After a Mini-Spring Practice, Hogs Will Get Ready for Penn State
Unless a team is in the final four of college football, bowl games are more of a reward for the fans than anything else these days.
Oh, once upon a time they were a reward for coaches and players after a good season. The national champion was decided after the last week of the regular season.
Maybe it's better now. Maybe not.
But make no mistake about it, Sam Pittman sounded more like a coach getting ready for what amounts to a light spring practice.
"We may look at some guys at different positions and different things like that," Pittman said Sunday talking about the Outback Bowl matchup against Penn State. "Just try to use it a little bit more spring ball-ish but not with the physicality of it with the older guys. We want to take our good players to the party, you know."
All of that is Pittmanese for the coaches getting a quick little spring practice done for evaluation.
Next season matters more than any little trip to Florida for a meaningless bowl game against an unranked opponent.
If you're looking at the big picture, that's how it should be viewed.
A lot of the press conference was about practice schedule for the Nittany Lions. That is actually pretty simple.
"We’ll do some hitting and some scrimmaging with the young kids," Pittman said. "Young guys will hit, obviously, throughout this process more than the older guys, and of course, until you get around 8-10 days out from the game."
The bigger issue in this day and age, of course, is the transfer portal.
Pittman is almost paranoid about it and, to be honest, that's how more folks should view it. The whole open free agency thing is a disaster for college sports, but it's here now.
It giveth and taketh.
The Hogs got a big boost from it Sunday with former Oklahoma wide receiver Jadon Haselwood making a commitment less than a week after entering the portal after Lincoln Riley sailed out of Norman to Los Angeles.
Before we can start making projections for any bowl game, we have to know who's actually going to be playing in the game.
There are some of the Hogs projected to get picked in the NFL Draft in April.
"I think we’ll have everybody, but I really don’t know," Pittman said Sunday. "We’ve got a lot of kids just because somebody else does it, I don’t think they look at that. The opt out deal became popular, there was a whole bunch more opting in, though."
In case you're wondering, that was a big circular comment that few guys tend to bail on their team before a bowl game.
"If you really look at it, nobody opts out for a playoff game because they don’t want to hurt the team," Pittman said. "We’ve got a whole lot of kids on our team that wouldn’t opt out simply because they don’t want to hurt the team. So as of right now, I don’t have anyone that I know of that is willing to opt out of the game."
What he didn't say is that if you really look at it, it's still early.
Let's check again in a couple of weeks and see where things stand.
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