I’ll try to put the link in here, I have varying degrees of success with that. But anyway just found a YouTube from HTL where JJ said in Ford’s practices “If you dressed out you got hit“ ..all the way to Thursday on game week.
No surprise to anyone that remembers the Ford era. The team always looked dead legged on Saturday, like they were glued to the ground. Especially the defense. I noticed it a lot and I know I wasn’t the only one. Broyles said he’d never seen as much hitting during the week in season, and he came from no face mask era.
Lately we have had coaches that went too far the other way. Looked like our teams the last few years were used to no contact football and wanted no part of it come Saturday. The first thing Pitt said to his team was “the no contact practices are over”. Not sure if that’s one of the things that won them over but it seemed to be well received news. Any good football player knows you gotta have some. Not as much as Ford but he was pretty unique in his approach on it. I think if he’d have changed that part of his routine he may well have been here longer.
Link attempt:
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