For most of its fall camp, Oregon held its practices earlier in the day. The start of practices during the first week of camp ranged anywhere from 8:05 a.m. to 2:35 p.m. But head coach Willie Taggart wants to keep his players sharp and ready for anything. That’s why week two of fall camp opened with a bit of a curveball: an evening practice with a 6:15 p.m. start time.
Players attended meetings, hit the weight room and studied film for most of the day before dawning pads and heading to the practice fields around 6:20 p.m.
“It was weird,” linebacker Troy Dye said. “It took us back to those high school days where you get those 7 o’clock practices where you have to wait after school in study hall and stuff like that.”
Taggart said that players should expect a constant changing of practice times to keep them ready for the odd game times that Saturday’s will bring this season.
“Throughout training camp, we’re moving practices all around,” Taggart said. “We don’t play at a certain time every Saturday, those times are a lot different. Sometimes we play at 3 o’clock, sometimes we play at 5, sometimes we play later on. So we try and move our practices around throughout training camp to make sure that we come out ready to play whenever that time is.”
When asked if he thinks this approach will help the team, Dye was unsure. This is, after all, the latest college practice that many of these players have experienced.
“I think it will,” Dye said. “This is the first time for us here as a team because everything last year was in the morning. So, hopefully, we’ll see and just try to build off it. But we’re all looking forward to practicing under the lights again. We haven’t done that since high school.”
As far as the overall content of practice, little was revealed in the 20-minute window that media gets to observe. Offensive players took the near field while the defense ran through drills on the far one.
The offensive line took the first hack at offensive drills as they pushed a sled up and down the field while rotating guys in.
Next, players broke out into specific position drills. Receivers, quarterbacks and running backs performed ball security drills first. Then, the receivers and quarterbacks separated to one end of the field to work on passing and route drills. Among them, Brenden Schooler, who appears to be working solely with the wide receivers now.
.@SchoolerBrenden working with the WRs pic.twitter.com/QSWgGzyViK
— Gus Morris (@JustGusMorris) August 9, 2017
Some deep action from QBs to the receivers including recently converted safety Brenden Schooler. pic.twitter.com/A0PFBsNLPn
— Jack Butler (@Butler917) August 9, 2017
While those drills went on, the offensive linemen were testing the sleds once again with more specific drills aimed at improving form. At the same time, the running backs were off to the side of the field, running through pylons and under tarps.
While these drills do carry value, it’s whats going on when the media is absent that holds the true importance. Taggart and his coaching staff find themselves a little over three weeks away from Oregon’s season opener and while progress is being made in learning new schemes and plays, it can’t be understated the difficulty of implementing a new game plan to a team with a majority of returners.
Taggart said at practice on Tuesday that he and his staff have been going over film from the first week of camp, trying to identify areas that aren’t up to their standards yet.
“We’re just going back over what we did last week,” Taggart said. “Especially with it being an early training camp week, we have the luxury of doing those things early and getting our guys to understand the basics first before we move to all the advanced level football.”
It is only week two of fall camp but once those basics are down, expect Oregon to really turn it up in practices with the season approaching fast.
Follow Gus Morris on Twitter @JustGusMorris