Toney’s out, Armstrong’s in
Evaluating Florida's new Defensive Coordinator

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After just one year, Patrick Toney is out and Austin Armstrong is in at defensive coordinator for the Gators.

The fact that Toney decided to leave a defensive coordinator position at an SEC school to become a safeties coach in the NFL is a little bit surprising. That sort of step down isn’t the normal career path considering Toney’s history, but Gainesville can be a pressure cooker when things go poorly. Perhaps he just decided a fresh start was needed.

The good news is that Florida head coach Billy Napier was ready with an immediate replacement. Part of this is likely because the move for Toney had been in the works for a little while. But part is that I’m assuming that if Napier had truly wanted Toney to stay, he could have made it worth his while financially. Remember, the Gators did just that for Todd Grantham after 2019 when he flirted with the Bengals.

Instead, Napier apparently decided a fresh start was necessary also and went with Austin Armstrong, a 29-year old Alabama assistant who spent the past two years as the defensive coordinator at Southern Mississippi. We’ll get to his track record in a moment, but the significance of such a hire should not be glossed over.

Toney was Napier’s hand-picked defensive coordinator. Now his second choice is a guy with two years of experience to lead a defensive turnaround when other programs in the conference (Alabama with Kevin Steele, Auburn with Ron Roberts) are going the tried-and-true route.

Is that the right decision? Time will tell, but the reality is that you don’t get to change out coordinators every year when you don’t get the results you need. Napier needs Armstrong to be good, and good quickly.

Patrick Toney Out

Patrick Toney came to Gainesville with much fanfare as the prized Napier pupil who was going to turn around a defense that Todd Grantham had let atrophy in 2020 and 2021.

Grantham had been fired mid-year in 2021 and had built a defense that couldn’t stop Samford. He also helped create what a Florida staffer told Saturday Down South was the “most toxic environment I’ve ever dealt with.”

The thinking was that anything Toney could do would be an upgrade. Well, that thinking was clearly, and emphatically, wrong.

Toney presided over a defense that put up the following statistics:

• 105th in yards per play allowed vs. FBS opponents
• 87th in points per game allowed vs. FBS opponents
• 129th in third down converstions allowed
• 87th in red zone TD conversion percentage
• 93rd in 20-plus yard plays allowed
• 96th in sacks
• 74th in tackles for loss

Those are just atrocious numbers that add up to what is definitively the worst Gators defense in the last 30 years (yes, even worse than Grantham’s 2020 squad that cost the Gators a playoff berth).

The only thing that Toney’s defenses seemed to do well was create turnovers. The Gators averaged 1.8 turnovers per game vs. FBS opponents, but a lot of that was built on forcing fumbles (11th in the country) and recovering fumbles (4th in the country). Both of those statistics tend to be highly variable from year-to-year.

The most concerning thing for me when looking at the 2022 stats is that not only was Florida not getting to the QB, but they were unable to make the QB uncomfortable at all. We can measure that by looking at Havoc Rate, which is the number of plays that end in a tackle for loss, turnover or pass breakup. That can be divided up into front-seven and defensive back havoc as well.

What the above table shows is Havoc Rates for the Gators defense over the past five seasons. What we see is that in 2018 and 2019, Todd Grantham’s defenses were able to create a bunch of havoc, or at least far more than what we’ve seen in 2020, 2021 or 2022. Not coincidently, the defenses with higher Havoc Rates were good in 2018 and great in 2019 but fell apart in 2020 and 2021 when the Havoc Rate dropped by 7 percent.

That continued in 2022, as the defense under Patrick Toney had a Havoc Rate two percent below where Grantham’s defenses were in 2020 and 2021. That drop was exclusively due to defensive back play, as Jason Marshall, Rashad Torrence and Tre’Vez Johnson all seemed to take a step back in 2022.

The irony shouldn’t escape us that Toney is leaving Gainesville to coach safeties in the NFL.

Austin Armstrong In

So what does the profile of Austin Armstrong tell us about his chances of being successful?

First, we should take into consideration that he had left Southern Mississippi to serve as a linebackers coach on the Alabama staff. If Nick Saban likes you enough to bring you on, that certainly says something. Additionally, Armstrong served as a defensive quality control coach for Georgia and Kirby Smart in 2019, so he knows the lay of the land for the SEC elite.

