While 12 of the 14 teams in the SEC have a bowl game to prepare for, right now players are in the thick of finals.
During finals week, we didn’t practice at all. Finals week is dead week. We wouldn’t be completely off of everything — we worked out during some point of the day — but that was it.
After finals week, we’d get right back into football mode. While every other student is back home or vacationing for Christmas break, we’d have 6 a.m. workouts, breakfast, meetings, practice, and more meetings.
We typically held one week of practice before coach Steve Spurrier let us go home for the break. During that week, practice was very relaxed. The schedule was an all-day type deal, but the actual practices weren’t tough or long. Coach would give a lot of the backups and younger guys a bunch of reps and let the veterans and starters get their work in early and then cheer on the backups for the duration of those practices.
The atmosphere was great and that week of practice was usually the most fun. We had always just gotten finished beating up on Clemson, so that may have had something to do with it, but I do think that we would’ve had calmer practices regardless.
We would watch a ton of tape. I mean a ton. We’d probably watch every game from the whole year, and the offensive guys would get yelled at for doing something wrong for the second time. That was the worst part. Looking back, that’s pretty funny because all of us would be like, “Coach, we’ve had this conversation before. You’ve already screamed at me about this exact play two months ago.”
Quarterbacks coach G.A. Mangus always got a kick out of those meetings too because he said Coach Spurrier did that same thing when he was at Florida.
Coach Spurrier was in a pretty good mood up until we had to watch a game tape from earlier in the year and I messed up a play. For the most part, the practices were high energy and fun for everyone. We were also very appreciative of Coach Spurrier for giving us time to go home and spend Christmas with our families for a few days. He was always cognizant of that and we as players were very thankful.
The Man. The Myth. The Legend.
