Florida defensive coordinator Brad White covered his side of the roster in depth on Tuesday, the day that the Gators reported to fall camp. He focused on player growth, both physically and mentally, the opportunity to coach at Florida, and broke down the defense's overall approach heading into the season.
White highlighted certain players, such as edge defender Jayden Woods, safety Bryce Thornton and defensive lineman Brendan Bett, but he emphasized a need for depth, noting that injuries can and will occur. He labeled consistency as a major focus, discounting high effort made on plays before low-effort ones. It has to be every down if Florida is going to succeed, and the staff has set the expectations high.
Here's everything White said.
How much have you enjoyed your journey with Jon Sumrall over the last decade and now being on the same staff?
Yeah, it’s
awesome. I mean, that’s what life’s about, right? It’s about relationships. It’s about journeys, working together, then watching him go be successful these last four years, which you knew was going to happen. It was just a matter of time. We used to talk, and I was like, 'Man, you’re going to be really, really good, so don’t forget about me.'
We’d joke back and forth. He’s like, "Oh no, don’t forget about me." But the reality is, when you’re in those staff rooms, and you’re grinding together, you get really close. You get really close as families. So, to come full circle and be here and be able to watch him as a head coach on a daily basis, it’s everything I thought it would be, and more.
He’s so good with people. He’s so good with the team. His ability to build culture and build accountability within the building at every level is rare and unique. I come in every day and I learn from him. So, excited to be here and ready to get this season going.
How has Jon Sumrall empowered you to do your job and run the defense?
He’s super supportive of what we’ve done from an install standpoint. Being a defensive guy is awesome for me because, as we’re installing or we’re going through things, the questions that you get are thoughtful. It makes us — you’ve got to make sure all your rules for everything you’re installing make sense.
But he lets the staff on defense — he lets myself coordinate. He lets the position coaches be the position coaches. It allows you to take ownership. And I think when you feel empowered at any level of your job, I think you get more invested.
We do the same thing with our players. This isn’t a, "Hey, just line up here, do this exact thing." I want to empower our players to have some freedom within the defense. Yes, are there some basic structures, alignments, assignments? Yes. But then you’ve got to go be a football player. You’ve got to go do what made you special, why you got to the University of Florida.
It’s the same thing I think Coach does with us as coaches, both sides of the ball. It’s, "Hey, what got you here?" Trust your gut. Trust your instincts. But again, there’s the accountability piece at every level.
How would you assess the depth in the JACK room, and how many defensive linemen have positional flexibility?
Yeah, I feel good about that room. Everybody knows about Jayden (Woods), but with Kofi (Asare) and K.J. (Ford), those are two guys that are capable of going in and playing winning football. Just like everybody on the defense, they need to continue to take steps through fall camp to get really comfortable in what we’re trying to get done.
But yeah, I think we’ve got depth there. And I think we’ve got pieces to work with in a lot of different front structures. I think the key, especially in this league, is you’ve got to have contingency plans. You have to be able to adapt as the season goes. Knock on wood, we can stay as healthy as possible. But injuries do happen, and they occur, and so you’ve got to be able to have plans that allow us to be successful even if those things occur.
What does Jayden Woods give you at the JACK position?
He’s a special human being, and he’s a special player. He works so hard at it that he gives you the ability to be at that Jack position, but he can move around in some different spots on the field. It makes it harder to just target that one spot.
That takes work. I think people underestimate how much effort you have to put in from a mental standpoint to be able to play multiple positions, be able to play at different spots around the field.
He relishes that challenge. I think he really likes that he has to be sort of malleable in terms of his thought process. It’s not just one position, one thing. It’s like, "Hey, listen, I’ve got to be able to be around some different spots on the field."
What are your thoughts on being described as a brilliant defensive mind who could be a Fortune 500 CEO?
Well, I appreciate that.
I’ve been blessed to be around a lot of really good coaches and a lot of different schemes and thought processes. It’s about blending all of them, from Indy to my time at Wake Forest to time at Kentucky. You just try to take the best of all worlds and figure out what fits best in those moments.
He’s (Sumrall) the one that will undersell himself. Quite frankly, the University of Florida is like a Fortune 500 company, so he’s already a CEO.
How important will consistency be for the defense?
