For decades, the culmination of college football’s spring practice window was the Spring Game, when programs open up the stadium and play a scrimmage to give fans something to dream on over the summer.
But college football has entered its Transfer Portal Era, where, seemingly, everything is changing, and it’s starting to look like the Spring Game will soon be extinct.
Texas didn’t hold one because it has been in the College Football Playoff the past two years, and head coach Steve Sarkisian wanted to give his guys a physical break. USC, Florida State, Oklahoma and Ohio State also decided not to play a Spring Game. Several coaches who have made that decision cited the portal as a big reason why they weren’t going to do anything that looks like a football game.
Nebraska’s Matt Ruhle put it as bluntly as he could:
“I think it’s really, fundamentally … I hate to say it like this … it’s really because last year we were one of the more televised spring games, and I dealt with a lot of people offering our players a lot of opportunities after that. To showcase them for all the other schools to watch, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
Over the weekend, San Diego State became the latest school to eschew a public scrimmage, opting instead to break up the roster into 14 teams and holding a series of competitions like dodgeball, tic-tac-toe and obstacle courses. As a mid-major program, SDSU is ripe for Power 4 teams looking to pick off talent with hefty NIL offers.
That, however, is not why the Aztecs decided to make the change.
“This decision not to play a typical Spring Game or scrimmage wasn’t driven by anything portal-related,” said Aztecs head coach Sean Lewis. “It was not driven by, ‘Hey, if we do a Spring Game, there’s going to be more tape for someone else to evaluate, steal my guys. There’s going to be over 100 messages on my phone right now when I get back to it about things that are going on with guys on my roster, with other teams that are actively trying to work and pull them away.” And that’s OK. That’s fine, because I’m very confident in what we’ve built. I’m very confident in what we have.”
Lewis said SDSU chose the format they did for two main reasons, and it’s awfully hard to argue with either of them:
- The team did everything he wanted it to do during the first 14 practices and the players needed to have fun
- As college football becomes more of a year-round endeavor, he wanted to mitigate injury risk
It seems to have worked. The players say they fully enjoyed competing in a different way.
“I feel like what we did today is something we wouldn’t have been able to do last season because of how our connection is,” defensive back Chris Johnson said. “Players wouldn’t have cared about hyping each other up or anything, and I’m not knocking last year’s team, because I was on it, but it definitely feels different this season, and it has to do with the brotherhood we created. We’re definitely just a more close, unified team.”
College football fans, get used to a major change in tradition. And accept that it may be radically different, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
