Quoted: Fall Camp Practice #1

Below is a partial transcript of Indiana head football coach Tom Allen's Zoom press conference on Aug. 6, 2020.

Head Coach Tom Allen
Opening Statement…
ALLEN: Good morning, everyone. Feels weird not having you guys all in here, but I guess this is the new normal for what we got to do. We'll knock it out, here, just like we always would, but really excited to get back today. It was great to get back on the field with our team. We had a chance to have these walk-throughs the last several days, which was good leading up to fall camp, but it's nothing like getting out there where you have all your equipment at your disposal and just helmets on. A lot of good energy and effort. I loved the focus of our guys. I really felt like all those walk-through days that we just came off of, even though we didn't get the full amount of them because of having our team quarantined. It was still very, very evident that those reps and just all the organizational pieces with that allowed us to have a much crisper, sharper practice number one. So, really encouraged by that. Feel like that's something that helped us have a better day today. Really need to get the guys out there, getting them flying around, catching balls and tagging off at full speed, defensively pursuing the football. A lot of positive things. Really good energy. Love our team. Just got a lot of really hungry guys that really enjoy being around each other. That's probably been the biggest challenge of this whole time is just being apart. They really do enjoy being with each other and hanging out together. That's been something that's really, I think has been hard, hard these last several months. Really trying to do everything we can to protect our guys. The way we practice, the structure, the organization, the field use, keeping everybody spread out, doing a lot more small, smaller groups, more isolated, individual things as much as we can. Then at the same time when we do come together just trying to maximize our field space. Utilizing all the rules, protocols we have to follow for certain number of guys either in a room or on a field or in a facility and that makes it very challenging. But we've spent hours, hours and hours planning practice. We've had to scrap certain plans, had to redo plans. Just really been a very interesting set of weeks leading up to all of this. Feels great to be back and so we'll learn something more every single day to allow us to be more effective on the field. Helmets on when we practice tomorrow and we'll put pads on here day number three. Anybody's got questions, let's get started.

Q. On your message to the team with all the uncertainties still in the air including games…
ALLEN: Well, that's a great question because, yeah, it (2020 Big Ten schedule) came out yesterday morning. We were on a Big Ten call when they gave it to us. That was the first time I had seen it, so I was kind of going through real quickly trying to get it all written down. I knew I was eventually going to get a copy of it, but I was just trying to get it in my head about the flow of the season. I think the thing that sticks out to me is two things. Number one, emphasize the flexibility of the schedule. As you mentioned, there's a lot of uncertainty about it. You can say, "Yeah, we're playing this team on this certain date." We had a Zoom meeting last night with all our parents to just talk about the Big Ten's protocols that they just put out before fall camp and the season and everything that we're going to be doing. I just wanted to be able to get in front of them. We talked about, had a lot of questions about the season itself and just different things that pertained to that. Here's been the message and that was to our team today. We're going to focus on one thing and that's today. I can't control tomorrow. I never have been able to control tomorrow, but more than ever we have to focus on today. Yeah, we're going to have a plan but man, we had a lot of plans going into all this. Most of those plans have been scrapped. So, it's going to focus on the short term of today. We'll have a plan for tomorrow schedule-wise for sure, but we're not going to go much further than that. I challenge our players, we're going to control what we can control. We have no control whatsoever on what happens across this country, what happens other places, but we can control our mindset, the way that we attack every single day. Our one word for 2020 is "Relentless." So, we're going to relentlessly attack today and control the things that we can control, which is our focus, our effort and the way that we prepare. As the staff, it's keeping our players safe and it's getting them prepared. That's the message and it's focused on a daily focus of that and not try to go beyond it because if you do, you get into a lot of what-ifs and a lot of different scenarios that we probably waste a lot of energy trying to figure out right now. I know that's not always comforting to not know where you're going to be, what you're going to be doing at certain dates, but it's reality and I think we've all been through this long enough to know that that's kind of what we've gotten used to in some ways. From a schedule perspective, it's been put out there. That was good. It was good to know kind of even just the progression and the flow, but our job right now is to focus on today and get our team prepared.

Q. On the position changes…
ALLEN: Well as far as those two individuals (David Ellis and Gavin McCabe), still working David at running back because, like you said, the spring was cut short. We know what he can do at receiver. He's just one of those guys you want to get the ball to. Getting the reps at running back, I thought, was really important during spring and then allowing him to continue to develop in that area. You'll see him in both spots for sure and obviously on special teams as a return man. I feel like that that's something that we'll continue to utilize him both as a running back and as a receiver. Then in regards to Gavin McCabe, yes, he's full time on offense. Working hard. Getting bigger and stronger. Really excited about his growth there. Just needs reps. That was where he really needed the spring. It was unfortunate for him for sure at that position, but everybody else on the team, yeah, we made some positional moves within the defense and those have all pretty much stayed true to what we did during spring football. Once again there's a lot of versatility back there. You know, Jamar Johnson can play really all three safety positions and that's really important for us. Raheem Layne is at safety right now. We know he can play corner. That versatility and flexibility is going to be really, really important. Bryant Fitzgerald, same thing. He can play multiple positions in the secondary. That's going to be a big priority for us to maximize the flexibility of our guys skill sets and allow us to put the best guys on the field.

