Five rules for parsing offseason talk
How do we interpret the coach babble and camp reports that come out from all these teams?
Fall camp is approaching and with it comes…practice reports, coach pressers, and offseason talk.
At Big 12 Media Days this year I had the chance to ask Coach Brent Venables of Oklahoma about his new transfer linebacker Dasan McCullough from Indiana and received a lengthy dose of coach speak.
The player McCullough was as a converted safety last year with the Hoosiers who played as a Sam linebacker in their base 3-4 package, where he had 49 tackles, 6.5 tackles for loss, and four sacks. Quite good for a freshman, but Oklahoma doesn’t have this 3-4 Sam linebacker position in their package. McCullough played as a nickel in their spring game in alignments unbecoming of a 6-foot-5, 225 pound downhill athlete.
Whether Oklahoma can utilize him this season to rebuild a bad defense and how they might do so are important questions for their upcoming season. He has undeniable playmaking talent attacking the backfield as a pass rusher, but he’s too small to play defensive end and needs to learn a position from which to blitz.
So…
Ian Boyd: Coach, what’s the best role to make the most of Dasan McCullough’s skill set?
Brent Venables: Yeah, I mean, we’re playing him at linebacker right now and he’s looked good.
You know I recruited him for a year while I was at Clemson and feel strongly about where he’s at and to me wherever he this year, a year from now he’ll be in an even more enhanced role. The worst thing we can do right now is to putting too much on a guy’s plate. Give ‘em what they can handle and then play ball from there.
Sometimes it has to do with what other guys can and can’t do around him. You know if we were…I think we’re better at rushing the passer right now than maybe what we were a year ago, I feel confident that we are, and so how can we best utilize all of them together? You know? What’s the best combination of all of them?
But he had a great, great offseason a year ago while he was a true freshman, some people say “ah he’s coming from Indiana, he must not be any good…” well then you obviously haven’t done your research. You have no idea what his recruitment was all about, coulda gone anywhere in the country, had offers from everybody, was committed to Ohio State, his dad got hired as the running back coach at Indiana from the Chiefs so he was committed there, his brother was gonna be a grad transfer as well. And then his dad got a job at Notre Dame and things have changed and so he put himself in the portal.
But it just tells me someone with a mic front of them doesn’t know really what they’re talking about. But Dasan’s got a tremendous skill set, he’s got great length, instincts, toughness, a year he was at Indiana he had a shoulder surgery so he missed a lot of development that happens for true freshmen. He’s a long, skinny safety outta high school that needed time in the weight room and he didn’t get that a year ago. He’s been able to get that since January and he’s made tremendous improvement in the weight room and his size and his strength and his power and I love where he’s at. Got a great mindset. And in the catapult system he’s always one of the top guys from a game rep, output, and his speed and his explosiveness. He’s wide open, he strains, he values what it means to strain, he’s shown competitive toughness, and again humility too. I love his humility, he’s a great teammate so far, he’s wanting to learn from other people. He’s made us better at linebacker.
So what does all that mean? I think know, from years of parsing offseason talk and then seeing what played out in reality across multiple programs. I’ll try and offer y’all some of my rules for understanding either coachspeak OR the insider practice reports you get from the media.
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