The Reviews are In!

Thank you to everyone who has ordered the 2024 Read & Reaction Florida Gators Preview Magazine! For those who haven’t decided to take the plunge: What are you waiting for?

In all seriousness though, we realize that you are trusting us that this is a good value for your money, so I wanted to share a sampling of the reviews we’ve received from people if you’re on the fence.

• “If you’re a fan of the Florida Gators, this magazine is a must.”
• “The Read and Reaction Magazine is an exceptional read for any Gators fan! The in-depth analysis and detailed charts provide unparalleled insight into the team’s performance and strategies.”
• “This magazine is exactly what a Gators’ fan wants: In-depth articles about our team, instead of mile wide/inch deep summary of all teams across college football like we get with other publications.”
• “You’ll find great detail, utilizing unique data sets and in-depth review of plays and players as well as predictions for the future of Gator Football.”

A sincere thank you to all who have purchased the magazine and especially to those who have encouraged us either with public reviews or privately. If you haven’t made the purchase yet, it’s a perfect item to bring with you to the lake or beach this summer.

Is Austin Armstrong too aggressive?

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It’s not a secret that I wasn’t a huge fan of the Austin Armstrong hire at defensive coordinator.

At the time, I wrote that I thought the improvement Southern Miss showed during his tenure from 2021 to 2022 was mostly a mirage. His 2022 defense actually had a lower havoc rate than his 2021 defense, even though it jumped from 90th in sacks to 4th in sacks from 2021 to 2022. You can make an argument that either 2021 was an outlier or 2022 was an outlier, but one of them was definitely outside the norm.

One of the other things that jumped out about Armstrong was his proclivity to give up explosive plays. His Southern Miss defenses ranked 80th in 2021 and 114th in 2022 in allowing 20-plus yard plays. That certainly continued in his first year at Florida, as the Gators ranked 71st in 20-plus yard plays allowed and 123rd in 30-plus yard plays allowed.

But how Florida came to achieve that stat actually tells an interesting tale, and perhaps is a silver lining that Armstrong may be able to turn things around.

Aggressiveness and Big Plays

My supposition was that Armstrong was too aggressive, left his guys out on an island, and that was the reason for all the big plays that Florida and Southern Miss allowed. It is certainly true that Armstrong blitzes a lot (23% in 2021, 33% in 2022 and 31% last year), but if we look at the entire SEC, that shouldn’t be the reason for the problem.

The chart above shows explosiveness ratings from collegefootballdata.com versus blitz rate (from Sports Info Solutions) for SEC teams in 2023. What we essentially zero correlation between these two variables, which suggests that Armstrong’s aggressiveness is not the issue at Florida. For what it’s worth though, that one outlier data point I have circled is Florida.

But this is a critical point that I want to re-emphasize. Armstrong’s aggressiveness is not the culprit when it comes to Florida’s vulnerability to explosives. So it must be something else.

Where is Florida susceptible to big plays?

We all saw the Florida secondary get burned plenty last year. In fact, the inability of Florida’s defensive backs to break up deep passes has been an area of frustration for fans for a while now. However, the statistics say that wasn’t the *main* problem with the Gators defense last year. That becomes clear when we break down explosiveness vs. blitz rate for running and passing plays.

The above chart isn’t great for the Gators. They’re still the worst team in the SEC in explosiveness through the air. But they are no longer the giant outlier that we could see on the previous chart. This suggests that there are improvements the Gators can make defending the pass, but that their pass defense explosivity was at least close to in-line with their competitors.

You can’t say the same for the run defense.

What we see here is two outliers for high blitzing teams: Vanderbilt (1.18 at 32% blitz rate) and Florida (1.28 at 31% blitz rate). This is why the Gators defense couldn’t stop anyone. They could not stop giving up explosive plays against the run.

This isn’t a new phenomenon for Armstrong defenses:

Ruh Roh! We might blame Scooby Williams or Shemar James injury or any number of factors for the Gators’ lackluster performance against the running game, but this suggests a schematic issue that is causing these sorts of results.

Reasons for Hope

There’s a reason Billy Napier went out and got Ron Roberts after his departure from Auburn. Not only is Napier comfortable with Roberts, but Roberts has a track record that suggests he could bring significant improvement (we have a 4-page feature in our preseason magazine detailing how).

But here’s one other reason for hope now that I dove into these rushing stats.

First, Armstrong’s Florida defense was abnormally bad on the ground, even for him. If only Armstrong were leading the defense, I wouldn’t expect the run defense to be fantastic, but I would expect it to regress back to what it was in 2021 or 2022.

But if we compare explosives in the run game against Roberts, he has had some really good seasons at all of his stops. That includes 2022 at Baylor, 2019 at Louisiana and 2023 at Auburn. Additionally, out of the nine seasons that these two coaches have been coordinators, Armstrong owns three of the five worst seasons when stopping explosives in the run game.

How can they do it?

Sports Info Solutions has a stat called BT-MT%, which is the percentage of attempted tackles that result in a player failing to bring down the ball carrier when they are in a position to do so. Here’s how Florida compared to Alabama and Georgia in 2023, for players with a minimum of 5 tackles.

There’s a little bit of variability on the defensive line, but Florida was substantially worse at bringing guys down at linebacker, corner and safety than either the Bulldogs or the Tide. This is fundamentally why Florida gave up so many big running plays. You’re going to have some missed tackles up-front. What you can’t have is a bunch of missed tackles on the back end, which Florida clearly had.

The good news for Florida is that they’ve had a complete changeover in personnel.

The biggest contributors to the BT+MT% last season were safety Miguel Mitchell (25%), corner Jaydon Hill (22.2%) and corner Jalen Kimber (21.9%). Those guys, along with linebacker Scooby Williams (20.9%), defensive end Princely Umanmielen (16.0%) and linebacker Mannie Nunnery (14.7%) will not be on the 2024 defense.

In their place will be guys like Asa Turner (6.9%), D.J. Douglas (20.6%), Trikweze Bridges (12.5%) and Pup Howard (0% on 97 snaps). If those guys can replicate those performances (save for Douglas), Florida should be much better at getting guys to the ground.

Takeaway

Florida’s defense has been bad for all of the 2020s. That level of futility is something we haven’t seen in Gainesville since 1979 and is a huge reason why the Gators are 25-25 over that stretch and 16-19 in the SEC.

I’m still not a huge believer in Austin Armstrong. His track record of giving up explosives is now three years long, which suggests that he isn’t a difference maker as a coordinator. That’s why it’s important that Florida added Ron Roberts, as he should at least be able to stabilize the unit.

There are good signs. As we touch on extensively in our preseason magazine, some of the underlying statistics for last year’s defense suggest it wasn’t that far from being at least decent. And given how bad the tackling was last year and some of the replacements who are coming in, Florida should be much better against the running game even if the front-four don’t take a huge step forward.

But “at least decent” isn’t the standard in Gainesville, nor should it be for a program that consistently recruits in at least the top-15 in the country. Florida had nine players who made at least five tackles last year with a BT-MT% north of 15 percent. Alabama had three. Georgia had three as well. The Gators had six players above 20 percent while Alabama had one and Georgia had zero. Say what you will about talent disparities, but tackling comes down to toughness and coaching.

That’s what 2024 should bring: A lot of answers about any increases in the Gators toughness, and the ability of its defensive coaches to be difference makers.