From the other day...
OPENING STATEMENT:
BROWN: “The team is back to 100% so we’re really blessed that they’re all healthy and doing well. I do think that Coach Hess and the players have done a remarkable job, and Kelsee (Gomes) our nutritionist, Luke Ross our trainer, they’ve done a tremendous job through all this pandemic in the spring of keeping the guys healthy, getting them in shape, even the ones who have had a positive, they look good right now. I really commend the NCAA for allowing us to watch them work out and get to be around them more because with not only their physical health right now, but their mental health, they need to be around coaches. They need to be around us.
“And that’s very, very important. And we need to be able to see them work out and meet with them. And then the NCAA, for the first time, is allowing us to have walkthroughs with them. And that helps the teaching process that we would’ve had in spring practice. It’s obviously not full speed and you can’t hit, but it’s really, really helped. And it’s 20 hours a week. You still get a day off. So it gets the guys in a routine like they’re going to have during the season. And then to even go a step further, the NCAA allowed us this morning for the first time for the guys to wear helmets in that walkthrough. I don’t know how much you can see of this, it doesn’t look like much Jeremy. And Jeremy, you may can get it, but there’s a shield in the front but there’s also a shield underneath down here at the bottom. I’ll get Jeremy to hold it up for us.
“And with this shield, they feel like it gives the guys extra protection. Now some of them that wore it this morning in the walkthrough didn’t like it as well, because they said, you know, you had trouble breathing. But in practice we’re either going to wear the shield or we’re going to wear a mask. And in the games, they’ll be able to do whatever the doctors allow them to do.
(Pauses for Jeremy to hold up helmet)
“As Jeremy’s getting that ready, we start practice on August 6th like was planned before. We’ll have two days in shorts, the NCAA rules have not changed. We’ll have two days in shells, which is shoulder pads and helmets. And then we’ll have the rest of the time in time in pads, and that will give us the normal start. Here is the lower shield (on helmet) that is sitting on the helmets now. So you can see the upper shield, a lot of the guys wear anyway. And the lower shield will just replace the mask because that is protection for them down at the bottom. A lot of the guys really liked it. Some felt like the shield fogged up a little bit, but kudos to the NCAA for letting us wear it today and up until we start practice. Because I’ve told our players: wear it until practice starts at least and try to make it work, because people think it’s safe. And then if you don’t like it, we’ll go back to the doctors and look at other options, but let’s try to make that work.
“Our school starts on August 10th, so then we go back to 20 hours a week with a day off. So we will not have as much time as we normally would in preseason camp to visit because of schools starting earlier for us, because it was supposed to start the 18th. But we’re also not really sure when our first game will be because Rick Steinbacher is working hard to figure out when the plus-1 is. We don’t have a plus-1 yet. And Bubba and Rick are working on trying to schedule. Scheduling has gotten very fluid here the last couple of days just because of decisions made by the ACC, decisions made by the SEC and some decisions that were already made by the Big Ten and the Pac-12. So now we’ve got to figure out who that plus-1 is. And then you have to figure out when do you schedule them, so all of that is changing as we speak. I’m really not sure who that is, who that will be, what those options are or when it will be. So we have to have a preseason camp but with the schedule to play on the 12th, maybe the 19th, maybe the 26th. We’ve just got to try to prepare a number of different practice plans until we can get ourselves in a position where we know who we’re playing.
“Goals for the fall have not changed. They were the same as the spring. Now you have COVID guidelines and we have our medical guidelines. So we obviously have to go by those guidelines, the strict interpretation of those guidelines or we can’t play. And the most important thing for all of us is the safety of our players, our staff, our fans, our media, everybody involved. People that are first-responders and healthcare people at the stadium. So it’s something that everybody is looking at from top to bottom to figure out exactly how this thing’s going to work.
“For us in football, we’ve got to create more depth. It was one of the disappointing things for us and everybody else that we didn’t get to have spring practice because we had a lot of young guys that we could’ve looked at and worked in the spring. We had 13 early enrollees and some guys that redshirted last year. So we have to make hard decisions with all those guys … in fall camp, to see which will be ready to play and which will not.
“Our kicking game needs to get better. We mentioned that the other day. So we’ll work hard on kicking game starting from the first day. We want to be better in the red zone, short-yardage goal line, we want to be better at 2-point plays now that the overtime rule has changed for sure. And we always want to be good in 1-minute offense, because we want to be good right before the half and right at the end of the game if we need to drive the length of the field to score.
