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First off, I hope everyone is well. I know I have taken quite a bit of time off and a lot of people wondered what was going on or if I would ever get this blog started again. The short answer is that I have been spending a lot of time building up my business and hanging out with my family. We added a third this year; my son Jackson, who turns 1 next month. Things got a bit crazy at first, but all is well now. Thanks to all those who sent well wishes. No promises on my end, but I would like to start writing again, and I hope to be a bit more active in the coming months.
This first entry is basically a repost of some things that I posted this week on Gator Country. The content was received very well, so I figured that I may as well throw it up here, so that others can view it, and so that I can archive it to see how I did when the year is over. This entry may be a bit unusual in that the content evolved from discussion in the thread, so I am also going to include some follow up points that were made to the existing post. So here you have it…
I am a big believer that our defense will be just fine this year, and possibly even great. That said, I, like many, feel that in order for us to win they just need to hold their own and let the offense do their thing. If we get anything better than an average year from them, we may run over the competition.
I think that compared to the NFL where large scale player development does not seem to occur year in and out, college football sees much bigger changes in player development year over year. This is most notably caused by the fact that these guys are still growing and maturing from their adolescent bodies. Many of the players who come in as Freshman continue to fill out naturally, but also benefit from the extensive strength and conditioning programs that each school offers. I think the biggest changes can be seen after just 1 year on campus.
The purpose of this post is to put into numbers a few things. The first is how much more experienced we are than last year on defense. It is up to you to decide if you believe that experience will equate to improvement. I for one, believe that it has to, especially when you see that the players in question are not only more experienced, but are more physically ready to perform. In addition, when you take into consideration how ridiculously inexperienced we were compared to every other team last year, the case becomes even more compelling for how much we can expect to improve this year.
As a team (offense and defense) we returned only 21 Seniors and Juniors last year. No school in the SEC or in the State returned less than 28 and the average for he entire SEC was 34. Unfortunately, this is one of the few areas that we do not improve that much in this year, although our team total inches up to 24 if you do not count injured Safety, Dorian Munroe. While on the surface this appears troublesome, if you dig a little deeper into it you will see that the quality of players who are part of that group has increased exponentially. I think it is fair to say that of the players that we lost on defense from that group this off-season, only Joiner and Harvey were major contributors, while Manson, Estopinian, Jackson and McMillan were not as dominant or were injured. By comparison, we can now add the following guys to that group… Spikes, Cunningham, Doe, Stamper, Anderson, Pierre-Louis, Epps, and Antwine, Estopinian, Wilson, Holliday, and we have players like Marsh, AJ Jones, Rickerson, Bryan Thomas, and Sanders who are going on their third seasons as Gators, although they are classified as redshirt Sophomores. Last year we did not even have that going for us due to the decimation of the 2005 recruiting class. We only had Stamper and Munroe as RS Sophomores.
So by comparison last year we had 8 players who had been on campus for 3 years or longer on defense, and one of them was a converted offensive player who moved back to offense late in the year, while this year we have 16 players who have been on a college campus for 3 years or longer and from that group we can anticipate as many as 8 or 9 starters. Further compare that to last year where only 2 of those players were full time starters, and it should become clear that our situation has vastly improved in this area.
The second thing that I am going to show is a comparison of player weights compared to last year. Keep in mind that the added size also does not show how much faster or stronger these players have gotten (since I do not have that data), but most of us have seen the boards showing this improvement. The 2008 weights were taken from the new media guide, and while some of those weights have been speculated to be projections, I think overall it should be pretty obvious that our strength and conditioning staff has positioned this defense to be much more physically ready to compete this year. The team is not only bigger among its existing players, but it also seems that we brought in a lot of beef this year compared to those players who left the program. The notable exception being at Safety, although with the moves of AJ Jones, Cade Holliday, and TJ Lawrence to the position, and the addition of all everything Freshman, Will Hill, it seems as though we still have a decent amount of options. Hopefully this size and strength increase will show up on 3rd and 4th downs and late in the game, which was the teams Achilles's Heal last year.
Here is a link to the 2008 media guide roster for those who are interested in current player weights.
Without further discourse, here is the data. I think it speaks for itself. Keep in mind that what is being presented here is only what can be quantified. In other words, since I do not know how to quantify what an additional year of coaching can mean to play on the field, or what an additional year of life on a college campus and the maturity and experience it brings those things can't be shown here. I think most people will agree with me though, that those things are just as important, and will prove very valuable on the field for us this year as well.