Q. On your biggest concerns between now and your first game…
ALLEN: Well I would just say, you talk about all the time when you're challenging your players about how you can't shape the game. What does that mean? That means you can't take shortcuts. You have to prepare a certain way to play. Well that means for getting ready to play your season and so the things that we've missed, you can't just speed that up and say "Okay, well we didn't get to do all this." You have to make adjustments. For me, the challenge is and the balance is how do you maximize reps but also do a really, really good job of paying attention to the bodies of your players. So, we started today. One huge blessing, I think, for us is the fact that we got Aaron Wellman. He's coming straight from the NFL. He was a part of a committee that studied the last five years of training camps and how you prevent injuries, how you get your teammate to peak performance during that time, how you maximize all those things. His expertise in that area has already been tremendously helpful and I'm going to really rely on him heavily to make sure because that's a big piece of getting your team physically ready to play. I think the mental piece, I feel good about that. You know one thing we were able to do in the time away with the Zoom meetings and I thought they were extremely effective in allowing our players to really maximize their knowledge of our systems. Offense, defense and special teams, especially offense and defense. They even did a lot of good work on special teams, especially later in that time period, but you can't speed up the physical part. So, I just think the physical preparation, getting our guys bodies right, the timing that you have lost by not having spring practices in the passing game, I think that's big. Weren't able to throw. I did not do 7-on-7s the entire summer. We usually have player practices all summer long. Did not have one of those. We're not allowed to. Those are the challenges, the timing that you have to have, the reps that you need, the balancing those reps with protecting your players and not having those nagging and frustrating soft tissue injuries that could often limit you. Being able to utilize the wisdom and the experience of Aaron Wellman from a physical perspective and matching that up with schematically helping our guys get the reps that they need to be ready to play, that's the biggest challenge.

Q. On COVID-19 potentially affecting redshirts and walk-ons usage…
ALLEN: From a physical perspective from the health part, it's the biggest challenge because you kind of touched on some key points. First of all, we've kind of got nearly good at the lingo of how you identify these different components, you know, from when a person tests positive. We have certain protocols for them. They get put in isolation, but then you have all those that are in close contact with them and then how the CDC defines that, how the NCAA defines that. Which, basically we follow the CDC. That is absolutely what we're going to do and then the contact tracing component when we try to figure out who did he have contact with. He as in the person who tested positive. Who did he have contact with that puts them at risk? So, then those individuals get put in a 14-day quarantine like you mentioned. And so, we've experienced that first hand in a very, very widespread way throughout the six weeks we were here in the summertime. So, how does that look during the season? That's kind of a million-dollar question. How did they, the local health group that decides that contact-tracing component once an individual tests positive, it's who does he also pull out because they were in close contact, whether that's a roommate or somebody you hung out with. That's been the issue. It's what has happened away from the facility. Things have not happened here and they try and go back and target where the contact occurred and it's been off campus. That was the fear from the very beginning. We feel really good about what we can do when they're with us. What do they do when they're not with us? That to me is now that you start practicing and you're tackling guys because all these things are going on and we weren't blocking anybody, we weren't tackling anybody. We still haven't done that. All the walk-throughs that we had at the end of the summer here were that. There was no physical contact. Even today's practice there's no tackling, there's no blocking yet. It's closer to that because you're getting your hands-on people now that we have helmets on, we're going at practice number one, but we still haven't tackled guys and still haven't had that so that's just a big challenge I think for every team right now. NFL's dealing with all of it. We're all dealing with it as a highly, high contact sport that football is. That's where everyone is trying to figure this all out. We don't have all the answers for that yet. We obviously will follow protocols and guidelines medically that CDC sets out and then the NCAA, floats down to the Big Ten and then we do everything we can do within the guidelines at the local level to be able to do a great job of keeping our guys safe? So, and I know that's kind of a long answer because it's not simple at all and we're trying to figure it out. We've never had this situation before. We're trying to go through and say, "How do you do, how do you play this sport?" It is going to affect the way we practice. There's going to be, I think, less tackling in practice. We've got to use sleds a lot. We've got to use dummies a lot. We got to do a lot of things that are going to help us. Those things that affect how we practice, I see us doing more walk-throughs. I see us doing less live-go's together. We're going to have to maximize those kinds of things to prepare our football team to be able to play and stay healthy throughout the season. But, once again, you got to balance that with getting your body ready to play Big Ten games, which is hard to do physically. That continues to be our objective and challenge and all that wrapped up into one to try to figure this all out.

Indiana University Athletics

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David Ellis

Bryant Fitzgerald

Jamar Johnson

Raheem Layne

Gavin McCabe

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