I have been sitting here for the last few weeks looking forward to spring football in South Bend.
With the regime change there should be plenty to talk about over the next few weeks as we get a first look at how Brian Kelly will run things.
I am certain that I will watch even more five minute videos of bag drills than usual in a fruitless attempt to capture some nugget of enlightenment. If you catch me here claiming that Armando Allen is going to run for 1500 yards this fall based on some bag bag drill video I saw feel free to snap me back to reality.
And therein lies the rub.
Extrapolating any real info out of spring football requires a fair amount of digging and a lot of reading between the lines. For the most part depth chart updates and interviews with players and coaches are pretty much all you have to go on.
The pay sites will have some factoids about so and so coming out of his breaks better etc. but in reality how much stock can you put in all of that? Then you cap it off with an intrasquad scrimmage that doesn't really tell you much. Is the DL better or the OL worse? Hard to say. The upside is that it is your team, they have pads on and you can watch it on the internet 100 times in a row if you want to. That aspect of it is actually pretty cool.
So this evening I did a quick lap around the internet to see what was going on and saw the gents over at We Are Notre Dame discussing a great idea from Dabo Swinney.
Play a real spring game. Dabo was talking about playing Georgia. That would be awesome, dust of Howard's Rock in April, bring the Bulldogs to town and air it on ESPN.
I'll watch it. I would be significantly more excited about spring football if teams capped it off with real scrimmages against anyone other than themselves. The Blue-Gold game is cool but watching the Irish mix it up against (pick any decent FBS team) would be way more interesting.