With the youthful and Armstrong being hired as DC, did Spence and Raymond subtly undermine Napier's/Armstrong's leadership and perhaps recruiting? Had to be resentment there. Inquiring minds want to know.
Doesn’t matter. They are gone. This program is being rebuilt from ground up. There will be hiccups, mistakes, bad hires and great hires. IF the stories of lazy recruiting from Raymond and Spencer are true.. they needed to be replaced. Recruiting is the life blood of college ball. We will never hear if they undermined or resented or whatever . I’d prefer to think they were professional enough to do their job but don’t Put in the extra hours the extra work required to rebuild UF into a great program again.
Didn't sound like Napier had any beef in the press conference. Not sure where this is coming from. I think other programs just effectively negatively recruited our program and former coaches had nothing to do with it.
Napier is struggling with issues beyond the rebuild. He wanted SEC experience, but could land only retreads like Raymond. Now he is getting technical coaches. But he needs staff stability to recruit talent.
Rumor and innuendo... smoke. Fired! What we know is true is that sports are the soap opera for men. Big egos on cfb sidelines. Surprising Raymond didn't succeed at UF. Definitely a story there. Took on coaching the whole secondary. Did he want DC? Did he not mesh with Armstrong? Was Kamari a casualty or a catalyst. The secondary struggled. Hopefully we see a big improvement there. If there was discord on the defensive staff, it is gone. Perhaps we finally are on the right road back to respectable defenses.
I’ll say this, our D backfield has been abysmal as far interceptions, jarring hits, etc… really bad. Antone Lott freshman year bad. Something HAD to change.
I'll leave my opinion on this. When we hired Austin Armstrong to take over the defense he talked about a 4 and 5 man fronts as our main formations schemes on the defensive line. I saw far too much 3 man fronts and missing assignments on the defensive front. The D-line was incapable of getting off their counterpart O-lineman holding them.Counters and other techniques confused our D-line and they often looked lost lining up for an obvious run or pass plays. Same with our back-end. The could never get off the receivers holding them, and they missed too many assignments. It was the simple things like open-field tackling that made me the most upset. There was no structure and even though we had one starting LB get injured it seemed like our entire defense digressed instead of improving like most all other teams seemed to do. There is much more to mention... but I think you got my point. It was time to move on to younger, more aggressive, position coaches.
Lot of questions unanswered and probably never will. If strength and conditioning was lacking, the position coaches would have been well aware and bringing attention to it. Same thing with some coaches not doing their job. Coaches aren’t shrinking violets and there would have been internal “discussions” Wash the laundry and get some new clothes so we can strut around town again.
Welllll.... IF THERE WAS discord between Armstrong, Raymond and Spencer, then that could explain the HUGE defensive drop-off on our Gator defense. In perspective, I have never seen such deficiencies and drop-offs in Gator D in over 50 years. Yes...let's move on... but imagine being Napier and watching the defense being chewed up by mighty Kentucky and Arkansas! That's NOT Napier's fault! Remember, Napier and his offense scored PLENTY of points to win against Kentucky and Arkansas... And with those two wins, we would have gone to a bowl. But our defense let us down. Amongst all the negativity we have around here coming from rival posters... Let's not forget that it would have been VERY easy to have AT LEAST two more wins this year.
Maybe that was because the secondary needed more people, because they couldn't cover with the normal amount of DBs. My biggest issue with the secondary was that even if they were right in the receiver's face, the DBs never turned and looked for the ball. Against fsu the DB was right with the guy and if he had turned and looked, he wouldn't have gotten an interference call. I've never seen DBs play like they were just there to watch the receivers catch the ball as if they were spectators.
There were too many missed assignments. Maybe the defense was too complicated? That's happened before. But at any rate the defense looked lost far to often, and that is almost always coaching.
I highly the coach that worked for Dabo Swinny... among others, and got hired by Kirby before we stole him, is the problem. Which coach said that AA's defense at Southern Miss? He knew what he was doing against an SEC school from that place. Do you think he suddenly forgot how to coach?
That was Moore who had been riddled with injuries and not much playing time. I feel like he’s probably the best corner we have, outside of that play I thought he did a great job against FSU. He’s also the only one that could have been in anyone’s face because everyone else is constantly burned it seems.
Saban, not Kirby but I get your meaning. He went there as the LBer coach though or maybe not even that, can’t fully remember. I’m on board with him though. Lot of moving parts on Defense as there is on offense too. If the DLine can’t put pressure on the QB it leaves the DBs in a bad spot and if the DBs can’t cover someone for 5 yards it makes our DLine look terrible. Who knows who to blame but both those coaches are gone.
Lol... I thought I fixed that... It was Kirby Smart that he worked for as a quality control coach. And then he was hired by Saban but only spent 2 weeks there. Yes, that was Saban that said that about AA when he played Southern Miss while AA was their DC.
