Three interesting things came from Mack Brown’s spring game presser.
I can’t imagine any coach in the country being more accessible to the media. In the off-season, during the pandemic, Brown still held Zoom press conferences regularly to keep us informed.
These virtual meetings are Brown at his rat-tat-tat best. He opens with an overview statement of Carolina football, delighting those fanatics who know all the names. It is basically a fluid depth chart on which players are expected to help the team this coming season.
During the real time of spring practice, Brown lists new enrollees and red-shirt freshmen who show promise, reserves last season vying for starting spots and which starters are honing their crafts or not participating at all.
Given to occasional hyperbole, Brown had just witnessed his 12th spring practice and crowed that he had “never seen that kind of energy for 12 straight practices” in his now 40-plus years of coaching.
He said sophomore Jacolby Criswell and freshman Drake Maye will fight it out in summer training camp to determine who will back up Sam Howell at quarterback, with Criswell’s one season of experience giving him the current edge.
And in listing who will play in the Spring Game Saturday at 3:45, televised by the ACC Network, Brown said with a slight laugh that starting senior center Brian Anderson would miss it because of his brother’s wedding. An unavoidable conflict, Brown explained.
Finally, something a one-time high school football player could identify with!
I was once vying for a starting cornerback position that would be decided in the last scrimmage before our first game. Only my first cousin was being bar-mitzvahed that same Saturday, and my mother said I was going and no argument I could make would change that.
My coach was a big burly man named George Winkler, who snickered when I told him. The guy who got all the snaps that day obviously got to start. I was on the bench until early in the season when “Wink” put me in, and I made an open-field tackle against a kid named Warren Muir, who went on to play at Army and South Carolina.
Two years later, I was in college and Paul Dietzel’s Gamecocks came to Kenan Stadium with a star running back named, you guessed it, Warren Muir. “Hey,” I said to anyone who would listen up in the press box, “I tackled that guy in high school.”
More snickers, few takers.
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Featured image via ACC Media
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