No two-a-days for Razorbacks good sign for fans

Arkansas head football coach Bret Bielema broke a little bit of news Monday in an ESPN appearance that said a lot about his Razorback football team and the coach himself.

Bielema said the Razorbacks would not have two-a-day practices during preseason workouts, which begin Aug. 6. No doubt there were more than few shouts of “Woo Pig” from the Hogs themselves when word filtered out to the players, whom Bielema said were unaware of the plan.

Now this isn’t big news. Years ago the NCAA mandated that two-a-day workouts had to be reduced to every other day, which is a far cry from the purgatory-type existence college players once labored under in preparation for the season.

While Bear Bryant’s Texas A&M “Junction Boys” — a great book if you’ve never read it — are the most famous survivors of two-a-days, every football player before the turn of the century has his own horror stories from the grueling workouts. Nothing made a football player yearn more for the start of classes than two-a-days, which mercifully ended when school began.

Two-a-days really are a relic in modern college football because players report for preseason practices in excellent shape. Originally two-a-days were intended to get players in shape “boot-camp style” for the onrushing season as much as honing and polishing actual play. Two-a-days became less necessary when players began to train year round on campus. Once the NCAA began to allow incoming freshmen paid tuition in the summer around a decade ago, two-a-days became even more obsolete. With player safety more on the thoughts and minds of administrators and coaches, it would not be surprising to see them regulated out of the college game in the near future.

Bielema said in his ESPN appearance that studies have shown for a few years that two-a-day practices in the heat of the Summer could be counterproductive to a team’s performance later in the season. If that is the case, why did Bielema wait until this season to drop the well-worn two-a-day format?

The answer, I’d guess, is that he has an experienced football team, which he anticipates needing less practice time to be primed for the season. His first two seasons, Bielema felt his Razorbacks squads could use as much practice as they could get before opening their seasons. He’d worry about the team wearing down later. This year with an experienced squad, he has the luxury of planning for later in the season rather than worrying if his squad will be ready for the Sept. 5 season opener against UTEP.

No doubt some of the Hogs’ newcomers will make an impact on the 2015 team, but in Bielema’s third season, he has a team that he knows and trusts on both sides of the football. That’s great news for Razorback fans.

Hearing that the Hogs are moving away from two-a-days reminds me of former Arkansas head coach Danny Ford, who conducted particularly tough two-a-day and sometimes three-a-day practices during his 1993-97 tenure on the hill. Ford, who was fired in 1989 after a storied tenure at Clemson that included at national title, had been out of coaching two and half years before he joined the staff of Arkansas interim head coach Joe Kines as a consultant in 1992. Athletics director Frank Broyles subsequently picked Ford to be the Hogs next head coach over Kines, who actually stayed on as Ford’s defensive coordinator for two seasons.

During the time Ford was out of coaching, the NCAA restricted the amount of on-the-field practice time for student-athletes. Ford lamented the good old days when a coach could practice a team until it got everything right. At Clemson, he worked inexperienced teams enough in preseason until they became experienced in practice. He rode his more experienced teams less rough.

One might wonder how a coach could be so successful at Clemson but not so much at Arkansas. Some of it was Arkansas’ transition to the Southeastern Conference, but I think a lot to do with Ford’s inability to adapt his coaching style to the changing landscape of college football.

If anything, Bielema has shown he is adaptable. He does have a tried-and-true belief in his football philosophy, but he is always looking for way to refine and improve the way he runs his football program whether its purchasing state-of-the-art overhead cameras to film practice or instituting a new preseason practice format to help his Hogs be more physically capable in October and November. Bielema may coach an old-school style of football, but he approaches the details in an innovative manner.

Bielema’s drive to stay on the cutting edge technology, nutrition, player development and practice theories should be great news to all Hog fans.