Knudson: Spring Ahead

By Mark Knudson, The Mtn. Insider
April 11, 2011

Does anyone have any idea exactly how the whole notion of having college football practice in the spring came about?

Whose idea was this, anyway?

I envision it went something like this: There were a couple of coaches in someplace like Alabama or Texas sitting around a campus half a century ago when early one spring day, bored with the end of basketball season and uninterested in baseball at any level, one said to the other, “Heck Billy Joe, why don’t we get them kids together and have us a football practice? Nothin’ important happening around here anyhow. We could run some of them new plays we were drawing up and heck, if any of ‘em work, we got us a nice head start when practice starts for real.”

“Ya know, Bobby Ray, for a guy with a slow leak in his head, you think pretty good…”

And off they went. Spring practice was born.

You know as soon as word got out about the first school holding football practice in the spring, the fear of falling behind forced everyone else to start it up, too. Pretty soon, everyone was holding practices in the spring, even where the weather was crummy. Then the NCAA had to get involved and regulate it.

At least that’s how I imagine it, since I can’t find any documentation about the real beginnings. Maybe George Clooney will make a movie about it sometime and clear everything up.

Anyway, today there are dozens of places around the country where spring football is more important than anything else on the sporting calendar, college or professional. In these places, there are four seasons: football season, recruiting season, spring football, and summer preseason. That’s it.

A lot of schools fill their stadiums for these scrimmages a full four and a half months before the actual season starts. It can be something of a phenomenon in some locales. Here in Mountain West Country, folks seem to keep practice in a little better perspective.

A couple of decades ago, you may have been able to make the argument that spring football was an example of excess in the sport. That was before schools began to profit by selling tickets to the spring game, and before every other sport became pretty much year ‘round as well. Baseball teams now practice in the fall, volleyball teams hold spring practice, too. Basketball teams travel to play in tournaments outside the country in the summer and track and field has a winter indoor season as well as a spring outdoor season.

Everyone is a specialist and they all train all year now. Football doesn’t get any more practice time than any other sport.

But it does garner the attention. Press releases detailing the day’s events in a controlled scrimmage are sent out to all the media outlets. The beat writers are there every day, detailing who’s beating out whom for a key starting spot. And the fans eagerly wait for news about the latest phenoms to wear their school colors.

Around the Mountain West this spring, we’ve learned that New Mexico’s move to a more attacking style of defense has been a hit with the players. Senior defensive end Jaymar Latchison says the Lobos are going to be making more plays behind the line of scrimmage. Wyoming coach Dave Christensen feels like he’s starting to get the personnel in place that’s a better fit for his spread offense. A couple of freshman quarterbacks (Emory Miller and Brett Smith) are now front and center, if not actually under center for Wyoming. In Fort Collins, where they play their spring game next Saturday, CSU Coach Steve Fairchild hasn’t been thrilled with his offense to this point. “To me, that’s as bad as an offensive practice as we’ve had in four years. They couldn’t line up right. We didn’t catch the ball. We didn’t throw the ball. We didn’t do a thing right today.”

"Right now, everybody's got football fever,” said San Diego State sophomore wide receiver Dylan Denso after the Red team beat the Black team 17-13 in the Aztecs spring game. “We're all kind of itching to see what our team is going to be all about for this upcoming season. I'm excited, as I know the rest of the team is too, and I'm excited to see what our finished product comes out to in the summer.”

Billy Joe and Bobby Ray probably felt the same way.

See all of Mark Knudson's blog entries HERE.