The greatest concern for a head football coach, perhaps, is to be underprepared. That leads to strict schedules and routines. All of that was turned upside down this offseason.
If you tuned in on Monday night to watch BYU and Navy it looked like one team was ready to play football and the other put pads and jerseys on for the first time. Navy, in an effort to combat the pandemic and keep its players safe, elected not to tackle throughout their fall camp to try and limit contact. They were pummeled 55-3 by BYU and, hey, maybe BYU is just an elite team this year. More likely, it’s just what we should come to expect from some teams when the season starts.
This offseason has been unlike any, save for the offseason when the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc on the nation. That has led to coaches being forced to go away from normal, comfortable routines and make entirely new ones. Navy head coach Ken Niumatalol is a fine football coach who has coached at the service academy for more than 22 years, including 12 as head coach. After the game, he acknowledged that the way Navy went about its offseason probably cost them the opener.
#Navy coach ken Niumatalolo: “That game was 1,000 percent my fault. Looked like that was our first live game. The first live stuff is usually against yourselves. That’s the worst Navy game we’ve every played. That’s my fault. I chose to block bags and tackle donuts. All my fault"
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) September 8, 2020
Dan Mullen has continued to hark on this issue. Multiple times he has mentioned that the team that handles adversity the best will be the team that wins the most games. The Gators have changed much of their normal offseason program but they, like every other team they will face this fall has been limited by the SEC.
“You’re looking at training camp where it really goes from unlimited hours, with one day off a week, and that day you’re allowed two hours of film to 20 hours a week. In a normal training camp, you’re probably, you’ve got about half of what you normally would do,” Mullen said on a Zoom call Tuesday. “You had to really look at where you’re going to cut. I didn’t, one thing, I could go back and do all the research of every little thing that I lost and give you the time but I haven’t done that. I just went to, this is the new rule, I’ve gotta figure out how to do it this way of what we need instead of giving the details of what we’ve lost.”
A typical camp day would see a morning practice. The team would go to get a meal after practice while coaches and staff prepared the film cuts from that morning’s practice. The team would then meet back up for a recovery lift after eating and go over film from the day. Additionally, the team would be able to have walkthroughs, which allow even more coaching and hammering in the details of the playbook and the way things should be run. Now, with limited hours, that’s simply an impossibility.
“We only have 25 practices we’re allowed,” Mullen further explained. “I’ve got to keep the guys healthy and safe. That’s obviously a big priority of mine. So we’re kind of under the limitations that have been given to us, so we’re going to stick to our schedule and keep going. Like I said, physically I’m OK with some things. It’s going to be a big mental grind for our guys over the last couple of weeks to get themselves prepared to play.”
That’s part of the reason that Florida’s scrimmage on Monday, its second of camp, will be its last. Mullen, in an effort to prioritize health and safety, will also have a lighter week on the field and a more intensive recovery and film week following the scrimmage.
Mullen’s gripes could come off as whining but he’s really just expressing the reality of the situation. Nothing about the 2020 season will be normal. The BYU Navy game was played without fans. There was no applause after the National Anthem because there were no people to celebrate the return of football. When Navy lined up to sing “Navy Blue and Gold” facing fellow cadets. Monday night they sang it to empty seats.
“I want to talk to some NFL people as well,” Mullen said about reaching out to coaches following their first games. “They’re starting up this week and get a feel for every different aspect of it with the stadiums, the lack of crowd noise, how the pumping in music affects, just the overall game-day feeling, the difference of game-day deals.”
He’s doing everything he can to better prepare his team in an uncertain and unstable time.