| FTBL NCAA Cap on Coaches' Time with Players

[laurajmoss]

"The NCAA mandates that we can spend only 20 hours a week with them during the season, and during the critical offseason strength and conditioning periods, those [supervised] hours go down to as little as eight hours a week. " -- Stanford's Harbaugh quoted in Sports Illustrated online

I guess this makes sense for in-season, because players have an academic workload that presumably comes first. But 8 hrs/week the entire offseason? Even summers when they are probably not in class?

Years ago when I was marathon training as a first-timer I was spending 8 hours/week pounding asphalt just to run a 4-hr time. I would assume, as this fellow Harbaugh goes on to suggest, that competitive college football players need to clock more than 8 hrs/week training to reach elite levels of fitness and performance.

Is perhaps this what Saban is getting at when he talks about "buying into his program"? That the players have to be self-motivated and show a considerable amount of initiative without someone looking over their shoulder to see if they're in the weight room?

link to referenced article: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/stewart_mandel/12/14/upsets/1.html

 

[Guest]

I'm one of those that believe practice/training time with coaches is to limited. It does have a lot to do with injuries occurring.

And the 8 hrs a week during the summer is ridiculous.
The best way to handle that is like Coach Fran put it to the guys when he first came. "Off-season workouts are not mandatory, but neither is playing time in the fall"

 

[Guest]

That is direct contact. Coaches talk to them on the phone and by texting...but yes the personal time is a bit on the short side.