24 For 2024 - #21 Will Muschamp

“Who would you rank as the coaches most important to UGA’s success?” 

A DawgsCentral user posting under the name PiousMonken posed that question to me in the spring of 2023, and I quickly realized that a good answer would require quite a bit of consideration. 

When thinking about the question, I kept coming back to an old football cliche, "It's not the X's and the O's, but the Jimmys and the Joes that make the difference." I found myself considering the players who suit up on Saturdays. Good gameplans and great play calls are key to the success of any college football program, but they are usually only as good as the personnel executing them. With that in mind, I decided to broaden the scope of the rankings beyond members of the coaching staff. 

It sparked a series of longform articles called 23 For 2023. The premise was simple- Profile the 23 people who were most important to Georgia’s success on the gridiron in 2023. To create such a list, one must make value judgments on what on and off-field assets are most important to a modern college football program. 

It focused on players and coaches within the UGA program. Collectively, the series served as a giant preview for the season ahead. It became a favorite of subscribers, and it forced me to ask questions that I hadn’t before. 

This year, I am bringing the list back once again. Naturally, it will be called 24 for 2024. 

With his former mentor now manning a microphone on ESPN, Kirby Smart is college football’s most accomplished coach. In 2024, Smart will have to navigate significant staff turnover and seismic changes within the sport itself. Georgia came up short of a third straight national championship in 2023, but winning it all this season would give the Bulldogs three titles in four years. That achievement would cement the program as a modern dynasty. 

Whether or not Georgia can reach that lofty pedestal, and how they go about trying to do it, will be largely influenced by the roles these 24 individuals play. 

Today we continue the rankings with #21. The first few entries in this series will not be paywalled, but as we get further down the list it will become a subscriber’s only feature. Let’s get after it…

#21 - Will Muschamp

A countless number of articles have been written on Georgia’s defensive brain trust as the Bulldogs have risen to the top of the sport. Many of them have focused on Kirby Smart’s scheme. Other pieces have discussed Smart’s refusal to concede that a defense has to give up handfuls of points in college football’s modern era. 

Many of those articles have centered around UGA co-DC Glenn Schumann, who has become one of the coaching industry’s brightest young stars. The praise for Schumann is certainly warranted, but it’s also worthwhile to remember that Will Muschamp deserves loads of credit for helping guide and design the defenses that helped UGA win back-to-back national titles and navigate three consecutive regular seasons without a loss…

The national attention given to the UGA defense over the last two years has been rightfully earned.

The 2021 unit might be the best college defense we’ve seen since modern Spread, RPO and Zone-Read concepts found their way into almost every program’s offensive playbook. UGA suffocated some of the best offenses in college football back in 2021, and capped off a national championship season by holding Alabama to 18 points in Indianapolis.

Muschamp joined UGA as a defensive analyst in the offseason prior to the 2021 season. When Scott Cochran stepped away from the program, Muschamp became UGA’s Special Teams Coordinator. As a former head coach, Muschamp was uniquely qualified to run Special Teams. That role works with every position group on the roster, and it is imperative that they understand how the skill sets of different players will translate to Special Teams.

After that season, Muschamp took over the Co-DC position that was left open by Dan Lanning’s departure. He also became UGA’s safeties coach when DB coach Jahmile Addae left for Miami.

The 2022 Georgia defense came into the season with question marks across the board after 8 starters departed for the NFL. It wasn’t just the talent of those players that was gone. What was maybe more concerning was the leadership vacuum that could be created by losing so many veteran defenders. Guys like Nakobe Dean and Lewis Cine had known UGA’s scheme so well that they functioned like coaches on the field.

Many wondered how the Bulldogs would replace all that experience and talent. The answer? Just fine. Georgia’s 2022 unit was the best scoring defense in the FBS during the regular season, allowing just 12.4 points per game. 

The 2023 Georgia defense is looked at as a unit that took a step back in the eyes of many. In reality, the Bulldogs had better numbers against the pass than they did in 2021 or 2022. The 179.1 pass yards that UGA allowed per a game was 20 less than they allowed in 2021, and 48.5 YDS less than they gave up in 2022. Muschamp’s safeties were a huge part of that success. Malaki Starks and Javon Bullard were the nation’s best pair of safeties, and Bullard was picked 58th overall in the NFL Draft. UGA also considers its STAR position as part of the safety group. Tykee Smith’s ability as a slot defender was one of the strengths of Georgia’s defense. He was picked 89th overall after being the MVP of the Senior Bowl.

