July 2, 2007

A few words of caution... keep spring football and bold predictions far apart.
 
And I think that pretty much holds true whether evaluating individual players or the team as a whole.
 
On the matter of the latter, the 2007 spring game was devoid of the following: Malcolm Kelly, Steven Coleman, Mossis Madu, Phil Loadholt, Ryan Reynolds, Gerald McCoy, Darien Williams, Matt Clapp and Brandon Walker.
 
The team that was running around Owen Field for the Red/White Game was the 2007 Sooners in some part, but it was not the complete article. Of that group listed above one is the MVP of the Big 12 Championship game, four have started for the Sooners and three more could project that way without much clairvoyance.
 
Even among the players that were dressed out, some were limited in what they did simply because the coaches have enough knowledge of their status that there is no need to see more.
 
Then you get the factor that is most often neglected in evaluating any workout and that’s the revolving door of substitutions. Of all the facets of a football team, none takes a bigger hit in something like a spring game than continuity.
 
There’s a reason why teams do not play three quarterbacks in each game and rotate in a new one for each series. And while the quarterback position is the one that seems to most impact chemistry, the barrage of new players in and out for every series on both sides of the ball has a similar impact.
 
The temptation for fans, and I count myself among that group, is to evaluate practice (and that’s all the spring game is anyway) like a game when in fact the only resemblance to a game is helmets and yard lines.
 
The coaches have it right. They evaluate the game within the game, the nuances, stuff that only they can see through an eye that has been trained for years. When a coach watches a play unfold, he watches only the players he coaches with full knowledge of what they’ve been taught and the call that is in for that particular play.
 
You and I sit there and bust on a corner that got beat deep when it fact it was a failure in safety rotation that led to an uncovered receiver.
 
Uninformed as I am, I have tried to adopt a coach’s philosophy when watching practice. I try to pick a player or position and watch it for several consecutive plays. It’s easy to do that when DeMarco Murray is juking through a secondary, but it can be even more educational to do the same thing irrespective of the ball.
 
Pontification is a lot of fun for sports fan, and there’s no shortage of it these days between sports talk radio and the internet. I just think that sometimes a lot of us are jumping to conclusions when the available information leaves us short of the knowledge we would need to do such a thing.
 
Spring ball, to a point, is fun to watch and it’s fun to ooh and ah over a specific play or player. In the end, it’s probably wisest to leave the evaluation right there and wait for another day, say a game day, to really form an opinion.

   
Mossman Prophecies Archive
 
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Kenny Mossman, Associate Athletics Director for Communications, provides his perspective on Oklahoma Athletics in his regular column on SoonerSports.com.