That’s where those guys have to really realize that you can’t have two good plays and a bad play. Two good plays, everybody’s clapping, everybody’s doing the hand signs, they’re doing straps and incomplete and all that, right? Then you have one bad play, and it’s over your head and the band’s playing, right? You realize, okay, nobody remembered those other two plays.
Defensive line is a little bit different. They’re in it. A guy six inches away wants to rip your face off on every single play. But I make two TFLs, everybody’s raving. Nobody really knows if I popped a gap on my third. Somebody behind me will clean it up. They have to be consistent and locked in on every single down.
The most successful defenses are the ones that give up the least explosive plays, and we’ve got to lead the league in that.
How important is stopping the run and making an offense one-dimensional in your defensive philosophy?
That’s an interesting question and a philosophical question, really, that I’ve had throughout my career. I was raised in a "you stop the run." When I was with the Colts, it was stop the run, stop the run. If you can’t stop the run, you can’t stop anything.
Then it has evolved where you realize, "Hey, listen, if you give up 450 yards passing and only 25 yards rushing, you probably lost the game." There’s that delicate balance because I think if a team can run the football on you, you feel like they’re physically dominating you, which you never want that feel. So you can’t have that. But you can’t say, 'Hey, I just sold out to stop the run,' and you get exposed in all of these deep, explosive plays.
I think the better way to view it, and the way I view it holistically, is, "Hey, listen, limit explosive plays while dominating the line of scrimmage." It doesn’t necessarily come down to a certain number of yards you gave up on the ground. It’s more, "Hey, what are the yards per rush that day?' How did you do if you went in and you said, 'We’re going to play light box, and I want it to be 3.9 yards per rush or less," and it was 3.1 or 3.2? You’re like, "I don’t care if it was 140 yards rushing. If it was only 3.2 yards per rush, we did exactly what we wanted to do."
I think, just over time, my philosophy on that has changed a little bit. But yes, I do agree in the fact that you can’t just let people run right through you. But what we can’t do is we can’t load the box to stop the run because there are too many playmakers in this league and across the country that, if you leave the secondary in one-on-one situations all day, it’s just bound for you to get burned.
How has Ben Hanks progressed through the spring and summer, and what can he provide at cornerback?
You’ve seen a guy growing in confidence. That’s huge because at that position out on the edge, you have to play with — there’s a swagger and an ego to be a really good corner. It’s borderline conceit. I want corners that will toe that line. You don’t want them to go over it because eventually that’ll catch up to them.
But you see he’s got elite-level ball skills. He’s got a trait that allows him to track the ball in the air. He’s got soft hands when that ball is there at the catch point. But what he’s going to have to do, again, it’s going to be about consistency of play, consistency down in and down out. How is he going to react when things go wrong? Because you play that position long enough, bad things are going to happen.
Can he put it behind him, play the next play and keep playing at a high level? Expecting him to take a major step from where he was last year.
What does Bryce Thornton provide at STAR and safety, and what does the secondary look like depending on where he lines up?
I think we have a couple of guys that have some position flexibility back there. You talk Bryce, a guy that’s just got so many reps under his belt in this league, which is huge. It’s hard to imitate experience. Just being able to understand what it’s like being in all these stadiums, being in those situations, being up in the third quarter, being down in the fourth quarter and everything in between. You can’t have enough of it on the field.
Having him as a really calming force — he’s always sort of got the smile on his face, so it’s really easy. You don’t ever feel like he’s stressed, which I think is a real comfort to our guys. But we have guys like DJ Coleman who have flexibility back there, with some STAR flexibility as well as safety.
We’ve got different guys that can play across both to the field and to the boundary at safety. We’ve been trying to put guys in different spots, both through spring and through summer, so we do have some of those contingency plans when things happen. Knock on wood, very rarely, but they will.
Which players have made the biggest leaps as vocal leaders over the last seven months?
Probably the ones that you would sort of think about. They were the ones that were vocal when I first got here, and they’re still probably the most vocal. Brendan Bett up front is that guy. I think that D-line is going to really lean on.
Somebody that I’ve heard more of in the summer, a guy like Kam James, I’ve been proud of. Having the offseason surgery, it’s hard to be that vocal leader when you’re not actually out there playing or participating. But now that he’s been cleared, he’s ready to go. You hear him and you feel him more.
