Billy Napier: Staff changes, added defensive depth producing positive results for Florida

If Florida‘s going to make year over year improvement against a tremendously difficult schedule it’s going to take a significant amount of growth on defense.

Simply put, if the Gators had to rely on their defense a year ago they were in trouble.

However, coach Billy Napier sees some positives in last year’s struggles. First and foremost, the team has developed some additional depth by virtue of having to search for answers last fall.

“Well we’ve got experience. I think for the first time there if you look at that group as a whole, lot of players playing last year, first time that they’ve played,” Napier said. “I think they went into this offseason understanding what’s required in this league to play.

“You added a few pieces to the puzzle, a couple young freshmen that are going to be impactful and then some portal players, in particular in the back end. So overall I think the experience piece is important. We also made a couple changes on the staff and I think that’s gone well so far.”

Florida replaced three coaches on the defensive side of the ball. Gone are defensive line coach Sean Spencer, linebackers coach Jay Bateman and secondary coach Corey Raymond.

Replacing them are defensive line coach Gerald Chatman, linebackers coach Ron Roberts, who will co-coordinate the defense with Austin Armstrong, and secondary coach Will Harris.

Napier already sees positives with both the new staff construction and with the additional depth Florida’s defense has added.

“I think in particular for us with where we’re at as a program, we are still building a roster that can be a contender, so I think we had some glaring issues from a depth perspective on our team last year,” Napier said. “And we’ve been able to add not only talent and traits, but I think this year in the portal we took the approach, ‘What is the extra dimension that these players add to the team?’ The leadership, the character component, can they get along? Every player that we got in, we got them around our team and we got feedback from our players, ‘Hey does this guy fit? Will he help grow the culture that we want here?’ I think it’s one of the areas we did a really good job in this cycle.”

It’s hard to take much away from a spring game, but Napier seemed encouraged by what he saw out of Florida on Saturday.

“It’s good to see some of these young players, who maybe had a little bit of experience last year show up and play with some confidence,” the third-year coach said. “I think overall pretty clean so far, and we want to see more of that.”