Inside football two-a-days

It’s an odd feeling walking into the still-new North End Zone complex of Memorial Stadium ahead of the sun peaking over the east end of IU’s campus.

The parking lots sit virtually empty, the field completely darkened, and the overall grogginess of answering the early morning alarm clock is very much still present.

The Indiana Daily Student was invited to take part in a special, now two-year-old tradition in which IU Athletics Department officials invite a handful of media members to experience — with virtually no boundaries — an entire day of preseason camp for the upcoming IU football season. Although the team began a regular practice Thursday, the preseason camp filled much of the players’ August schedules.

Our only directions were that we couldn’t report direct quotes or discuss specific plays. Access included position meetings, full range of the field for practice (normally a boundary is in place) and coaches meetings. It was 13 hours, essentially, of one the closest looks at a Big Ten football program available.

But first, it was breakfast time.

Players slowly filled the Hoosier Room beneath Memorial Stadium just after 7 a.m. Aug. 18 to find quite the array of steaming eggs, bacon, sausage and other traditional hot breakfast fare. After signing in at the door, players would stake their territory at a table — or make a beeline for one of two Belgian waffle makers. A large projector screen and several televisions showed SportsCenter as the room steadily amplified in conversational volume.

As they finished their meals, players left the dining room for a myriad of purposes — whether that was to hit the training room to get ankles taped or to have other minor nicks and dings attended to or to head to their position meeting room early.

Some players took advantage of the spare time between breakfast and their 8 a.m. position meetings — both are held in separate rooms equipped with a computer station, video projector and a dry erase board — to grab a few important minutes of shut-eye. We were permitted to choose which meetings we sat in, and for the first two of three that day, I hung around with the quarterbacks.

The meeting started right on time once IU offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Matt Canada took his seat behind the computer station. The first order of business seemed all too natural — some quick chatter about Brett Favre’s pending return to the Minnesota Vikings.

Canada soon steered the meeting to the business of the day, which included diagramming some new routes before having his five quarterbacks draw plays on the dry erase board. It’s a process that as Canada explained, makes remembering the glut of offensive play calls easier than his simply standing and lecturing.

Before the meeting wrapped, Canada went over what his players could expect from the different drills in the day’s first practice. Such communication has a drastic effect on the efficiency of practice, because players know what to expect.

The practice schedule isn’t one that seemed to change much — though the specific drills each position went through changed from session to session. The same can be said for special teams and full-time drills. For example, there was always special teams work at some point — though that could mean kickoff return is the focus during one practice, and punt formation the next.

By 11:30 a.m., the first practice wrapped, and it was somewhat of a break time for the players. They got to grab a lunch with a wide variety of options before taking a few hours’ break. Some chose to relax and re-energize, others used the training room for ice baths or other treatment and many took time to watch film by themselves.

Before the players reported again to the day’s second position meetings at 3 p.m., the offensive and defensive staffs took an opportunity to watch the morning’s practice film from multiple angles. In the offensive coaches’ meeting, coaches discussed the obvious of what went right and what needed to be fixed.

Afterwards, coach Bill Lynch joined the entire coaching staff together to discuss administrative details and the day’s second practice schedule.

Each drill was laid into a specific timetable, and though Lynch certainly had control of the room, he was more than willing to make some adjustments based on requests from the position coaches.

When the players returned to their position meetings, they were briefed on the practice schedule and — in the case of the quarterbacks — watched the first practice’s film of seven-on-seven and full team drills. In the QB room, Canada again had the players draw plays on the board, but in a slightly different fashion: instead of simply drawing a play, he wanted them to make a call for what they would run in different third down scenarios.

Practice went much the same as it did during the morning, but the players had lost the shorts and gone into full-pad mode for a half-hour scrimmage.

By 6:45 p.m., the team was back at the dinner table with hours of work still to go. The final position meeting of the day to cover the second practice film was yet to come, as well as a full team meeting.

The single day of a preseason camp, more than anything, screams that football is not just about who can hit whom the hardest. Indeed, with as many hours off the field as on it, the cerebral part of the sport is just as valuable.