Ready or not, Arizona football is hitting the closing stretch of preseason camp and the team will be on the ground in Hawai’i two weeks from today.
The Wildcats have turned in two full weeks of practice to date and have one more to go before “game week” arrives. However, the next couple days will be critical to solidifying the two-deep and identifying the travel roster for the Hawai’i game on Aug. 24.
Below are a few important items to consider as Arizona preps for the nearly 3,000 mile trip.
1. A Break From Football
The team was given Thursday off from practice, but it was not a day without purpose. In the morning, the Wildcats gathered to listen to guest speaker Chris Herren, who is renowned for his motivational speeches on overcoming adversity and never giving up on dreams. Herren himself saw his basketball career affected by substance, but now, sober for more than a decade, has become an inspirational figure.
By far the best team conversation about life that I have been lucky enough to witness in twenty years! @HerrenTalks | 🅰️ #BuildingTheA https://t.co/LwsPi4j8gi— Dennis Polian (@DPintheDesert) August 8, 2019
Herren’s guest appearance is one of numerous others that head coach Kevin Sumlin and his staff have scheduled throughout the offseason touching on a wide range of real and influential topics that can affect the young men in the football program. This is part of the year-round culture and development of the total student-athlete that often goes unnoticed to the outside world. A phrase I heard often around the program was “four years for the next 40 years” in terms of preparing the student-athletes for life.
The afternoon portion of the Wildcats’ day on Thursday would have been filled with rest, recovery and a meal. Position meetings, film review and possibly light walk-thru, especially for special teams units, would wind things down Thursday evening.
2. Time to Shine
When the Wildcats return to the practice field Friday, I would expect it to be short and light from a physical standpoint. However, these shorter practices still demand intensity and critical focus for special teams and/or game-like situations to rehearse alignments, assignments and communication.
Come Saturday, the full pads will go on and the team will hold what could be its final true scrimmage of preseason camp. Remember, the Cats will be two weeks away from taking the field at Hawai’i, so time is running out for wholesale auditions.
This scrimmage will be a critical one for many players vying to make the two-deep and travel roster. Knowing assignments, playing fast and communicating with teammates and coaches is essential at this stage. Players that have not progressed since last Saturday’s scrimmage will drop down the depth chart and likely land on scout teams. At the same time, any players on the fringe certainly have an opportunity to assert themselves and prove to coaches they are ready for the bigger stage.
3. Paring Down the Two-Deep/Travel Roster
As Saturday’s scrimmage comes and goes, Arizona’s coaches will watch the film, make their own individual position evaluations. Then, the staff will come together to begin paring down the depth chart and eventual travel roster.
When it comes to talking about a depth chart, the term seems to mean different things to coaches than it does to fans. Fans want to know who is first string here, second string there and so on, but coaches look at it from an overall depth standpoint. For a coordinator, the depth chart is more of an availability pool to draw from when adjusting to an injury at a particular position than it is to say Player B will always go in for Player A. Most players are cross-trained at multiple positions as they develop through their careers, which helps get the best talent on the field at all times. As I have mentioned in a handful of my previous posts (Five Key Questions), I fully expect to see Arizona rotate and play a lot of players early in the season.
Still, coaches will soon have to make some decisions to narrow down their pool. There is no roster limit for non-conference road games, but the Pac-12 Conference has a travel limit of 70 for league contests. I’d expect Arizona to maintain that travel limit of 70 for the trip to Hawai’i, just as it did for the contest at Houston last season.
Competition will certainly continue for a few of the last available travel spots, but by and large the two-deep for offense, defense and special teams will begin to take shape next week at practices. While media has been permitted to view portions of practice the last couple weeks and has reported some first and second team “lineups”, few positions have been settled.
Because the season opener is still two weeks away, there will continue to be fluctuation from first to second team units. That is natural competition that takes place all season long. But coaches will feel pretty good about the majority of their travel spots by the middle of next week.
Also next week, the structure of practices should begin to change significantly with game-specific preparation for Hawai’i. Those players not in the two-deep will slide over to scout team, learning and replicating the plays and schemes of the Warriors. A handful of younger players may go back and forth, but the purpose of practice will heavily shift from development to preparation.
4. Classes Can Wait (For Now)
One unique advantage the Wildcats have this season is they play a football game prior to the start of classes. As a semester school, Arizona almost always begins classes before it plays a game, sometimes starting the season the same week school starts. That can be a difficult acclimation for a team, especially freshmen (even early enrollees) that have never had to focus on the weekly buildup to gameday.
Arizona’s first day of classes this semester falls on Monday, Aug. 26, two days after the first game which is a special Week 0 date. And because a bye week follows, the Wildcats will enjoy a two-week break-in period for academic life before the rest of the schedule hits starting on Sept. 7 against Northern Arizona.
While it is only one game, it is a benefit for this year’s team to dedicate all of its preseason attention to the Hawai’i game with no academic responsibilities. This is something that schools on a quarter system often experience for the first three or four weeks of a season.
In the Pac-12, UCLA, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington operate on the quarter system. A few years ago, the LA Times attributed some of Jim Mora’s early-season successes at UCLA to the fact the Bruins had extra time to focus exclusively on football.
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