Photo credit: Sean Fitz, 247Sports
It appears as though the final piece of the Billy Napier staff puzzle has been filled with the name of Sean Spencer.
Spencer, who most recently served as the defensive line coach of the New York Giants, has been named the Gators’ new defensive line coach and co-defensive coordinator. He’ll share that latter tag with safeties coach Patrick Toney, and he becomes the second member of the 2021 Giants’ staff to join Napier’s staff along with offensive line coach Rob Sale.
The first thing you need to know about Sean Spencer is his nickname. His players have collectively dubbed him “Coach Chaos” for the ferocious nature with which his defenses tend to play. Right off the bat, the recruiting ammunition that provides is tremendous.
Now onto more important things. Spencer spent the last two seasons as the New York Giants’ DL coach under Joe Judge’s stewardship. The Giants struggled as a team during those two years, but that wasn’t because of his defensive line. Big Blue racked up 40 sacks in 2020, the largest single-season total in six years. That defensive line also helped the Giants finish the season with the 12th best defense in the 32-team league, giving up 349.3 yards per game.
But the real highlight of his resume- at least for this job with Florida- was his six year stint at Penn State.
Immediately upon leaving Vanderbilt, James Franklin went and grabbed Spencer as his defensive line coach at Penn State. Over the next six years, Spencer became known as a star recruiter and defensive line technician, most notably snagging five star Micah Parsons and four star Yetur Gross-Matos and developing them into the #12 and #38 picks in the NFL Draft, respectively. He’s also been known to recruit well outside of his own position, the most well-known example for which has to be him being the primary recruiter for star running back Saquon Barkley.
The stats on the field were tremendous for Spencer’s defensive line unit, too. After a somewhat rough first season in 2014, his Nittany Lions accumulated 40+ sacks in each of the next five seasons, including 45 in his final year in 2019.
Now, Spencer will be taking over a unit that loses a fair amount of talent with Zach Carter off to the NFL and Khris Bogle off to Michigan State. But while he’s still got plenty of talent to work with- namely, Brenton Cox, who sacked FSU quarterbacks four times this past November- the most exciting part of adding him has to be tacking on one more elite recruiter to a staff that’s already fiilled with them.
So, welcome aboard, Sean Spencer. Let’s get to work.
