What I wanted to hear from the hive mind here is your opinion on something we saw throughout the year. ONE unit was good/fair… one unit awful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in such drastic contrast from game to game in the 40+. Years I’ve been watching Gator football. FSU/Utah/Tennessee- defense fair/offense bad MIZZ/Ark/LSU- offense good/defense or special teams bad. I know some of this is opponent specific or due to injuries/youth etc… But I’m wondering if there is something else we can read from this in a top down/operational sense? Does it say something about the operation as a whole that you can’t get all 3 units to play well or that it’s such a drastic shift from game to game? thoughts?
Offense looks good against shitty defenses Defense looks horrid against great offenses ST I got nothing.
The thing is, those issues would happen in the same game. The defense would play good/average in the 1st half, while the offense would sputter, and then the roles would reverse in the 2nd half. The offense would start scoring and then the defense would start faltering. It seemed like Billy wouldn’t open the offense until he was playing catch-up for whatever reason. My opinion/concern is Billy plays things too conservatively and it causes him to miss out on opportunities to put the game out of reach. The problem with playing conservatively is it leaves little margin for error/bad bounces. There is a reason he is involved in so many 1-2 score games over his coaching career.
Not much to say here. The coaching has not been good in any phase; therefore, it would be sheer luck if any two phases of the game aligned in a positive way. I have dozens of spreadsheets on my computer analyzing talent, recruiting, experience, birth signs, Mercury in retrograde, and winning lottery numbers…My scientific conclusion is that makes sense with this team. My personal opinion is that these coaches are probably good recruiters but are not very good coaches—at least not together as a staff.
One reason I think Armstrong is getting some rope on defense is because of just how bad our personnel is there. I am not a fan of overly complex defensive schemes at all because I think it leads to missed assignments and big plays, but I think a DCs hand is kind of forced if the personnel isn't there. If our personnel is akin to that of 2015 and 2016 (talented, but nothing out of this world) and we're still being overly exotic and missing assignments, then I'd say we have problems. Just be aggressive, play fast, play physical, do your job, and play a lot of press coverage (none of this 10 yards off the line of scrimmage crap). Gator Defense does that with good personnel and it should be okay. Although Mullen fixed the offense, my goodness... we had an excellent defense for about 9 consecutive years with one bad season in 2017 under McElwain, and we've just never bounced back.
We just seem to adopt whatever playing styling the other team wants to play …. If they want high scoring shootout, we can do that (and the offense looks good)…. If they want to play a safe low scoring game, we can do that too (and the defense looks good)… hard to explain, and it may not all be all on our coaches… maybe the other team is happy to adopt Billy’s safe approach because no one is afraid of us…
