Despite what some people say, college football is a year-round sport.
The big bowls and national championship happen in January. The second National Signing Day is in February. March and April have spring practice.
Late May and June are season preview magazine season. July brings media days. August sees the start of fall camps, and, increasingly with Week 0 becoming a thing, possibly the opening of the season.
September through November hold the regular season. December then has conference championships, individual awards, the first signing day, and the bulk of the bowl games.
I’ve been living my life to some degree around this cycle for a long time. My first crack at sportswriting came when I started a blog as a sophomore at UF in 2004. That died off within a year, but I began a new one in time for the 2006 football season. With only a couple of breaks no more than a few months long, I’ve been covering college football consistently ever since.
It makes it extra strange for me to be sitting here in March with no sports activities happening. Like many, I love the NCAA basketball tournament. I always make at least one bracket, and I like to print my main one out so I can update it with red and green markers as the rounds progress.
But this time of year is also a major scouting time. Yes, spring practice is notorious for creating mirages. Every program has their spring practice heroes who never seem to get playing time in the fall. Dallas Baker was one of those for a time. Kyle Trask was too, at least until he got his big break after Feleipe Franks’s unfortunate big break.
Once you’ve been through a couple of spring sessions with a particular coach, you can learn how to learn things from spring. Some guys like Urban Meyer take the Lou Holtz approach of only talking about the things that aren’t going right. To take a late-March press conference from Meyer seriously was to doubt whether his team would even make a bowl that year. There aren’t any who relentlessly pump sunshine per se, but the upbeat motivators will focus on praising good performances from literally anyone to try to keep effort high. There is never a time when there are so many sixth-string walk on running backs with a real chance to get carries than in early April.
I’m still getting used to Dan Mullen in spring, but he’s more in the middle. He seems to call things pretty straight, with the possible exception of giving too much credit to veteran starters.
He was frank last year that there wasn’t going to be much help available past the top five offensive linemen, and that was true. At the same time, he either oversold or genuinely misjudged how high a ceiling his offensive line had. It might’ve been the latter, considering that by late November his best five linemen included two guys who weren’t on the top line of the depth chart in either spring or September.
Well, all that’s out the window now. I won’t get another chance to figure out how to parse the spring version of Mullen-ese. I also won’t get a chance to start figuring out how new FSU coach Mike Norvell communicates.
I do try to keep tabs on the head coaches of the Gators’ top rivals to enhance my coverage, so coaching changes at other schools mean I have to pay closer attention to those spring practice sessions too. Sometimes it’s easy. Kirby Smart talks like Nick Saban does, and I’ve covered both the SEC in general and Alabama specifically for other publications. Both Saban and Smart try to say as little as possible unless they have a message they want their team to hear through the media. Manny Diaz at Miami is pretty easy too, since he largely just says what he thinks is right. He will play coy and act guarded as all coaches do, but he will give you a straight answer more often than a Saban or a Smart will.
I don’t care to go watch old Memphis press conferences, so I’ll have to learn Norvell over time later. I have a 17-month-old who’s now out of day care as of last week. While everyone in the world is trying to figure out what to do with all their newfound spare time thanks to social distancing, parents of kids younger than about 3 have less time than ever.
I suspect the preview magazines will come out on time, and it’ll likely be both the hardest and easiest year ever for those publications. Hard, because they won’t be able to use spring practice reports to guide their depth chart projections and season predictions. Easy, because they won’t have to keep track of 130 spring practice sessions to make sure they don’t miss the backup guard at UMass tearing an ACL.
I want the year-round college football schedule to get back on track. More than that, I want everyone to stay safe from COVID-19. It’s going to be a rough year, one we all talk about forever. Hopefully it’ll at least have something on the field in the second half of it.