The flip side of the coin was UGA’s run defense. The Bulldogs gave up 112.2 YPG, which was the most since UGA allowed 137.3 YPG on the ground in 2018. While that was a regression, UGA’s biggest problem was its red zone defense. Georgia gave up a TD or FG on 91.18% of opponent’s trips inside the 20. That was a big step back from the two years before.

Even with those issues, UGA still fielded one of the nation’s best defenses. UGA allowed just 16.3 points per game, which was 7th best in the FBS. They did it despite injuries to key players and the lack of a dominant defensive lineman. In the end, the coordinator duo of Muschamp and Schumann went 28-1 over the 2022 and 2023 seasons. It’s hard to poke many holes in that record.

Back-to-back seasons like that is the type of thing that turns young coordinators into head coaches. That is why there was a certain irony to the fact that Will Muschamp and Glenn Schumann were Georgia’s Co-DC’s during that run. Schumann is still on the front end of a career that seems to be heading towards a head coaching job at a major program. Muschamp has already climbed that mountain, but his trip to the top and back gave him an eye for the big picture that has brought tremendous value to his alma mater…

Thin Margins & Inaccurate Narratives

20 years ago, Muschamp was a 32 year-old national championship winning coordinator at LSU. His boss was a man named Nick Saban, a guy who many considered the best defensive coach in college football at the time.

Muschamp followed Saban to the NFL and spent a year as the assistant head coach of the Dolphins before coming back to college football as the Auburn DC in 2006. There he coordinated two straight defenses that ranked in the top ten nationally in scoring defense.

In January of 2008, Muschamp became the highest paid assistant in the Big 12 when he was hired at Texas. Just 10 months later, the Longhorns announced that Texas would be Mack Brown’s successor as head coach whenever he retired. Prior to that announcement, Muschamp had been connected to job openings at Tennessee, Auburn and Clemson. He had planned to interview with the Tigers during an upcoming bye week, but Texas didn’t want to see him leave town. Muschamp was one of the coaching industry’s fastest risers, and Texas doubled his salary and named him the head coach in waiting to keep him in Austin.

If you look back on the articles that were published about Muschamp in the 2000’s you will read effusive praise for the man who had built dominant units at LSU, Auburn and Texas over the prior years. You will see him labeled as a “defensive guru” quite often.

Muschamp became a head coach for the first time at Florida (2011-2014) and then for a second time at South Carolina (2016-2020). Neither tenure ended with the type of sustained success that many thought they would. He did lead a Gators team that went 11-2 in 2012. That is the best record that a UF team has had since Tim Tebow was there. He also went 9-4 in 2017 at South Carolina. Historically speaking, it is really damn hard to go 9-4 in Columbia.

The media found new young coaches to laud during the decade between Muschamp being hired at Florida and the end of his tenure at South Carolina. During that time, Muschamp became a punching bag for some. There is a box that defensive coaches sometimes get put in. While offensive coaches get portrayed as savvy tacticians, defensive coaches are often made out to be somehow less sophisticated. Perhaps his fiery persona on the sidelines contributed to it, but somewhere along the way many began to paint Muschamp as a clumsy man who lacked intelligence.

Talk to anyone who has worked with or for Will Muschamp and they will tell you that portrayal of Muschamp is way off-base. When he was fired at South Carolina there were people in the football offices who cried as if they had lost a family member. Secretaries and equipment staff spoke about the kind and thoughtful man who they would miss seeing at work everyday. In reality, Muschamp the person was the farthest thing from the labels that some people put on him.

The coaching profession isn’t as simple as many make it out to be. Margins are thin. A play or two costs a team a game. That loss demoralizes the team and causes a season to spiral away. A penalty at one crucial juncture or a missed block at another can sometimes be the thing that a whole season turns on.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t things Muschamp could have done differently or better. It is an acknowledgement of the fact that a career is filled with a great deal of minutiae, and the difference between 4-8 and 8-4 at a place like South Carolina isn’t nearly as big as it seems. A coach’s tenure almost always ends poorly. Suddenly, that tenure must be eulogized in 280 characters on Twitter and 600 words on a dozen different websites. Somewhere in that process things get distilled to a type of black-and-white thinking where coaches become either smart/successful or dumb/unsuccessful.

