 'We're Talking About 61 Points'

Hope we are better on special teams as Napier says here. We were barely ranked in single digits last year, high 90s I think, much improvement needed there. Our offense was okay, defense and special teams really sub par. Can easily find 61 points in a season by improving those 2 areas.

 

The word "perfection" is an impossible thing to achieve, but if Napier wants to win those 1 score games in the future he'll needs to practice for perfection. That means everything from game clock management to the 2 point conversions... all the way to the hurry up offense.

I would practice plays to the point where it's not perfection, but instead to the point where you cannot get them wrong.

In all 3 facets on the game. Special teams... defense... offense. I would practice every single day and night in the hurry-up mode so that if you had to play a team that always plays in hurry-up we can hang with them and not go into panic mode over it.


How and what to practice:

The red zone is a must in practice... every day, so are all these below.
The two-minute offense in hyper speed is a must. If all practice in hurry-up then you need a faster hyper speed...
The two point conversion should by plays that we simply make and never miss on.
The run blitz front end and man-press on the back end. We don't have to blitz per se, if we get the right big-nasties on the D-line to bull rush to the QB. However.. I am quite sure AA has a plan for the defense... can't wait to see it.
We need to practice fake punts and how to defense against it too. We need to practice fake field goals and how to defense against it.
Open field tackling...
The spin move, and how to defense against the running-backs/receivers that are prolific at the spin move.
The slant pass.... over and over again and again.
The fade route/wheel route and others.
Gasses, what we once called wind sprints back in the day.
The pushing sled... every single day at the end of practice.

All of this stuff should be automatic for most good coaches, but we also need to add that special element to our practice and that is trick plays. SOS and Meyer we masters of these (easy points) trick plays. We must have them in abundance to get that edge that we need to be the top team in the conference.

One thing that separates good coaches from great coaches is thinking in terms of overall approach to a game. For instance, I would be looking to make the other team burn their time-outs coming out of half-time right away.

SOS made team burn time-outs early in the half or the game by going to the Emery and Henry formation...

There are hundreds of plays you can run out of that formation. I say bring that back. Hire SOS as a consultant if we have to, but we need those kinds of unpredictable play calls to get the desired result. To get the other team to burn their timeouts, and get some good yardage too. And if we normalize the hurry-up that too will add to the other teams confusion... force time-outs, win the clock and score board.

Some people call these "gimmicks," I don't care what you call them they work if you practice them... especially in a hurry-up offense. So we do that once of twice early in the 3rd quarter and we could force the other team to burn 1 or 2 other their second half timeouts. That's a real whole game strategy. We need whole game strategies to force our will upon the other team. Imagine the trick plays we could run from the Emery and Henry formation/s. Man I miss the SOS and Meyer days.

I think Napier will iron-out the minutia in his game day, mishaps like game clock, play clock and learning when NOT to call time-outs, and when to call them. I'm not worried about that stuff. That's usually a first year thing. Even Kirby (not so game-day coach) Smart had several game day brain-farts at the beginning of his tenure.

I am holding hope that some of what I mentioned will be part of Napier's regimen in practice. Blocking a tackling must improve just to look decent next year. So that is the first and most important part of every day practice. Get that right and then we can work on all the rest.

 

Start with a dedicated special teams coach and investing one scholarship into a designated KR, and a designated PR.

 

I'm thinking/hoping we already have the PR and KR guys on the team. We do have some speedsters now. Meyer's teams had those guys and they were good. Starting at your 40 or their 40 is a real a nice way to start a punt return.

I'm a bit more optimistic than the writers, that's for sure. If the line is good our offense should be pretty good. But I'm hoping the defense will be significantly improved. That could mean a couple more wins right there. I guess we'll know in 90+ days or so.

Go Gators.

 

I gave him a pass on his end-of-half clock-management as I beleieve he didn't trust his ofense to move the bal or his defense not to give up another score. I know that you need to try to win the game and not play scared, but the O was so hit-or-miss and the D was so "miss", end-of-half performance stunk on both sides of the ball.