Interesting conversation with a former college coach

Friday night I had dinner with a group of people that included a guy who coached (defensive coach) in college for over 25 years, including long stints at Texas and Maryland. He follows UF pretty closely as his 3 kids all went there. I asked him what he thought about this Gator team. He said their diagnosis was easy and he was surprisingly optimistic about the future. He explained that things appear much worse right now than they really are because of the specific position groups where UF is bad - he the 2 areas where our roster is deficient are 2 of the 3 absolute critical positions (which he said the 3 are O-line, linebacker and QB and QB is only one that is strong).

On offense, he explained that no matter how much talent an offense has, it cannot be consistently effective if it struggles at Oline - - and that is especially the case if more than 1 guy on the o-line is struggling. He likened it to having an expensive sports car with all the best parts, but with flat tires. He said coaches have a saying, “never expect an offense to be more consistent than its weakest o-lineman”. I asked what a team can do when they have 2-3 o-linemen who consistently struggle and he said the only way to overcome that to some extent is if you have a really dynamic runner at QB. He said though he’s not a runner, he’s been very impressed with Mertz and thinks our WR’s and RB’s are good enough to play with anyone, including UGA. He’s been surprised Mertz has had as much success as he has had given the o-line struggles - he said he doesn’t think fans have any concept of just how good Mertz has been given the poor o-line play. In fact, he said the fact that the offense has averaged as many points as they have is one of the things that has him feeling good about the future (i.e. he believes this would be a top 5-10 offense if they even had last year’s line.

Regarding Defense, he said likewise there is absolutely no question regarding of the main source our defensive struggles. Linebacker. He said the d-line has had a few struggles, but for the most part that hasn’t been the problem. In fact, he said especially given their youth and some guys having to play out of their natural position (due to injury at DE), the d-line has been a pleasant surprise and played well enough to win in most games. He said any defense coach will tell you that linebacker is the absolute key to ANY defense and it’s the one position on defense where, absent a dominant d-line (which he calls a “unicorn” in CFB) there is really not much you can do to scheme around poor linebacker personnel. Poor linebacker play has the exact same impact on defense as poor QB play has on offense. And he said our roster only had 1 real middle linebacker - Shemar. But even before he got hurt he was up and down, having some good moments (though he thinks Shemar will be good), but even he had a lot of inconsistent youthful moments. He said Shemar was the only guy who filled run gaps correctly with any consistency, so losing him went from bad to worse. He said if we just had two average to slightly above average SEC backers, the difference would be night and day. He loves Coach Armstrong’s system and aggressiveness, but said they just haven’t yet invented a defense that can overcome lack of linebackers.

So I asked him, what can our coaches do in this situation with a roster deficient at o-line and linebacker. He said unsarcastically, “give up 500 yards each week and pray your offense plays perfectly.” In short, he said the fact that our roster weakness happens to be at 2 of 3 of the most critical areas, it makes the team look much worse than they are. He said UF will obviously upgrade those position groups next year and just doing that alone probably gets us 8-9. wins. He also said while the other positions have some consistency issues with the youth out there, our talent level at most anll other positions is surprisingly good. He is not a Gator homer but said if UF fans will be patient enough such that Billy can hold onto his current class of recruits, he would bet anyone UF will win an SEC title at least one time in the next 3 seasons and that he will play for at least one NC within 5 years. He said it’s unfortunate our roster deficiencies are at those 2 critical position groups as he felt strongly that UF is much, much closer than fans realize.