There May Be No Fix For Spring Practice Disparity
For Coastal Carolina, this year’s signing day, Feb. 5, was just as busy as ever. That’s the day the Chanticleers kicked off spring football practice, a whole three weeks after the 2019 college football season ended with LSU’s win over Clemson in New Orleans.
The Chanticleers are one of two programs in major college football to have completed their entire 15-session spring practice before the virus pandemic shut down sports. The other: UConn.
“This year, we look like we’re Nostradamus,” laughs Jamey Chadwell, Coastal Carolina’s second-year head coach to Sports Illustrated's Ross Dellenger.
Clemson and Stanford got in nine and seven practices, respectively, while Alabama and Texas got zero. Entire states never kicked off spring. In Mississippi, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss didn’t have a single day of practice.
In Florida, a state with seven FBS schools, just 12 days of spring practice were had.
In the football hungry state of Alabama, the only FBS team to have at least one spring practice was UAB. It had six.
Regardless of what happens, there may be no way to even things out.
“The reality is it’s going to be really hard to create balance on this,” said Todd Berry, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “Believe me, we’ve modeled it, the AFCA and NCAA. We kicked the can pretty far down the road. It was difficult to come up with a really equitable and fair model.”
Check out SI's full list of spring practices for the 130 FBS teams
Remembering Don Shula
From SI's Tom Verducci: We lost a legend this week, Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history. Here's what I remember about Don Shula in the early 80s. I was a rookie beat writer covering the Miami Dolphins and Don Shula treated me like gold. I think about Shula now as Major League Baseball de-emphasizes the role of experience in the job of manager.
Ten years ago, the average big league manager had an average of 11.3 years of managing experience. This year, it's almost half of that, 6.8 years of experience. In the last five years alone 17 of the 30 jobs have turned over, more than half the managing jobs in baseball.
The longest tenured manager with one team in the National League is Craig Counsell of Milwaukee, who still looks like he might be carded. Don Shula is definitely on the Mount Rushmore of NFL head coaches. Conveniently only four won two-hundred fifty games and multiple championships. Shula, George Halas, Bill Belichick and Tom Landry.
Who would be on the Mount Rushmore of MLB managers? Conveniently, only four have at least two thousand wins and at least four World Series championships. Connie Mack, Joe Torre, Joe McCarthy and Walter Alston. Impressive numbers by all, but what impressed me most about Don Shula was the way he treated everybody.
Don Shula was 90 years old.
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