But just like Toney taking a lesser role at a higher level (DC in SEC to safeties coach in the NFL), Armstrong was doing the same to go to Alabama (DC in Sun Belt to LB coach in SEC). Perhaps the thinking is that with a successful run for Kevin Steele (he’s 64 years old), Armstrong would have been in the running to take over when that time came.

But wouldn’t he have been in the running for a big-time, Power-5 defensive coordinator position had his defenses at Southern Mississippi continued to improve? The answer to that is clearly yes considering he got the Florida job without coaching a game at Alabama, which makes me wonder why he decided to leave?

Regardless of why he left Southern Miss, what Armstrong left is a two-year sample of what he can do as a coordinator. That leaves some level of statistical evidence that should give us a decent gauge of reasonable expectations for him at Florida.

Let’s start with the good signs first.

Armstrong came to Southern Miss in 2021 along with new head coach Will Hall. The defense was really bad in 2021, but that shouldn’t have been a huge surprise because the Golden Eagles’ defense was bad in 2020 as well. The one place where improvement was immediately apparent was in forcing turnovers, as the Southern Miss defense improved from 84th in the country to 8th in Armstrong’s first year.

Interestingly, that did not coincide with a significant increase in pressure, as Southern Miss ranked 90th in sacks and 87th in tackles for loss, both steps back from their 2020 performance.

That completely changed in 2022, as the Golden Eagles got after the QB a ton, finishing 4th in the country in sacks and 3rd in tackles for loss. That caused a lot of interceptions (7th in the country) but due to some bad fumble luck, the defense only ranked 31st in takeaways per game.

But a closer look at the statistics also raises an interesting question:

If we take a look at Havoc Rate as we did for Toney, what we see is a significant increase for Armstrong from 2020 to 2021 when he took over, but not much more of an increase from 2021 to 2022.  It is great that he saw an increase from 2020, but it does concern me that the rate actually decreased in 2022 for a couple of reasons.

First, it indicates that the sack and tackle for loss numbers are a bit of a mirage either in 2021 or 2022. With almost identical rates of creating havoc, the defense put up much better raw statistical numbers in 2022. Either the increase in havoc was substantial in 2021 and the team got better at converting those opportunities into sacks and tackles for loss, or the raw sack and TFL numbers are going to be highly variable from year-to-year. I tend to lean towards the latter, which means expecting that to transfer to Florida is probably wishful thinking.

Second, the havoc numbers were actually better for Southern Miss in 2019 under co-defensive coordinators Tim Billings and Derek Nicholson before taking a nose dive under Tony Pecoraro in 2020. Given the firing of Southern Miss’ head coach after one game in 2020 and considering it was the COVID-19 season, I do think it’s fair to compare Armstrong to the Billings regime.

There are a bunch of stats that suggest that the 2019 Southern Miss defense was comparable to the 2022 defense that Armstrong was able to put out on the field. And if you look at the 2018 Southern Miss defense (ranked 11th in yards per play vs. FBS opponents), you find a unit that performed well, including giving up only 24 points to Auburn at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Armstrong was doing things differently. I just think there is quite a bit of doubt that he was a huge difference maker compared to his predecessors. Essentially, his defenses did what we would expect a Southern Miss defense to do, just in a slightly different way.

This was something that I pointed out when Dan Mullen hired Todd Grantham. Grantham had been the defensive coordinator at a bunch of different places and it didn’t seem like whether he was there or not made a substantial difference. If you’re looking to take a huge jump consistently on that side of the ball, that’s something you’d want to see.

The only stop for Grantham where that wasn’t true was at Mississippi State, where he took over for Peter Sirmon in 2017 and immediately made things better (98th to 48th in yards per play allowed) . In a strange twist of fate though, Sirmon took over for Grantham at Louisville and that defense immediately went south (7th to 70th in yards per play allowed). The question when Mullen hired Grantham to Florida was whether those numbers were because Grantham was good or Sirmon was bad.

We got our answer in 2020 and 2021.