OPENING STATEMENT:
BROWN: “The team is back to 100% so we’re really blessed that they’re all healthy and doing well. I do think that Coach Hess and the players have done a remarkable job, and Kelsee (Gomes) our nutritionist, Luke Ross our trainer, they’ve done a tremendous job through all this pandemic in the spring of keeping the guys healthy, getting them in shape, even the ones who have had a positive, they look good right now. I really commend the NCAA for allowing us to watch them work out and get to be around them more because with not only their physical health right now, but their mental health, they need to be around coaches. They need to be around us.
“And that’s very, very important. And we need to be able to see them work out and meet with them. And then the NCAA, for the first time, is allowing us to have walkthroughs with them. And that helps the teaching process that we would’ve had in spring practice. It’s obviously not full speed and you can’t hit, but it’s really, really helped. And it’s 20 hours a week. You still get a day off. So it gets the guys in a routine like they’re going to have during the season. And then to even go a step further, the NCAA allowed us this morning for the first time for the guys to wear helmets in that walkthrough. I don’t know how much you can see of this, it doesn’t look like much Jeremy. And Jeremy, you may can get it, but there’s a shield in the front but there’s also a shield underneath down here at the bottom. I’ll get Jeremy to hold it up for us.
“And with this shield, they feel like it gives the guys extra protection. Now some of them that wore it this morning in the walkthrough didn’t like it as well, because they said, you know, you had trouble breathing. But in practice we’re either going to wear the shield or we’re going to wear a mask. And in the games, they’ll be able to do whatever the doctors allow them to do.
(Pauses for Jeremy to hold up helmet)
“As Jeremy’s getting that ready, we start practice on August 6th like was planned before. We’ll have two days in shorts, the NCAA rules have not changed. We’ll have two days in shells, which is shoulder pads and helmets. And then we’ll have the rest of the time in time in pads, and that will give us the normal start. Here is the lower shield (on helmet) that is sitting on the helmets now. So you can see the upper shield, a lot of the guys wear anyway. And the lower shield will just replace the mask because that is protection for them down at the bottom. A lot of the guys really liked it. Some felt like the shield fogged up a little bit, but kudos to the NCAA for letting us wear it today and up until we start practice. Because I’ve told our players: wear it until practice starts at least and try to make it work, because people think it’s safe. And then if you don’t like it, we’ll go back to the doctors and look at other options, but let’s try to make that work.
“Our school starts on August 10th, so then we go back to 20 hours a week with a day off. So we will not have as much time as we normally would in preseason camp to visit because of schools starting earlier for us, because it was supposed to start the 18th. But we’re also not really sure when our first game will be because Rick Steinbacher is working hard to figure out when the plus-1 is. We don’t have a plus-1 yet. And Bubba and Rick are working on trying to schedule. Scheduling has gotten very fluid here the last couple of days just because of decisions made by the ACC, decisions made by the SEC and some decisions that were already made by the Big Ten and the Pac-12. So now we’ve got to figure out who that plus-1 is. And then you have to figure out when do you schedule them, so all of that is changing as we speak. I’m really not sure who that is, who that will be, what those options are or when it will be. So we have to have a preseason camp but with the schedule to play on the 12th, maybe the 19th, maybe the 26th. We’ve just got to try to prepare a number of different practice plans until we can get ourselves in a position where we know who we’re playing.
“Goals for the fall have not changed. They were the same as the spring. Now you have COVID guidelines and we have our medical guidelines. So we obviously have to go by those guidelines, the strict interpretation of those guidelines or we can’t play. And the most important thing for all of us is the safety of our players, our staff, our fans, our media, everybody involved. People that are first-responders and healthcare people at the stadium. So it’s something that everybody is looking at from top to bottom to figure out exactly how this thing’s going to work.
“For us in football, we’ve got to create more depth. It was one of the disappointing things for us and everybody else that we didn’t get to have spring practice because we had a lot of young guys that we could’ve looked at and worked in the spring. We had 13 early enrollees and some guys that redshirted last year. So we have to make hard decisions with all those guys … in fall camp, to see which will be ready to play and which will not.
“Our kicking game needs to get better. We mentioned that the other day. So we’ll work hard on kicking game starting from the first day. We want to be better in the red zone, short-yardage goal line, we want to be better at 2-point plays now that the overtime rule has changed for sure. And we always want to be good in 1-minute offense, because we want to be good right before the half and right at the end of the game if we need to drive the length of the field to score.
