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One of the biggest questions in sports today is when can they resume?
The whole world has been upended by the novel coronavirus pandemic, and while the curve in most of the United States seems to have flattened, there are fears of a second wave or any kind of resurgence once the broader stay at home orders have been lifted.
So, while some sports — baseball, basketball and hockey are all looking to either start or resume their seasons, we still don’t know if or when a 2020 college football season will even take place.
Some teams had the fortune of having started spring practice already, but Michigan was days away from the beginning of that period. Since quarantines began, the Wolverines have operated remotely. To some degree, that’s been helpful, like how offensive coordinator Josh Gattis said it’s allowed the team to be more patient with the offensive install.
But, as he told Jon Jansen on the In the Trenches podcast, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one very key component missing to the whole process. So while the offense might know more about what it’s supposed to do, it might not exactly understand just how fast it’s supposed to do it — particularly the younger players who haven’t seen much, if any, field time.
“You’re missing the speed of the game,” Gattis said. “The speed of the game, the competitive nature, that’s what you’re missing – first and foremost. Every kid is able to learn, but some kids learn differently. Some kids need to learn from correction. Some kids need to learn from the fast reps. The game of football is played fast. The ability to process information on the go, the ability to see things change. I think that’s one really key component that we’re missing through all of this. Yes, it’s what we have to go through and everybody understands it and everyone’s kind of going through the challenge themselves, but for schools that didn’t get a chance to practice any, you’re missing a significant chunk of competitive nature, competitive reps to really enhance your players.”
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With that in mind, given that there is no actual competition at the moment, what is the actual pecking order?
That’s something that particularly matters this year, as Michigan lost its starting quarterback, one of its starting tight ends, four starting offensive linemen and one starting wide receiver. Then, there’s a loaded running backs room which returns Chris Evans after his one-year academic-based suspension.
At quarterback, there’s nowhere close to a clear front-runner between Dylan McCaffrey or Joe Milton. While there’s some ideas as to who can step up on the OL, it’s never clear cut until after a significant amount of practice.
For the moment, that’s one of the things that actually does concern Gattis. While he feels comfortable with the offense in terms of the unit knowing the roles as well as the burgeoning leadership in the locker room, establishing a depth chart without having had the 15 spring practices creates an entirely separate issue.
“That’s actually gonna be a challenge that we’re gonna have on our hands,” Gattis said. “I think first and foremost, the biggest thing that we need to address when we get back is getting our guys caught up with competitive reps. Get ‘em good. Get the speed of the game down. We’ve missed those 15 practices in the spring so we’re gonna have to really speed up the process of preparing our players to be ready for the first game whenever that first game is.
“So you’re gonna have to balance that, balance all the different competitions. This may be a case where competitions aren’t quite solved leading up to the games. You don’t know what the process may be. What you do hope is that every player is out to prepare themselves from a mental standpoint where they come in and execute at a high level when the time comes. But another thing that you’ve gotta make sure that everyone’s in the right shape and I think that’s something that’s come up over this break is making sure that when we get back out there that our guys are in tip top shape. They’re in the shape to really go out there and really excel at a high level and not have to take a step back as far as worrying about conditioning – the physicality of this game, we can really take steps forward by taking advantage of this time that we have now.”
With all of that in mind, what is an ideal timeline for teams to get back to practice before the season starts?
Assuming Michigan does actually travel to Washington on time for the Sept. 5 season opener, how much time would the Wolverines need to prepare? Especially given that it’s missed out on what’s essentially two months of annual preparation.
“I think it’s been floated around six weeks,” Gattis said. “I think that’s very fair. I think it’s kind of patterned to the NFL model. Most NFL training camps get started probably about 5-6 weeks ahead of the Week One (game). The difference between the NFL and college is they’re allowed to have mini-scrimmages from preseason games to really kind of help to speed up that process to get guys game reps. Unfortunately in college, we don’t have that. So we have to be very unique about how we go about practices. I think we’re gonna have to have to get some real, live scrimmage situations in there. Because you’ve just got to make sure you’re preparing those guys for the time that they’ve been missing in March. I would lean on the fence and say six weeks. I think our guys are doing a really good job of (preparing for) that. They’ve got to take advantage so we don’t have any setbacks when we get started in July or August that we can all start off on a good foot and have a good background as far as conditioning and our health and rehab that we have nothing linger.”