With the NCAA Basketball Tournament being long canceled, Little 500 canceled and passed and the spring seasons – which would be approaching their home stretches as the 2020 commencement festivities concluded in Bloomington – Indiana Athletics fans have one of few events marked on their calendars: Indiana Football’s opening game against Wisconsin on Sept. 4.
But there are a number of hurdles to clear before that game can take place, with no guarantee that there even will be a football season – or at least, a football season as college football fans have come to know them – in 2020, due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
In determining somewhat of a deadline for when Big Ten coaches feel comfortable returning to play, Indiana head coach Tom Allen said on his radio show Thursday night that the conference’s coaches have had several virtual meetings throughout the dead period in an effort to identify how much time would be needed to prepare in the summer before officially kicking off the season.
“We kind of came up with a model and decided six weeks is really kind of the minimum,” Allen said. “If you had to, you could probably do it in a month. It’d be hard and there would be consequences probably, physically.”
Allen, and new strength and conditioning coach Aaron Wellman, made their appearances on the special offseason edition of Inside IU Football, which typically airs weekly during the season, one day before Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb announced a five-stage plan in hopes to reopen the state by July 4 – roughly eight weeks before the Wisconsin game.
While every state will have its own plan, since certain areas are hit harder than others in terms of COVID-19 outbreaks, conference commissioners famously told Vice President Mike Pence that there would be no college football unless students can attend classes on campus in the fall. Indiana President Michael McRobbie released a statement to University faculty, staff and students that laid out a number of scenarios for what the fall semester could look like, hinting at the likeliness of a “hybrid” approach, including both in-person and virtual courses.
While many different levels are working at different paces, the odds of a typical college football season are still unknown, even in steps of clarity. But until Wellman, Allen and the rest of the Indiana Football staff are told there is no college football season, Wellman said, they will continue to prepare their team as if kickoff is Sept 4.
That involves getting their bodies prepared.
“Ideally, what I’d love to be able to do is have that six-week period to get the team ready, because that’s more of a practice mindset – meetings and walk-throughs,” Allen said. “We have a whole progression for that. But you really want to have one solid month before that for some good, hard running so guys can get their legs under them and get their ligaments in shape, so you don’t have injuries during the season.”
That’s the primary focus for Allen and his staff during this time of irregularity – avoiding injuries in the fall. Typically, at this point in the college football calendar, the coaching staff is on the recruiting trail, evaluating recruits in camps or at high school workouts, scouting and collecting information on potential targets. For example, it was during this evaluation period during the 2019 cycle that the Indiana staff discovered freshman tackle Matt Bedford at a Memphis camp.
While coaches are on the road, players are left with the strength and conditioning staff as they begin to enter fall camp mode. Allen stressed Thursday that teams need to train their players in June and get them on campus in July to stay on pace for a healthy season. Wellman just sent a three-week workout regimen to Indiana’s players, adjusted, obviously, for the equipment they have at their homes. Schools cannot send equipment to players due to NCAA regulations.
Wellman, who has met the players he’s training one time in person before social distancing efforts dispersed them back across the country, has been working with his staff and the players individually to evaluate what each of them needs to reach their goals – goals that were already in place before facilities and gyms, both public and private, began to close. He said his staff sent 10-12 hours worth of film to the players last week to create as thorough of environments as possible.
“We have to prepare the soft tissues,” Wellman said. “We have to build the robustness, the resiliency, really in the lower limbs. I know there’s talk about how much time you need, but the time we need depends on the time they’re putting in right now.”
The coaching staff has no control of the amount of time each player is putting into his workouts. Wellman mentioned Thursday the amount of trust that is needed in this specific scenario – not only between strength coaches and players, but between players and their teammates too.
Allen mentioned during a Zoom conference call with the media in April that the issue is “universal” in college football. No coaches know exactly where their players are at from an evaluation standpoint, something that has shifted from a typical step in the spring process to a luxury after only being able to move through four of 15 spring practices. Only one of those practices was in full pads.
“It's the physical part,” Allen said in the Zoom call about his concern for the spring. “With not being able to practice, not being able to get those reps. You can't replace those. There are 11 practices we did not get to have that we would've had. Those are going to have to be made up eventually, but not necessarily replaced. Just going to have to find ways to creatively fill in the gaps.”
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