The defense has improved under Gibson. I also agree with a few things 2 things said above.
Bradley was very important in 2014, when we made the significant improvement from historically bad to average. To Gibson's credit, while it's hard to say we further improved from 2014 to 2015, we didn't regress, despite losing Bradley. You get more credit for average performance when it follows on the heels of terrible ones. Gibson was a bit heavy-handed this preseason with the hype but that kind of coach-speak is meant as more for internal consumption and making the players confident as it is to be legitimately informative. He's probably now learned that he should focus the confidence building on private talks witht he team and be more bland when talking to the media or fans. Not a biggie.
Under Deforest, and to a lesser extent Patterson, our defense often looked bewildered and as if one half the team was playing one defense and the other a different one. In 2012 and 2013, the mental mistakes and poor fundamentals were the defining characteristics of our D. We made practically every QB look great. The last 2 years, the good QBs still looked very good against us, but the average ones looked average and poor ones mostly poor. That alone is a major improvement.
I also think Gibson wisely both simplified the defense and called it more aggressively during games.
The other thing I agree with is I think it would be a huge mistake to promote him from relatively inexperienced coordinator to head coach of a Power 5 team. I've seen that movie before. I wouldn't even want a more successful and more experienced coordinator with zero head coaching experience.
