Situationalizing

You can never do enough of it.

`’Basically, every day we start our team meeting with another situation.  We have the entire team in here.  We go through a situation.  One of them might be two minutes, and the offense has to get a first down to win the game.  We had that situation come up against Tennessee.  We weren’t able to do it.  Then we had to stop them because we had a sack/fumble.  So we did stop `em.  We got the ball back.  We did score.  So what we’ve tried to do is replay the situation.  I’ve spent a lot of time during this offseason talking to NFL teams, because these NFL teams deal with this every game.  Every game comes down to that.  College football, I think, 50 percent of our games come down to one score.  So if that’s the case, we’ve got to simulate those.  So every single day, except the first practice, we had end-of-game situation at practice.  I think it makes Jacob (Eason) a lot better.  It makes Jake Fromm a lot better.  And defensively, it’s been great.  We even had a situation the other day where we were gonna clock the ball with the clock running.  We had a first down and we went to spike the ball and the guy jumped offsides.  At the end of game, we had a 10-second runoff.  So we start the whole meeting with that, and I think that kids can learn a lot from these situations.  I mean, Jay Johnson’s a guy from Minnesota and he brought a list of situations they did there.  That’s so invaluable to me because you try to simulate those.  You talk to other coaches and try to simulate them, so we’ve done a lot of that this spring.”

I think that’s great, as far as it goes, but it does beg the question about what they were doing to prepare for specific situations last season.  Are they prepping this stuff more than they did in the spring of 2016, or was it just a case of last year’s work not sticking?

Whichever was the case, there’s a perception that things were certainly lacking in that department.

Georgia has placed a focus on situational football throughout spring practice. (Deandre) Baker knows all too well that the lack of execution in the game’s latter stages cost the Bulldogs on multiple occasions.

“It allows us to project the real-game situation,” Baker said. “In a game, we’ll know how to respond when we get in a situation, whether we’re down or up by 10. Or if we have to get the ball back or something like that. (Georgia head coach Kirby Smart) pointed out games like Tennessee, Kentucky – which was a big one – and Auburn.”

Root for the learning curve, I guess.

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A landmark moment in Alabama football

We may never see this again in our lifetimes.

Nick Saban touched the Coke bottle for the first time in 3 years pic.twitter.com/ObP2vFi8Xb

— Marq Burnett (@Marq_Burnett) April 14, 2017

I’m guessing some hapless staffer’s ass is grass.

How the rich stay richer

Is it wrong to think that if Nick Saban and Urban Meyer are against something, I should probably be in favor of it?

Two marquee coaches who have remained steadfast in their opposition to adding an early signing day are Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer.

Saban’s objections are that an early signing period reduces the amount of time coaches have to evaluate prospects athletically, academically and socially. Also, he said a player signing early may not play as motivated his senior high school season and added there might not be any available scholarships for late-blooming prospects.

“We would probably make some academic, character and maybe evaluation mistakes, because you aren’t even seeing a guy play during his senior season,” Saban said several months ago. “The other thing from a high school coaches’ standpoint, I mean what is really the guy’s motivation to play, and really work hard to get better to play for his team in his senior year?

“Ultimately, every player should have the opportunity to make official visits, to develop relationships.”

Meyer has been even more outspoken opposing an early NSD.

“I hear the reasoning is because there’s so many decommitments,” Meyer said. “What the hell does that mean? So because 18-year-olds – excuse me, 17-year-olds – are decommitting, let’s give them a legal document so they can’t decommit? That’s not very smart. Young people have a right to choose where they want to go to school. Period. Let them decommit a hundred times. That’s why they’re called 17-year-olds.

“So I don’t understand, whether it’s lazy, whether it’s, you know, I don’t understand why this big push. Now they want to move junior, like have official visits in their junior year. There’s some kids that don’t even have ACT scores. They’re bodies are gaining 18 pounds. Why not move it back to their sophomore year? It’s bizarre. You’re going to see more transfers and more mistakes made in recruiting than ever if they keep pushing this thing up.”

Chaos, I tells ‘ya!  And that can’t be good for Alabama and Ohio State.

By the way, Nick’s doing great in the character evaluation department.  He just needs more time.