Football is always relevant. If you disagree with that, Sean Salisbury will be coming to your home later today and will be personally berating you for following any other sport that might actually be playing games right now.
He came to my house yesterday, made fun of me and then made fun of John Clayton for going to Duquesne. As such, I was inspired to comment on the end of spring practice and take a look at the approaching horizon that is September 2.
Anyone who owns EA Sports' NCAA Football 2006 knows about Oklahoma drills. These same people also probably would agree that half the time, playing the Oklahoma drills is more entertaining than playing an actual game.
Well guess what -- watching the drills in person is even more exciting.
Oklahoma drills are a down-in-the-trenches drill that test strength, intensity and the ever intangible concept of "want-to."
At Virginia's open practice April 14, the Cavaliers closed the session with Oklahoma drills. The basic gist of it is something like this: In an area no more than five yards wide by 10 yards long, there are three offensive players on the line and three defensive players opposing them. The quarterback has the ball right behind the center, with a running back behind him. The quarterback hikes it, the men on the line lurch forward trying to gain ground, and the running back has to try to find a way through the mess.
The offense has four downs to get to the de facto endzone, otherwise the defense wins the set.
But it's not just for, as John Madden would say, "the big hogmollies up front." Wide receivers take a three-point stance against the secondary; tight ends get in the mix; linebackers fight for ground as well. The collisions are big, and the competition is fierce first and friendly second.
With the whole team gathered around the action hootin' and hollerin', the excitement would wake up even Dan Johnson's slumbering bat.
And unlike in EA Sports' version, the running back does not have the luxury of dancing around, throwing a well-timed juke and gliding into the endzone. The running style for the backs resembles the pound-the-ball-in approach usually seen on the goal line and short-yardage situations.
Nothing is easy in the Oklahoma drills -- if you filmed it, edited it, tossed in some slow motion in key parts, added some gratuitous groans and grunts and then put Al Pacino's drawl in the background, you'd have a pretty good independent film.
And as Al tells Steamin' Willie Beamen and company in "Any Given Sunday," the inches we need are everywhere around us. He also mentions in no uncertain terms that they make the difference between winning and losing.
Such will be the case for Virginia football in the 2006 season. Virginia's own Al will have to spur these guys to work harder than ever before.
The Groh family business has lost 77 percent of its offensive production from 2005 from both a yards gained and points scored perspective.
By comparison, in 2005, Kent State lost star quarterback Josh Cribbs, who accounted for a similarly large percentage of the Flashes' offense in 2004. They went from being a 6-5 team with him to being a 1-10 team without him.
Replacing Marques Hagans and Wali Lundy is going to be more difficult than people seem willing to acknowledge.
It doesn't matter if we have the second-coming of Jim Brown and Dan Marino stepping up in the backfield -- the transition from established players to new stars will take time.
In this transitional period when things are still getting sorted out, the only way to prevent a Kent State-like disaster is to A) open the season with an easy schedule and B) work your freaking tail off.
We seem to have the first part of that in hand, so now it's all about working hard until it starts clicking.
Because, unlike in the EA Sports version, there's no restart button.
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