Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
UF’s Mullen: Missed tackles not easy fix as practice contact limited
GAINESVILLE – The Florida Gators have a lot to work on following the team’s sloppy 24-20 season-opening win over Miami.
The trickiest fix for coach Dan Mullen and his staff will be reducing the number of missed tackles.
Mullen watched the Gators whiff on Hurricanes’ ball carriers during some key moments of the Aug. 24 matchup. This culminated with Miami tailback DeeJay Dallas juking one would-be UF tackler and running through three more en route to a 50-yard touchdown to give his team a 20-17 lead early in the fourth quarter.
Mullen half expected the poor tackling effort by his defense. After all, the Gators’ lack of live contact during the preseason is the new normal in football in order to keep players healthy.
While injuries unfortunately are inevitable, reducing the risk is a coach’s responsibility.
“We don’t live tackle a lot in practice,” Mullen said. “You can’t. It’s a scary thing for coaches.”
Mullen said the Gators’ two scrimmages during preseason camps are especially nerve-racking for coaches.
“I’m scared to death in scrimmages,” Mullen said. “Because once you guys start hitting the ground, it’s not the guy nearly as much the guy with the ball or the guy doing the tackling. It’s third party that all of a sudden a bunch of guys are hitting the guys and
legs flying and guys getting rolled up from behind.
“That makes you nervous as a coach of protecting all these guys.”
At the same time, a rash of missed tackles are going to make for plenty of nervous moments during the regular season. Missed tackles, blown assignments and penalties during the Florida-Miami matchup were a problem for the Gators during a game that featured five lead changes and was decided during the final moments.
Mullen said the Gators work quite a bit on proper tackling technique — keeping one’s face up, not leading with the helmet, hitting with shoulder and wrapping up with the arms. “Thud” drills have replaced one-on-one showdowns like the Oklahoma drill and allow players to go full speed until contact.
The challenge is for players to go full speed to the finish and not give a cursory effort at the end.
“The intensity of practice, you go watch our practice film and there was a whole lot of, ‘Oh, I’ve got them. Yeah, that was a tackle,’” Mullen said.
But the lack of live contact does not need to make a lost art out of open-field tackling — one of the more difficult skills in football.
UF defensive coordinator Todd Grantham said the Gators coaches and players have to learn from the Miami game and practice with more attention to detail.
“We all got to do better. We’ve got to coach better and they’ve got to play better,” Grantham said. “There’s always a balance in practice of getting guys ready and prepared and keeping guys healthy. Everybody’s got that same issue, so you’ve got to look at the plays you made — we made some plays in space.
“You watch, there were some good tackles, it’s just that when you’re in space like that for 80-some plays, seven to 10 plays can get noticed and those are the ones we’ve got to get better at.
“It’s really more about leverage, eye control, don’t stop your feet, understand where your target is, continue to go through your target, run through your target, wrap and squeeze and then get the guy down. It’s not like you’ve got to thud the guy and kill it. It’s get him on the ground. You’ve got to be able to do that. We’ll continue to work on that.”
UF’s defensive effort did have plenty of positives.
The Gators held Miami to an average of just 4.7 yards per play — better than all but six games a season ago — had 10 sacks — more than Grantham can recall ever seeing by a defense he’s helped coach.
“I think at Virginia Tech, one time we may have had one close to that. And then on a Thursday, we played Seattle when I was in Dallas and I think we got pretty close to that mark, because the guys were doing a turkey trot every time,” Grantham recalled. “Yeah, I was really pleased. And that was really a combination of guys in coverage sticking with guys, so they really had nowhere to throw the ball, guys staying relentless in their rush and it was really a combination of pressures.
“I mean, that’s a pretty rare trait to have that happen.”