Lincoln Riley describes offseason 'boot camp'

Before the Coronavirus halted progress at Oklahoma, the Sooners were having a productive offseason.

OU got in nearly a full week of spring practice before the shutdown. And before that, players flourished in winter workouts.

Winter mornings at Oklahoma are infamously difficult.

The Sooners’ strength coaches team up with the team’s coaching staff to push the players in unique ways and test their mettle.

Lincoln Riley calls it “coaching stations.”

“It’s kind of our version of boot camp, or your week of hell, however you want to describe it,” Lincoln Riley said. “It’s evolved through the years.”

Riley has only mentioned it briefly, and is careful — as usual — to not divulge too much.

“Without giving too many details,” he said this week, “it’s something we do early each morning. Guys are graded very specifically on some key categories. Guys are put in very, very adverse situations, physically and mentally, to see, one, how do they handle it? And two, you start to see leaders emerge from the group, you start to see the personality of the group.”

Riley said the sessions “help you as coaches … figure out where we’re at at this point, where we need to go, how we need to attack it. It’s one of the best things I think that we do, to put guys in situations that are very similar to game situations, where unexpected, very difficult things are going to come up and you start to figure out who can handle it and who’s not ready to yet.”