Starting at the end of July with conference media days, the media has access to college football coaches and players for about a month straight during fall camp. After a long practice on a field that’s 15 degrees hotter than the actual temperature, the last thing either the coaches or the players want to do is talk to the media.
And yet, that’s the drill.
That pattern is repeated at least 15 more times before school starts. So naturally, you hear a lot of clichés that are sometimes confused with coachspeak. The latter is more, “(Insert Week 1 FCS opponent) might be Division I-AA, but they’re tough. They beat (weak FBS opponent) a few years ago, and we take them seriously.”
(On second thought ... coachspeak and clichés might actually be the same thing.)
There have been quite a few first-year head coaches around the Triangle in the last few years, and in the ACC in general. So the league's media has become well-versed in the first-year coaching clichés, spoken by both the coach and the players: “Changing the culture.” And then of course, there’s “we’re learning a whole new system” and “our guys are still getting the terminology down."
But there are plenty of clichés that can apply to any team, no matter how long the coach has been there.
And you have to learn to love them, because they're not going away:
This is mostly from the players. And there is no exception to this rule.
In nearly a decade of doing this, I have never heard a player say anything except the most positive possible things about the new strength and conditioning coach. He’s always amazing and he’s getting everyone on the team into the best shape of their lives, pushing them to limits they never thought possible. The enthusiasm seems so real. But when they change strength and conditioning coaches the process repeats itself. Again and again.
An extension of this, and something that happens every year, is:
Camp Wonder Guy is almost always athletic, but he hasn’t quite put it all together. He’s dominating his teammates in camp. Don’t fall for Camp Wonder Guy.
There’s about a 50/50 chance that Camp Wonder Guy will actually help your team this year.
This is probably the most common cliché out there.
It speaks for itself.
And yes, it's also used frequently during the season.
This is more of an early quote in fall camp, but, generally speaking, if a reporter is trying to do a story about a team’s Week 1 opponent, a coach won’t give you much until it becomes game week for said opponent. Especially if that opponent is high-profile.
Also, forget about trying to do stories about anyone the team faces AFTER Week 1.
In the ACC, this is true of a team that’s going to face Georgia Tech especially. It’s become pretty common to hear that, either during Georgia Tech game week or even during camp.
Thanks a lot, Paul Johnson and your tricky triple-option offense. You win again.
Yes, this is a misdirect to avoid answering a depth chart question. But the whole “competition” thing is a common camp convention. GOTTA HAVE COMPETITION AT EVERY POSITION. YOU DON’T GET BETTER WITHOUT COMPETITION.
Great! Most of the time, the media isn’t allowed to watch practice so we were hoping YOU might have a better idea of whether or not Player X could do it on game day.
Well, technically, that’s not true.
Third-teamers are two ankles away.
Also, an extension of this -- and something that often prefaces it -- is “We had a feisty practice today.” That usually means there was a fight or a scuffle of some sort.
Special teams is often something that gets brought up when coaches are asked about how both the offense and the defense are coming along, and the coach gets tired of it and decides he’s going to change the subject.
It’s also his way of showing that even though he has a ton of assistant coaches, he is in tune with ALL THREE areas of his team.
It’s usually a “yes, but...” situation -- an über-athletic, talented player who hasn’t quite gotten everything together mentally yet.
And on the flip side...
Translation: Player X is not very athletic.
Ah yes, take his game to another level. Whatever that means.
Usually, it means that Player X was a 4-star or 5-star recruit and hasn’t quite lived up to the billing yet. Or, Player X is the quarterback.
This is also known as the next step. Another level. Next step. Same thing. For some reason, you never hear “take the next step to another level."
It seems redundant, except that’s what steps are actually for -- going to another level.
Right. Never has any coach said, “We don’t want our defense to create turnovers.”
Similarly, no coach has ever said, “We’d like our offense to be a little more reckless with the football.”
Ah yes, adversity. This ever-so-ambiguous cliché could be anything from being sore or sick or tired to coming back from a large deficit in a game or a team suffering a rash of injuries midseason. And it’s most frequently used during the season.
Either way, if that word doesn’t come up at least once every two weeks, that’s a head coach who has learned a synonym for Adversity.
Another derivation is “we’ve got to play all 60 minutes.” Because if you play every snap in a game as hard as you can except for one, that's the one that loses you the game. Even though another common cliché is that one play doesn’t win or lose the game. PICK ONE!
This is almost always not true. There are teams out there that could execute as well as is humanly possible for every single play of a game ... and still get annihilated by, say, Alabama. But hey, at least that team was fundamentally sound!
