GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Jaydon Hill reached for his stomach, made a couple of small circles with his right hand and had a nauseated look on his face.
“It was not a good feeling,” said the junior defensive back.
Well, that matches the way most Florida fans feel about last season’s historically bad defense that went from No. 9 in the country to No. 83 and ranked 100th in the nation in passing defense.
You can blame CODID and a missing spring or you can just say offenses were set up for a special year around the country.
Or you could explain it the way senior linebacker Jeremiah Moon did on Thursday.
“We had all the pieces, but we didn’t put it together,” he said. “We didn’t tackle.”
Of course, at all levels of football, that’s kind of important, that whole tackling thing. Florida’s defense a year ago was abysmal at tackling and one of the best tackles of the year resulted in a shoe throw that helped the Gators lose a game.
Thursday, as UF had its Media Day (and possibly the last in-person interviews of the year), you could see that the defensive players know that last season was not up to the Gator standard. To be honest, it wasn’t up to any program’s standard.
Florida gave up the most points per game and the most first downs in school history. Florida outscored most of its opponents during its 8-1 start, but mostly because it had no choice.
Dan Mullen has been preaching at the end of last season and throughout the off-season that it wasn’t as bad as it looked and he did so again on Thursday.
“I don’t think it was our No. 1 issue,” he said. “There were a lot of deals. It was almost a game-by-game issue. If it was one thing, it would be easy to solve the problem.
“It was a lot of things. I think we’ve addressed a lot of things where we were inconsistent last year. We’re in a better place.”
Florida landed two players on the preseason all-SEC defense – Kaiir Elam and Zachary Carter – has a leader in linebacker Ventrell Miller and added two defensive tackles from the transfer portal.
So, one would think the talent is there, especially in the front seven, to return to playing the kind of defense Florida fans had become used to.
The biggest questions may be at the two safety spots where the competition will be fierce. Elam and Hill have already been tabbed as starting corners but it was on the back end where Florida struggled last year.
“No matter who they put on the field,” Hill said, “we’re going to get the job done. We’re going to go out and prove a lot of people wrong.”
Most of those “people” are predicting that Georgia will win the East and that Florida may take a step back, in part because of the losses of offensive personnel and in part because the defensive performance of 2020 is still a fresh wound.
Mullen said he’s not worried about outside perception as the Gators get ready to start camp Friday.
“I don’t know that (the players) notice that,” he said. “I like the edge of our team, just kind of the edge in what they are and what they want to become as a team.”
And a defense.
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