If you don’t believe college football coaches will go to any length for a motivational ploy, head to a Virginia practice this spring. There you’ll see Cavaliers players running around the field without numbers on their backs or helmets, because in the words of new coach Bronco Mendenhall, “What better way to hold players accountable than have them earn everything they get, including what they wear.”
Instead of just letting veterans keep their numbers and distributing unused digits to new players, Mendenhall has devised a multi-step selection process to motivate his guys to work hard in training camp. Via the Daily Progress, in Charlottesville:
“If you start from the beginning of the offseason program and you take the body of work from the offseason program through spring practice, through the summer and through fall camp,” Mendenhall said, “that will then determine the order in which a player can choose his number.
“So the team will vote on who gets first pick and he can choose any number he’d like. It’ll work sequentially down.”
Mendenhall “anticipates” significant numeral changes from last season.
“There’s a great chance that not everyone will have the same numbers,” Mendenhall said, “in fact very few might. I’m not choosing that vote. The players are choosing that by the amount of work they’ve chosen to invest under the observation of their teammates.”
Mendenhall knows how to hit players where it hurts. Athletes put their numbers in their Twitter handles, tattoo them on their bodies, and give jerseys with them to their family members. No one wants to wear No. 24 his whole career then switch to lame No. 29 because he didn’t run hard enough in some wind sprints in March. So maybe this could work!
Then again, collusion is going to be rampant come jersey-number draft time, and it would take a lot of guts for a hard-working freshman to snag a senior’s digits. This could be a lot of trouble just for the sake of a cheesy object lesson:
“To be able to play for this school and this program,” Mendenhall said, “it ought to be something they cherish. I don’t intend to skip over the foundational elements of really driving that point home.”
There is one key aspect of this Mendenhall hasn’t seemed to address: If the players aren’t wearing numbers, won’t coaches struggle to tell them apart?
