Wednesday was the first day in pads for the Ohio State football team. Saturday will mark the first scrimmage for the Buckeyes. Until these two things take place, there’s not a whole lot of depth chart movement.
The coaches want to see stellar play, obviously, but they’re more interested in how players practice, rather than how well.
“It’s all culture at this point,” Urban Meyer said on Monday. “It’s the whole thing, the go-hard, because there are going to be plenty of mistakes. The player that freezes up, and we have a saying around here, when contact is made, that means when you’re in a game-like situation, you revert back to your training. The players that revert back to their training.”
The players who maintain that training will look a whole lot better than those who don’t. And at a successful program like Ohio State, you’re going to notice the ones who are having trouble keeping up.
Early in camp, the coaches want to see the culture of what they have built shine through and stand tall. Even though the pecking orders will come after the scrimmages, you can get a pretty good idea of what things are going to look like just by how players work from the outset.
“That’s the hardest thing for a quarterback because they can look so good in drill work, and then you get out there and you can’t hear,” Meyer said. “The right guard misses a block, you get hit and you lose your focus. Those are the quarterbacks you see really struggle in NFL, college, high school.”
It’s not just the quarterback that can get flustered, obviously. No position is above such struggles. The players who power through — and keep powering through — will be noticed. That is essentially what earned Michael Jordan a look at left guard in the spring last season. Within a week of getting that look, the job was his.
There’s a reason winter workouts are terrible and summer workouts aren’t any better. It’s training for the inevitable. It’s preparation for the weeks to come. The players who can fall back on that training are the ones who will see the field in the fall. By showing up early, they can lock themselves into a coach’s plans.
Then all they have to do is keep relying on the culture in order to stay part of those plans.
“The player that something good does not happen and he could go right back to fundamentals and all the training he’s been through, those are guys that play,” Meyer said. “That’s what I look for now and all our coaches, as you start establishing depth charts, and we’ll have a scrimmage this Saturday. Then after that you’re going to start seeing depth charts get materialized a little bit, and following that one, they’re done. So they have about ten days or whatever it is, to establish themselves, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for assignment expertise yet.”