While hardly giddy, Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham sounds noticeably more optimistic and assured about his work-in-progress 3-4 defense this spring than he did at any time last year.
To hear your average Bulldog fan tell it, last year's defense was a broken levee. Although it was far from dominant, it wasn't nearly as bad as some would lead you to believe, especially given where it was the year before, and factoring in an entirely new scheme and new terminology.
The Dawgs finished in the middle of the pack in ppg allowed, and 4th in total defense. Improvement is most certainly needed, but that's not a bad jumping off point.
One thing lost in the shuffle of a new staff and scheme, though, is how much better all the defensive coaches (remember, except for Garner, the rest of the staff was new as well) will be at identifying the various strengths and shortcomings of their personnel. As a coach, there is a fine line between teaching a guy to do everything he needs to do (and do it well), and getting to a point where you say, "That's just not a strength of our team, so we need to find other ways to be successful."
Grantham has begun to echo a prevalent idea last year, which was that there definitely is a learning curve in switching to a new defensive philosophy, but the players are starting to play faster and with more confidence.
When you know what you're doing and how to do it, you can really let your ability come to the forefront. Hopefully, the Dawg "D" will begin to reflect the talent that has supposedly been assembled in Athens over the past few years.
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I like Mark Richt and all of the coaching staff at Georgia. Mike Bobo may have reached ‘coordinator’ status a little early; but it was not my call and he has done fairly well (no I couldn’t do it better). One thing that sticks out about last year is the horrible start to the season after the first year of no ‘two-a-days’ in the late summer. I really think they need to re-think it and hold two-a-days this year because the first game will be against a team (Boise State) that will arrive in full fighting physical form, with the idea of embarrasing us! Go Dawgs!
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