Like many college football bastions, Nebraska’s annual spring intrasquad game had evolved into a hallowed custom, rife with pomp and three-point stance. A glorified practice that attracted thousands, it was equal parts recruiting tool and rite.
Same at places such as USC, Ohio State and Texas, where this alliance of social event and scrimmage embedded itself on a community’s calendar.
But this year, none of those places are staging spring games, for varying – and valid – reasons that may prompt other big-time programs to follow suit.
“The word ‘tampering’ doesn’t exist anymore,” Nebraska coach Matt Rhule said recently. “It’s just an absolute free, open common market. I don’t necessarily want to open up (spring practice) to the outside world and have people watch our guys and say, ‘He looks like a pretty good player. Let’s go get him.’”
As the line keeps blurring between major college football and the NFL, and de facto free agency (the NCAA transfer portal) persists at the collegiate level, spring games – if not spring practices – have joined walk-ons and wing-T formations on the sport’s endangered list.
And while some coaches, such as Florida’s Billy Napier, still cling to the tradition, the demographic at-large is left to wonder how much longer it will last.
“I just think it’s a healthy experience for the players; I think it’s great,” Napier said at his Feb. 5 national signing day news conference.
“I can still remember some of these rookies last year talking about it. … (Veteran defensive tackle) Joey Slackman said, ‘Man, that was the biggest crowd I’ve ever played in front of.’ So there’s a healthy component to filling that thing up, playing a game. I think we played like 50 players on both sides, right? Just that process of preparing, dividing the team, I think there’s still a lot of positives there.”
The positives are being offset by more and more pitfalls. Texas coach Steve Sarkisian didn’t see the benefit of staging a spring game only three months after the Longhorns completed a 16-game season in the expanded College Football Playoff.
“Over the last two years, we’ve played 30 games, and that’s a lot for college football,” Sarkisian said on the Up & Adams show on FanDuel TV.
“We’ve had 25 guys get invited to the NFL combine the last two years, so we’ve got a lot of young players on our roster; we have 21 mid-year high school kids that just showed up. So the development that’s needed for these guys to get ready for the fall is a little bit different than it used to be.”
Similarly, Ohio State coach Ryan Day recently told his school’s board of trustees that the Buckeyes will transition from the normal spring game to a “spring showcase,” though details on what that entails haven’t been released. Florida State also won’t hold a traditional spring game this year (opting for a similar showcase-type event), but only because of ongoing renovations at Doak Campbell Stadium.
“I think we have to be smart about how we handle this,” Day said.
“When you look at the NFL model and they’re playing the number of games that they play in the NFL, we just played 16 games. So to think that we can continue with the same spring game or spring practice model I think is asking for trouble, because of the amount of games now.”
The sentiments of Sarkisian and Day coincide with a growing push by college coaches to transition from the traditional 15-practice spring period to NFL-style organized team activities (OTAs) during the summer.
CBS Sports reported that Football Bowl Subdivision coaches even discussed a proposal to eliminate spring practices and implement OTAs in the late spring and early summer months at the American Football Coaches Association annual meeting in January.
Should that come to fruition, spring games will go from rite to relic.
“To each his own,” Napier said. “I’m either going to have coaches tampering with my players, or I’m going to have a fan base that’s pissed off at not having a spring game. It’s pick your poison.”
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