Despite all that has been said or written about him, Will Muschamp still has a brilliant football mind. It is the same one that he had when he was the 37 year-old defensive coordinator of the Texas Longhorns. It is the same mind that had him labeled a “defensive guru” by media members who sometimes serves as kingmakers.

“Alike Thinkers”

Flashback to where Georgia was when Smart hired Muschamp after the 2020 season. The program was seen as one that couldn’t quite get over the hump. The media painted Kirby Smart as a guy who could recruit talent but not win with it. Many felt his commitment to defense was holding his offenses back.

To make matters worse, UGA had just suffered a bad loss to Dan Mullen’s best Florida team in Jacksonville. UGA recruited blue-chip players all over its defense, b had been carved up by Mullen’s offense. There was a large segment of the media who believed Smart wasn’t the best coach in his own division.

Smart had taken UGA to within a play of the national title in 2017. He had also been minutes from beating Alabama in the 2018 SEC Championship, but his defense faltered down the stretch when Jalen Hurts was inserted for an injured Tua Tagovailoa. Smart called a fake punt that ended in disaster, and moments later Alabama took the lead. Smart’s 2019 team possessed the nation’s best defense and an anemic offense. That campaign was sunk by a loss at home to Muschamp’s South Carolina team when the Bulldogs were 21.5-point favorites.

On the heels of that, Smart hired Muschamp as a defensive analyst in January of 2021. Remember what I said earlier? The margins are thin in this sport. Will Muschamp arrived in Athens armed with the experience of coaching against Smart’s football teams and the rest of the SEC for nearly a decade.

The two first met as teammates at Georgia. Muschamp, an upperclassmen and a starter, encouraged the freshman from Valdosta to keep working and believe that he could see the field at UGA. Smart then coached the secondary at Valdosta State when Muschamp was the defensive coordinator in 2000. The two had the same job titles again at LSU in 2004. That past experience has given Smart and Muschamp a tight bond. They shared information for years while both were at different coaching stops, and Muschamp described the two as “alike thinkers where football is concerned,” back in 2016 during Smart’s first SEC Media Days as the UGA head coach.

Sparking UGA’s Defensive Evolution

When Muschamp came aboard he immediately had Smart’s trust. Analysts are often charged with self-scouting the team they work for. Muschamp told Smart that Georgia needed to simplify its scheme. Will looked across the roster and saw blue-chip talent everywhere. He recognized that Smart’s machine had recruited superior talent across the board, but felt like those athletes weren’t always being put into positions where they could use their physical gifts without hesitation. That moment represented a philosophical shift in how Kirby Smart’s program played defense.

Prior to that, Georgia’s defense was heavy on pre-snap checks, and matchups could be exploited depending on where a receiver, tight-end or running back might line up. Those checks confused UGA’s defenders at times, and it could leave players scrambling to get into position as the offense snapped the ball. The Bulldogs were also caught between wanting to bring extra pass rushers at times, but struggling to deal with the loss of a back end defender. Exploiting those pre-snap issues and running routes into the spaces UGA blitzers rushed from helped Florida put up 38 first-half points during their 2020 win in Jacksonville.

Georgia implemented the concept of “creepers” into its defense. Those creepers are usually second level defenders who would wait until the snap to rush towards the line of scrimmage instead of coming up to the line before the play. By bringing creepers from their regular pre-snap positions, it let UGA bring extra rushers without giving away the blitzer pre-snap. It also allowed players to react to run vs pass plays in real time. The pre-snap blitz looks where UGA brought five, six or even seven players up to the line of scrimmage didn’t totally disappear, but the philosophy allowed UGA to keep two safeties over the top at the same time. This created a system where an opponent’s QB could be staring at two safety shell at the same time UGA was showing an all-out blitz to the offensive line. That’s a lot to process, and the post-snap rotations allowed UGA to run virtually anything.  

Modern offense is all about putting the ball into space. Georgia evolved its defense by taking away the offense’s ability to dictate where space was pre-snap. Then they let superior athletes in the back end play the man across from them. Those scheme changes were coupled with a greater emphasis on getting opponents into obvious passing situations on third downs. Georgia simplified and shrunk its call sheet on early downs, stripping things down and letting players react with less hesitation.

