The bank thermometers reach for 97, 98, 99, 100. The walks from the office to the parking lot grow slower, sweatier. Sighs. Wiped brows. Into the car to blast the air conditioner. That’s most of us.
And then there are the Kansas University football players, winning big autumn games here in the relentless heat of summer. The term summer vacation doesn’t apply to college football players anymore. Now, they basically are full-time, year-round student-athletes.
Thanks to recent rules changes, even incoming freshmen attend summer school classes and partake in intense strength and conditioning exercises. Football coaches aren’t allowed to attend these sessions, which places even greater importance on the strength coach and his staff.
Chris Dawson sets the work-ethic bar high so that when Mark Mangino and staff take over, there will be no surprises. Players ever-so-gradually increase their strength, quickness and flexibility by sweating the summer away.
KU football players returned to campus the first week of June and have been at it ever since. The NCAA allows four weight-lifting sessions per week and four conditioning sessions. The latter involve position-specific agility drills, strength and speed drills, and plyometrics (leaping and bounding). “Optional” seven-on-seven passing drills are allowed two nights a week. Optional means the player has the option to attend, and the coach has the option to bump the player down the depth chart once word gets back (immediately) to the coach that a player missed one.
The strength staff is charged with motivating players who think they’re working their hardest to work a great deal harder. They do it without having the motivational carrot of playing time to dangle. The job is as difficult as it is important at a school such as Kansas. The harder a player pushes himself, the tougher he is, physically and mentally, on game day.
Mark Mangino has made subtle, gradual gains in recruiting. Some of the players he recruited when he first arrived at KU wouldn’t be offered scholarships now. Still, unlike a Texas, KU remains a developmental program first. Whereas Texas wins many games on the first Wednesday of February, signing day, KU wins them in the heat of June, July, and August.
The goal posts uprooted in October (Missouri) and November (Nebraska and Iowa State) began wobbling on long, hot summer days on practice fields and in the strength center.
Cornerback Anthony Webb is the only member of the incoming recruiting class rated a four-star prospect. He attended South Oak Cliff High in the Dallas area, the same school as sophomore receiver Dexton Fields, incoming freshman receiver Xavier Rambo, and basketball recruit Darrell Arthur. Maybe Webb will remain the star of the recruiting class. Maybe somebody else will bypass him.
The number of stars next to a player’s name isn’t the issue. How well the players develop matters more. So much of that takes place now, sweat bead by sweat bead. Nick Reid wasn’t recruited by all the superpowers coming out of high school. He arrived at Kansas as a quarterback, and left as the Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year. He didn’t do that by taking summer vacations.
