You get the idea from Chad Morris that no matter what the weather, he’s going to wish it would get worse than what it is.
That’s a change.
With a multi-million dollar indoor workout facility, Morris uses it for warmup. Then he gets the team out into the elements, no matter what they are.
That, folks, is old school.
To me that’s something that’s been missing in college athletics, but then again I came up in an era where that was the normal way coaches did things.
In spring practice when it was cold and rainy, Morris said he wished it was colder and the rain coming down harder. When it was hot starting fall practice he wanted it hotter.
The little fit he threw early in Monday’s practice didn’t appear to surprise the players and Morris might have been waiting for it.
“I had to push a little yesterday, but that’s okay,” Morris told the media Tuesday. “That’s to be expected.”
We suspected he was counting on it. I’ve had many Hall of Fame coaches tell me for 40 years their little fits in practice are close to being orchestrated. The truth is they’ve planned it and it’s part of the psychology all winning football coaches use in a manner professional psychiatrists admire.
“You can tell a lot about a football team by how they respond,” he said Tuesday. “Yesterday, the energy was very low and it was evident when they came out of the locker room.”
As he said, he was expecting it.
“I was waiting on that day to come,” Morris said. “I didn’t know when it was going to be here, but it showed up yesterday and it was evident. It was evident when they came out of the locker room.”
The guess here is he knew fairly quickly the time had come.
“That’s not our style,” he said. “That’s not what we’re about. We challenged them really hard yesterday.”
It’s a good thing they picked it up or they might have been on that practice field until the lights came on. It was not uncommon for old-school coaches years ago. They simply stopped practice, went back to warming up and starting it all over again, regardless of the period things dropped off.
“We were going to get our 22 periods of work in,” Morris said. “Now that might have taken us six hours to get it in, but we were going to get it in regardless. My message was you either push or I will.”
Morris got the response he was wanting.
“They responded well today and I was excited about that,” he said Tuesday. “Had much better energy today. That was good to see. We’re obviously making some progress, but we’ve still gotta keep pushing. We’ve got a long way to go.”
That’s because things change dramatically next week. The coaches’ contact will be restricted again.
“This is essentially the last week of camp before we break and get into school mode next week,” Morris said. “We’ve still got a lot of work today between now and our scrimmage on Saturday.”
Remember, I don’t think Morris’ “long way to go” is a reference to just breaking even in wins and losses. He’s talking about being ready to compete for championships. He told us that was the goal in his very first press conference back in December when he was hired.
“The guys are moving in the right direction,” he said. “I’ve been pleased with the progress of some of our young guys.”
But he’s still dancing all around the question of who the quarterback is going to be on this team.
That’s the biggest question Razorback fans always have.
And Morris isn’t giving up anything, citing positives for all of them on Tuesday and even throwing walk-on Jack Lindsey into the mix and why he was held back in Saturday’s scrimmage.
“No separation,” he said when asked if anyone was stepping up after Saturday’s scrimmage.
In that scrimmage, freshmen Connor Noland, John Stephen Jones and redshirt freshman Daulton Hyatt were full live contact. Ty Storey, Cole Kelley and Lindsey were not.
Lindsey was held back not necessarily for the quarterback battle, which is rather congested right now.
“He’s an older guy,” Morris said Tuesday. “Obviously, he’s holding for us (on kick placements) and he was going to be in some live field goal situations, but as far as putting him back there at quarterback and making him live, he’s an older guy that understands the offense and with him being our starting holder we just didn’t want to take a chance on him.”
Morris stressed again his offense is a two-back, run-oriented offense that will take shots down the field. That two-back set he refers to is just about always a quarterback and running back.
The knee-jerk reaction when he was hired was that his offense would be flinging it around like during the Bobby Petrino days of 2010-11.
Nope.
With five running backs he likes and a scheme that creates running lanes, you get the idea Morris is going to be running the ball a lot more than people think. He wants to have a lot of plays, but he wants it equally divided between run and pass.
“It’s who we are,” Morris said. “We’re going to run the football.”
Like we’ve said, he’s more of an old-school football coach than maybe Arkansas has seen in at least a decade. In the way he handles players maybe go back a couple of more decades.
You see that in the way he embraces bad weather.
“Any time you can put them in those type of situations and conditions and see how they respond, that’s what it’s about,” he said of the rain that was heavy at times. “You couldn’t have scripted a better day today.”
Right now rain is in the forecast through Monday next week with the exception of Thursday.
He may get some more chances to work in wet weather.
And, as always, he’ll probably wish it would rain harder.
