Why Oklahoma State Will Do These Two Things During Game Week Preparation

As Oklahoma State prepares for its second scrimmage on Saturday, there was logic behind why they scheduled the game for 6 p.m.

As new head coach Eric Morris explained at the beginning of camp, he wanted to move practice times and scrimmage times around to help players get used to the changing game windows during regular season play.

College football games typically fall within four windows for television purposes, and the Cowboys don't always know when they're going to play a game until 10 days out from the contest. In special cases, they may not know until the Monday before. Morris wanted them to get used to having to do the same things at different times to prepare for the season.

But with school started and players on a class schedule, Morris is adapting how he's doing the rest of fall camp to how he'll do things during the regular season. And that's why these two pieces of preparation and scheduling matter from week to week.

Why Eric Morris Will Do These Two Things Week to Week

Oklahoma State's KD Jones runs a drill. — Oklahoma State's KD Jones. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

The Cowboys have been practicing in the mornings all week. Before school started, Morris moved practice times around. But now the practices will be consistently in the mornings.

When he was a player at Texas Tech under Mike Leach he typically practiced in the afternoons. He migrated to mornings during his first head coaching job at Incarnate Word because class schedules required it. He said those practices would sometimes start 5:45 a.m. But there’s another reason he’s stuck with the practice.

“There's some science behind it,” Morris said. “The recovery is a little bit better.”

The second piece is how he'll treat the end of the week. With teams using padded practices less during the regular season, some programs have changed how they do workouts late in the week.

Morris has seen as colleagues go back and forth on when they use pads late in the week. Some go Thursday and some go Friday. Morris has figured out what works before for his approach and his players are going to get a bit of a gift at the end of the week.

“I think half of America still practices, you know, with pads on Thursday,” he said. “The other half does what you call Fast Friday. So, we're going to go Thursday this year and then just give them Friday completely off.”

Morris sees it as an opportunity for his team to recuperate and recalibrate before playing on Saturday. The Cowboys don't have a non-Saturday game this year, so they'll be able to stay on schedule throughout the season.

Morris hopes the stability will help his team perform better on game days. He started building that stability this week.

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