The Myles Grahams, you hear. That’s really important. A guy — we talked about Bryce — but even DJ Coleman, now that he’s got his feet under him, he understands, "Okay, where do I fit within the team, and what are the expectations? What are the demands?" You start to feel him a little bit more from a vocal standpoint.
Again, we’re going to need it at every level, and we’re going to need guys to hold each other accountable. We’re going to need to have guys that have thick skin so that when they’re getting held accountable, they don’t — we talk about the term all the time — we can’t be frontrunners. We can’t be super high and excited and do everything right when things are going well, and as soon as we hit a little pocket of adversity, things go sideways and everybody becomes all about them.
That’ll be a piece that we need to grow and continue to develop through fall camp. I’ve seen growth. We’re not there yet. We’ll try to get them in as many situations as possible that create that adverse moment in practice and let them continue to respond to it.
If it’s not the right response, we can teach. Then we put them in a situation again, as adverse as possible, and see if they can rebound and then grow and grow and grow, because there’s still growth that needs to be done in that area.
What allowed your Kentucky defenses to have success against Florida up front, and how do you recreate that in Gainesville?
We got lucky. Every game, every situation is different. There were games that we played well physically and games that we didn’t.
I think the games that we played the best — and you talk about it, and we talk about stopping the run — when your defensive line can be physical, they can be strong, they can dominate the point of attack, you don’t have to commit as many to whether it’s pressuring or loading the box.
Then you can protect. You can give different looks to a quarterback. I think that’s key. So much of the talk has been about the weight gains, the strength gains that we’ve had, and Rusty (Whitt) and his crew down there have done unbelievable things.
That gives us a chance in more ballgames than not to own that part of the game. When we own that part of the game, we’ve got a chance to play really good defense.
How much are you looking forward to the opportunity to do more with more at Florida?
I’m really excited about the opportunity to. It’s a whole thing. I don’t know if I can put it into words. The players, the coaches, the fan base, the energy, the passion, all of it. My wife is so excited to experience it because she’s never been in the Swamp. I can’t tell you how excited I am to experience the Swamp from the home sideline because even in scrimmages, the defense is on the other side.
I’m like, "I can’t wait to get the angle looking the other way," because it’s just one of those places. It’s just different. Knowing the kind of players that we have in that locker room, from the day we stepped in, how committed they were to saying, "Okay, we want to get this place back to what it’s meant to be."
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what we were going to step into. Again, I was on that field there, whatever it was, early November last year, and dissension. It’s like, "Okay, how are they going to react to a new staff? How are they going to react to this?"
They’ve been all in, bought in. Do we have work to do? Yeah, we do. But you’re encouraged as a coach to know that every coach on that defensive staff, every player in that unit room, is committed to trying to be and live up to Coach’s standard. That’s to be the most feared defense in college football.
Do we have a huge task in front of us to get to that? Heck yeah. There are a lot of really good defenses in this country. Heck yeah. But we want that challenge, and we embrace that challenge every single day. That’s why today, walking in, there’s always been an energy in this building, but I was joking with Coach Harris. We were like, "You just feel like there’s something different when you walk in, and it’s report date and it’s real."
If we could start today, I would.
Do you care about outside expectations or use them to motivate the team?
No, because as soon as you start weaving into that lane, then you lose track of what you’re actually trying to do. The bulletin-board material, this, that — those are fleeting. You can use it to run out of the locker room, right? You might get it in the first series, but as soon as you catch the first pop to the face or the first — all of that goes away, and now you’re just playing ball.
Whatever you need to do to keep them focused during the week, okay, maybe that helps focus. But the reality is, it’s 60 minutes on a Saturday or Friday after Thanksgiving, and that’s all that matters. Forget the noise. Forget who’s ranked what. Forget what the records are. That person across from you doesn’t respect you, and you shouldn’t respect that person across from you.
The goal is to take everything that they have and they want. That’s it. If we can get to the point that teams don’t want to line up against you, or at least they have doubt about it, now we’ve accomplished what we want to do on defense.
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This article originally appeared on Gators Wire: Florida DC Brad White previews defense ahead of fall camp