But those two concerns aren’t even really the highest things on my list when I examine the statistical record for Armstrong. Instead, it is that his defenses ranked 80th in 2021 and then 114th in 2022 in allowing 20-plus yard plays. That 2022 squad was 121st at surrendering 20-plus yard plays through the air.

That indicates that while he was dialing up pressure on the QB, when he didn’t get home, his secondary was getting torched for big plays. That’s the reason for the similar havoc rates while putting up a lot of sacks. You’ve heard of a bend-but-don’t-break defense? The Southern Miss defense last year was the exact opposite.

All that leads to a stat at Collegefootballdata.com called explosiveness that measures the average expected points on successful plays. The higher the value is for a defense, the worse it is at surrendering explosive plays. Anything above 1.35 is typically considered poor.

Armstrong’s two defenses at Southern Miss were at 1.42 and 1.35 in 2021 and 2022. But they were particularly bad through the air, surrendering explosiveness values of 1.87 and 1.68.

That’s bad news for Florida, as the Gators have surrendered explosiveness values through the air of 1.63 (2018), 1.49 (2019), 1.60 (2020), 1.57 (2021) and 1.64 (2022). The Gators have had consistent problems in the secondary that were masked in 2018 and 2019 by Jachai Polite, Jabari Zuniga and Jonathan Greenard. The minute those guys left, the defense fell apart.

This is why I stated on this week’s Stand Up & Holler (mostly in jest) that I hated Armstrong’s hire “with the heat of 1,000 suns.” His profile – though significantly shorter – looks a lot like the profile you would have seen if you were evaluating the hire of a man named Jeffery Todd Grantham in 2012 after two seasons at Georgia.

Takeaway

Is Armstrong doomed to be Todd Grantham? Not at all.

He likely learned a ton while at Southern Miss, and if he can take those learnings, bring them to Gainesville and learn how to apply them to the Gators defense, he has a chance to succeed. The question I have is whether the learning curve is too steep for the time-frame he’s going to inherit.

I actually do believe that Armstrong is going to preside over a much-improved Florida defense this year.

That’s not because of some confidence that I have in Armstrong that I have yet to disclose in this article. Instead, it’s because history suggests it is really difficult to be as bad as Florida was on defense last year without a major regression back to the pack.

Of the 23 new Power-5 coaches hired in 2019 and 2020, 8 presided over a unit that underperformed by 50+ spots nationally in either yards per play gained or allowed compared to their predecessor. Typically, the underperformance was on the side of the ball opposite of the head coaches’ expertise (a good sign for Florida).

On average, those programs saw an improvement of 62 spots in the rankings, which would put Florida at 43rd nationally in yards per play allowed in 2023. Considering the Gators ranked 39th in yards per play allowed in the 2021 season under Grantham though, I wouldn’t consider that working a miracle. Instead, it would be reverting Florida’s defense back to where its talent profile suggests it should be.

And that’s really how we should evaluate Armstrong. If Florida puts up a top-20 defense, I’ll have to eat crow comparing him to Grantham. That would indicate that he is way better than both Grantham and Toney, and has the potential to lead the Gators to where they want to be.

But you’re also going to hear a lot of praise if the defense ends up 50th or 60th in the country. After all, that’s way better than what Toney was able to achieve last season. But unfortunately, all that suggests it that Toney was more like Peter Sirmon than we would really like to admit. That still means a net upgrade for the program, but it would not portend long-term, sustained success on that side of the ball.

What should we expect? I think we’re going to see a defense that puts way more pressure on the QB. But I think we’re also going to see a defense that has to sell-out to do so, opening up big plays on the back end. Even in the worst-case scenario, that’s still better than last year, but I’d be surprised if it ends up good enough to bring Florida into the elite of the SEC on the defensive side of the ball.

And that’s really the thing that concerns me most about this hire. I actually understand the need to take a big swing on a youthful hire. Napier isn’t currently recruiting at a high enough level to bring along coaches who aren’t major difference makers if he wants to win big. He needs someone who can squeeze every ounce of potential out of the players on the roster to show progress until D.J. Lagway takes over behind center.

But based on his time at Southern Miss, Austin Armstrong has a lot to prove to show he’s that guy.