With just a few days of spring practice remaining, head coach Mack Brown stopped by with the media on Wednesday and one of the main things that he did was discuss the decision to not have this Saturday’s spring game televised.
The decision to have last Saturday spring practice televised and not have the team’s spring game available on television or stream is something that Brown confirmed was the school’s decision, not the network’s decision. “We made a decision with the ACC Network that we didn’t want the spring game on TV because we’re looking at a lot of different things. And we felt like we could highlight our players, especially in an NIL world right now, you can have Kaimon Rucker interviewing on TV, you can have J.J. Jones, you can really celebrate your program easier in some ways if you have a highlighted all-access rather than just a game.”
This is an interesting strategy from Brown, especially in this era of the sport where visibility is so important in the recruiting and the transfer portal because of it value to NIL. The good news, though, is that this will allow for the day to be more like a traditional spring game, something we haven’t really seen in a few years.
After last year’s spring game being thud only, the format will be 15-20 thud plays to get the limited players some snaps before they will go 40-60 plays of full contact where Brown says the staff will “turn them loose”. That will be the case for everything but special teams which simply don’t have the depth that the rest of the roster does to handle going through a full contact scrimmage on Saturday. With a decent amount of starters on the shelf that the staff may want to use on special teams and only one punter on the entire depth chart in the spring, it makes sense why they won’t use the special teams unit outside of the placekicking group.
Even though we won’t see the special teams unit at full capacity, everything else will resemble an actual game, something we haven’t seen the last couple of years. This should make for an exciting and informative day for fans in attendance on Saturday.