I. Experience: This Year UF returns (prior year in parenthesis)…
a. our leading tackler…Spikes – 131 (Joiner – 3rd with 59)
b. our sack leader…Cunningham – 6.5 (Harvey – 11)
c. our leading tackler for losses…Spikes – 16 (Harvey – 13)
d. players credited for 82.5% of our tackles (30%)
e. players credited for 70.6% of our sacks (35.3%)
f. players credited for 81.8% of our INT's (9.5%)
g. players credited with 80.3% of our breakups (22%)
h. players credited with 75% of our forced fumbles (33.3%)
i. players credited with 100% of our fumble recoveries (62.5%)
j. 15 players who started a game last year (6)
k. 8 full time starters (2)
l. 9 of the top 12 tacklers including the top 3 (2 of 12 and lost it's top 2)
m. Players credited with 103 career starts (36, and 11 of those were credited to KJ from 2 years prior, while 15 went to Joiner)
n. 12 players who have recorded a sack (3 Harvey, McMillan, and Alford)
o. 8 players who have made an interception (1 Joiner)
p. a total of 38 scholarship players on defense (33)
q. 27 non-Freshman scholarship defensive players (excluding Wilson, but includes Epps) (18)
II. Player Physical Development
O.K., so that was the original post, slightly modified to reflect some information that I discovered after I originally posted, and what follows is some additional comments that arose during the discussion. One of the big objections to the relevance of this data was that our development can only be viewed relative to other teams that we compete against like Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, who are also likely to improve. One poster pointed out that as Gators we tend to dog on players like Myron Rolle and Matt Stafford and do not properly account for their potential improvements. While I recognize that this is somewhat tangential t the discussion, I still thought that it was interesting conversation and worth mentioning here. Here is my response.
I don't disagree that other teams will improve as well. That said, I think we have the capability of improving the most due to talent, returning starters, experience, and physical development of our previous years starters. Most of the guys we are talking about were Freshman and Sophomores and they were not physically developed.
As far as Rolle goes, I would argue that he came into college older than most Freshman. He was almost 20. As such, he was always playing in HS as an older kid and was more physically developed and I think quite a bit overrated. His speed numbers from HS were just not true at all. He runs around a 4.7, and as a hybrid Safety/LB who is on the smallish side for LB, that just is not that fast. Yes, he can improve, but I just don't think his upside is comparable to many of the guys that we are grooming.
My argument for Stafford is very different. He definitely has been overrated in terms of his play on the field to date. His numbers are just not that spectacular. Georgia wins by running the ball, and if anything, Stafford has driven some Georgia fans crazy with his decision making and low completion percentage. I have seen it written that a QB's completion percentage is very similar to a baseball players on base percentage. The theory says that you are what you are, and you can't expect great changes year over year.
FWIW, Stafford was a 50% completion percentage QB as a Junior and elevated his game to 64% as a Senior in HS. So far as a college player he has recorded a 53.7 and a 55.7 percentage. I think he will improve, but I am also not expecting him all of a sudden to put up Tebow numbers as a passer. I think he is a gunslinger with an arm and some moxie. He has yet to learn how to be a polished QB. He was the 56th ranked passer last year and his numbers were very similar to one SEC QB, who was generally considered awful, and another who was considered adequate (although he won the NC). See for yourself…
Since Georgia is on everyone's mind these days, I spent a lot of time dissecting the differences between their very young defense and our very young defenses of last year. One poster mentioned that if we were to evaluate Georgia's roster like I did for UF's we would see very similar improvements. Unfortunately, I just don't have the new data for Georgia to do that, and their athletic department does not publish the same kinds of stats, but here is what came of that. I think it makes a very compelling argument for why we improve more than they do on defense.
I took a quick look at Georgia's Defense, and they may be the one team who seriously rivals our ability to improve on Defense, although with South Carolina's injuries last year, maybe they rebound as well. Georgia was also very young last year, and do return a lot of guys with upside.
In terms of returning players this year, their percentages for sacks and tackles are almost identical to ours. They return 71% of sacks and 80% of tackles. Compare that to our 70.6% and 82.5% respectively. (I do not have data for the previous year.) Keep in mind that these numbers are similar despite them having more starters returning. In addition, their interception percentage is lower than ours by about 20%. We have 81.8% of our INT's returning compared to their 60%. That is a bit misleading though, because in both cases that equates to 9 INT's. They just intercepted the ball more last year.
Last year they were also a very young team, and while not quite as young as we were, they were close. I think the big difference can probably be found in the amount of Freshman and RSFR who started or contributed for us compared to them. Most of their young first time starters were all on the team at least for 1 year. They did not start any true Freshman (with the exception of Curran for 5 games) compared to the 3 or 4 that we started at times on a regular basis.
In fact, True Freshman were responsible for 25.5% of our tackles last year compared to Georgia at 6.3%. If you add in Redshirt Freshman than between RFR and FR they combined for 37.2% of UF's tackles versus 23.1% at UGA. The point is that although previous starts may have been similar for both schools last year, UGA was pretty much a year ahead of us in terms of on campus and in weight room experience and I think that probably represents the difference between the performance of both squads (3.2 pts., 23.6 yds per game, and 13 spots in scoring and yardage ranking). If anything, I think UGA's success is probably a predictor for how much better we can be this year, although I think we may even surpass that due to the starting and field experience compared to UGA last year, and the slightly better recruiting classes that we had than them.
As you can see from the above chart, their talent was mostly older, although similarly inexperienced (more physically ready). The purpose here is not to say that Georgia won't have a good defense. I think it is obvious that they will. I think the purpose is only to note which defense has the ability to improve more. The Law of Diminishing Returns certainly favors this argument as they were clearly a better defense than us last year, so they have much less to go in order to be considered great.
One other similarity between Georgia's defense and our defense this year is that the 2 major players they needed to replace on D are almost identical to ours. They lost their top DE and Safety. Same deal here. They definitely look to improve, and they are talented, and experienced.
Written by GC Blogs Blip Page on July 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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Written by GatorCountry.com on July 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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