There are 33 days between Indiana's regular season finale against Purdue and the Gator Bowl on Jan. 2 in Jacksonville. Indiana head coach Tom Allen discussed how he plans to manage the team's time to maximize performance and travel before Indiana's first ever Florida bowl game.
As the regular football season progresses, it’s easy to get into a routine on a week-by-week basis before the end of the season is suddenly part of the present rather than the future. That can be especially true with the word of the week and the-next-game-is-the-most-important-game methods Tom Allen uses from game to game.
But now that the regular season has concluded and the next game is the Gator Bowl on Jan. 2, Allen has removed the blinders that he applied to his young team to keep it focused during its historic 2019 season and made an attempt to put the game in perspective for a team that hopes to change the course of the Indiana program.
“Just talking with them, even this morning as we had our practice and team meetings, just about the opportunity that this creates for our program,” Allen said Friday after Indiana had its first bowl practice. “And just really congratulating the seniors and their leadership in leading this season and allowing us to be awarded with an opportunity to go and play in a bowl game of this stature and this location.”
Allen made the trip to TIAA Bank Field, the home of the Gator Bowl and the Jacksonville Jaguars, last Wednesday while he was on the recruiting trail. He noted the natural grass field, the intent to provide a true postseason experience for both teams, the pride around the city and that Gator Bowl CEO Rick Catlett expects a sellout of the 67,000-plus capacity stadium on Jan. 2.
He brought that anticipation back to Bloomington on Friday to assist in motivating his players back into practice after some time off. The Hoosiers have three practices scheduled from Friday to Sunday before getting time off for finals. The first three days, as Whop Philyor and Nick Westbrook noted on Saturday, are getting back to the fundamentals, working against each other to get back into football mode.
Allen said the first three practices are geared toward younger players, not just the younger players that work in the ones and twos but the even more inexperienced players who haven’t seen much game time, getting them more productive reps and creating a pre-spring environment. Eventually, there will be some early enrollees, such as Carmel linebacker Ty Wise, who will join the Hoosiers at practice as well, though Wise and others won’t likely get into pads but will learn the terminology used around practices and get an idea of how practices are run.
Tennessee preparations don’t begin until the next burst of three practices, which begin mid-week after finals, to avoid the stale feeling that comes with preparing for one opponent too long. After a day off, Indiana gets back to practice for another three days, a stretch that ends on Christmas Eve morning. The Hoosiers have some time off until they meet in Jacksonville on Dec. 28. The Hoosiers will likely practice at a high school venue while they’re in Jacksonville, something with a good surface, probably similar to the natural grass TIAA Bank Field uses.
“The biggest thing is a bowl that is this late, how do you manage the time?” Allen said Friday. “These last two weeks have been huge for us to be able to kind of learn from some things the way I liked it done in the past.”
The two weeks that Indiana had off from the Purdue game until Friday’s first bowl practice weren’t completely away from football – maybe “a couple days of that,” Allen said about practice. Allen and the training staff worked with keeping the players in shape with five individual workouts during that time off but emphasized time off after a long season.
Even Allen himself has watched “very little” film on Tennessee to this point, as he and the staff have been split up while pushing hard in recruiting across the country. After a visit to Arizona four-star defensive end Jason Harris on Thursday, Allen and his staff didn’t get back to Indiana until “the wee hours” of Friday morning. That’s when they got most of their film watch in.
But before the Hoosiers get deep into Tennessee work, they’re finishing out tackling drills and special teams work in John Mellencamp Pavilion.
“it's a long process you go through,” Allen said. “You don't like to start too soon on your opponent. It gets a little stale if you do. So we're going to be focusing at this point trying to just get better, just get better as a football team and the things that we know we have to get better at from a fundamental technique perspective moving forward.”
Once Indiana gets into Jacksonville on Dec. 28, it will take some time to visit the Indianapolis Colts and support the in-state NFL team while the Colts play the Jacksonville Jaguars at TIAA Bank Field on Dec. 29 – the only game scheduled to play in TIAA Bank Field between now and the Gator Bowl.
“They will have only one more game, which is against the Colts, between now and when we play, so barring a rain game, it should be in really good shape.”
----
• Talk about it inside The Hoops Forum or The Football Forum
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Follow us on Twitter: @IndianaRivals
• Like us on Facebook.
