Spring game summaries
College football has finished spring practices and put on the exhibitory spring games. What did we learn?
This last weekend featured a round of spring games from the major programs across college football. It’s common for fans and writers of a respective team to mine the spring game for content and clues about the team, everyone else mostly ignores the game save for rival fans looking to dunk on mistakes or poor performances or national media looking for content.
It’s very easy to find something in a spring game to lead you to believe the team will be awesome or terrible, after all the full roster tends to see the field and there’s a lot of zero-sum game results.
For myself, I like the spring games and do find them fairly instructive even though you have to wade through a ton of context. Teams don’t really practice and run plays in a spring game that aren’t fundamental to what the team is doing. The results are something you can toss out, but the process that’s going into the results is usually worth a nice look. Did the quarterback complete a bomb to an open receiver? That may or may not matter, who was he facing? Did the coverage bust? There’s a lot of reasons the big play is just a one-off without much predictive value.
But, “can the secondary trade off routes or leverage runs from base defenses?” That’s pretty valuable.
I looked around at a few spring games around the country to see what I could glean and will now share some of those notes with you fine people.
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