Originally Posted by
Prediction? Pain.
Last year's defense was awful every which way you slice it. Confusion, missed assignments, being out of place, poor tackling, you name it. Grantham has nowhere to go but up, and his track record says that's exactly where he's going to go. How much and how soon is the question. Overall, I think the talent's there to get it done in no longer than a season or so.
As for whether and to what extend Mullen has meddled with the defense, I'm not sure what I think. If he does actively meddle with DCs and inflexibly require them to run "his" system, we've had some pretty varied results with Mullen pulling the strings. In other words, some DCs have had success under whatever system Mullen imposes -- Diaz in 2010, Collins in 2013 and 2014 -- and others -- Torbush in 2009, Wilson in 2012, and Sirmon in 2016 -- have not. In scoring D and total D in conference play, we've been as high as 3rd in the SEC and as low as 11th. We've seen similar swings in rushing D, sacks, TFLs, 3rd Down D, and Red Zone D. Top 3 in the conference under one DC, bottom third in the conference under another, often within the span of a single calendar year. Ditto for advanced stats rankings. We've been in the Top 25 of the defensive FEI rankings multiple times under Mullen, including a Top 15 finish in 2010, yet we've also finished at 50th or worse multiple times. Those are some pretty big swings that are happening while we're changing coordinators every year or two under Mullen.
And as for style of play, some seasons the defense is aggressive and disruptive, and other seasons it's not. In 2014, for instance, in SEC play we were 3rd in sacks, 1st in 3rd down conversion D, 3rd in interceptions, and 1st in PBUs. Those are not the numbers of a "bend but don't break," passive defense. And in 2010 under Diaz, we were 5th in sacks, 4th in TFLs, and 4th in PBUs. But in 2012 under Chris Wilson, we were 11th in the conference in sacks and TFLs, and seemed to waste our two NFL-caliber corners by playing off coverage for huge swaths of the season (though we did have ok overall INT numbers that year). And if you look at advanced stats, there are similar swings. In 2014 and 2015, our "Havoc rate" ranks were top 20 and top 35 nationally, showing a penchant for a fairly disruptive style of defense. ("Havoc" rate, by the way, is "a team's total tackles for loss, passes defensed, and forced fumbles divided by total plays.") But in 2016, we were 82nd nationally in that category.