Since that moment, UGA is 43-2 and has won two national titles. It might not have happened without Muschamp coming into the fold. Smart and the entire defensive staff worked together to perfect those solutions, but many believe Muschamp’s voice was the first to start talking about the problem.

The impact of those changes were immediate. In the 2021 Florida game, UGA shellacked the Gators and ended Dan Mullen’s tenure in Gainesville. It was a full circle moment that showed just how much had changed in one season.

The legacy of the 2021 Florida game might have been Smart’s comments after the game, where he chose to be mum about any schematic changes. "There’s no coach out there that you can out-coach recruiting. No coaching is going to out-coach players. Anybody will tell you our defense is good because we have good players."

Georgia always had good players, but the brain trust of Smart, Schumann and Muschamp found new ways to maximize their talent.  

Fiery as Ever

Many thought 2023 could be Schumann’s last as a UGA assistant. Instead it was Muschamp who chose to make a change. Multiple sources have said that Muschamp approached Smart after the regular season and told him he was considering retiring from coaching. Kirby encouraged him to take time to think about it, and offered the idea of an analyst role where Will could continue being part of the program while stepping away from the day-to-day grind.

While figuring out his future, Muschamp helped Smart complete a flip of 5-star safety KJ Bolden. At 52 years old, Muschamp is still relatively young, but coaches age in dog years. He has developed the type of big picture wisdom that only comes with decades of experience in college football’s toughest conference. That wisdom is also the product of a lot of long hours and plenty of scar tissue. His years as a head coach made him plenty of money, and he could retire comfortable at anytime. For now, he has chosen to stay with UGA as a defensive analyst.

Georgia hiring Travaris Robinson to replace Muschamp as Co-DC/Safeties Coach speaks to Smart’s respect for Will. Robinson’s first coaching gig came as a graduate assistant under Muschamp at Auburn from 2006-2007. Robinson then coached DB’s at Florida for Muschamp’s entire tenure in Gainesville before serving as his defensive coordinator at South Carolina from 2016-2020. Nobody has a better understanding of Muschamp’s defensive philosophies and techniques than Robinson.

An NCAA rule change that was passed this week put an end to restrictions on the amount of time that analysts can spend coaching student-athletes. Muschamp, and other analysts like him, can now provide, “technical and tactical instruction to student-athletes during practice and competition," said the NCAA. That means that Muschamp will be able to do plenty of hands-on work with the Georgia defense. Before the rule change, the lines on what analysts could and could not do were a bit blurry. They weren’t supposed to be involved in giving detailed technical instruction during drills, but they could only point out big picture things and comment on effort during practices. In the past, analysts were given a lot of freedom to interact with players in the facility and watch tape, but any yellow tape is no longer a concern.

Sources close to the program described Muschamp as being “fiery as ever” this spring. During one of Georgia’s spring sessions, the loud voice that earned him the nickname “Boom” filled UGA’s indoor practice facility. He started in on Bolden after the talented early enrollee failed to properly play his half-field responsibilities at the safety position. When the prized recruit didn’t make it over to the boundary in time to defend a pass in a team drill, Muschamp lit into him for the effort he showed on the play. It was vintage Muschamp, and being around that type of burning intensity was one of the things that convinced Bolden that Georgia was the right place for him to play his college football.  

There is something poetic about the fact that Smart hired his former boss to assist him in taking their alma mater to the pinnacle of the sport. The defensive changes Muschamp inspired helped spark Georgia’s historic three-year run. 

As the Bulldogs prepare for 2024, it is likely that Smart, Schumann, Muschamp and the rest of UGA’s defensive staff are hard at work on solving the Bulldogs’ issues with red zone defense. Most great defenses are great at controlling the run, and you can bet that UGA will have a renewed emphasis on shutting down opponents on the ground. As the staff analyzes the best way to use 2024’s personnel, another wave of defensive evolution could occur. In his analyst role, Muschamp is likely to have more time to spend on these types of projects. That could pay major dividends for the Dawgs when it comes time to take the field. 

For UGA to win a third title in four years in 2024, its roster full of talented defenders must play at a high level. Still one of the sport’s sharpest defensive minds, Will Muschamp will be a big part of helping the Bulldogs get there.