For FSU secondary, two coaches should be better than one

Having hired seven of his assistant coaches, new Florida State football coach Willie Taggart has three more hires to make -- with the likely positions being defensive ends, quarterbacks and wide receivers.

While it’s not yet known who will fill those positions, it has become clear that there will be a couple of substantial differences in the makeup of the coaching staff’s assignments ... at least compared to how the positions were divided under former head coach Jimbo Fisher.

One obvious change, which is not necessarily unique to FSU, is the addition of a special-teams coach; that position likely will become the norm across college football now that the NCAA is allowing schools to hire a 10th assistant coach. The other is an expected second defensive backs coach, which could have a major impact on the back-end play of Florida State’s defense.

Under Fisher, FSU had four assistant coaches on defense -- a defensive tackles coach, a defensive ends/outside linebackers coach, an inside linebackers coach and a defensive coordinator/defensive backs coach.

While it's not unusual for college teams to have only one full-time defensive backs coach, a case could be made that the Seminoles would have been better served to give more secondary help to former defensive coordinator Charles Kelly. With FSU playing nickel and dime packages so often, Kelly’s players frequently filled five or six of the spots on defense, while the other five or six players were coming from the other three coaches’ position groups.

That was one of the big takeaways former FSU defensive back Bryant McFadden had when he watched several Seminole practices over the last year.

“I felt like Coach Kelly had a lot on his plate,” said McFadden, who played seven years in the NFL before embarking upon a career as a college football analyst. “He was handling the entire secondary, and then when you add in preparing the game plan, that’s a lot to ask.”

McFadden doesn’t believe that was the primary problem with FSU’s defensive play in recent years, but he does believe it was a contributing factor.

From a sheer numbers standpoint, Kelly had 14 scholarship defensive backs on the roster this past season, while inside linebackers coach Bill Miller had just seven players, DEs/OLBs coach Brad Lawing had nine, and DTs coach Odell Haggins had 11.

Former FSU defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews, who was on Bobby Bowden’s staff from 1984-2009, said he often was concerned about being stretched too thin when coordinating the defense and also coaching all of the defensive backs -- and that was when the Seminoles played much more of their base 4-3 defense.

To make sure each player was getting proper instruction, Andrews said he would often split the defensive backs between himself and a graduate assistant coach. When former Seminole safety Bill Ragans was the defensive G.A. in the mid-1990s, for example, Andrews would work with the cornerbacks while Ragans would handle the safeties.

By the early 2000s, Andrews made the decision to always work with the safeties, while the G.A. would coach the cornerbacks.