With the hype around Tennessee football for 2016, it can be hard to stay focused. Butch Jones’s quotes Tuesday hinted the Volunteers are struggling with it.
Your team just finished its best season in seven years, and you’re hungry for more. Knowing that everybody is going to be back for next year, you start to buy into the offseason hype surrounding the program.
Related Story: Tennessee Football 3/29 Spring Practice Report: Butch Jones Not Happy
What it, all of a sudden, that hype starts to knock down your sense of urgency, and you start to feel yourself too much? Could that be happening to Tennessee football?
On Tuesday, Butch Jones said for the first time all spring that he did not like his team’s physical and mental approach. That may just be a fluke instead of a trend given the fact that he never said anything about the team before Tuesday. But perhaps there is something deeper to his comments.
After all, Tennessee is running a very thin roster this spring due to minor injuries to lots of players, and Joshua Dobbs wasn’t even there Tuesday because he had to accept the award. Maybe, as a result, the players are not remaining as focused as they should be for these practices.
That’s a dangerous thing to have happen.
All the talk about teams who have won a lot getting complacent is true, and that’s what makes it hard to repeat. But it is just as difficult to learn how to deal with expectations and the pressures of winning big when you’ve never done it before. Those in Knoxville, fans and media alike, have forgotten about those expectations. The players on the team have never experienced them.
That makes it incredibly hard to stay focused with football season more than five months away and when you’re practicing with barely half your roster. Add in all the distractions that went through the Tennessee football program earlier this year, and it’s easy to see why there can be a lack of focus midway through spring practice.
But it can’t happen.
You think Nick Saban allows Alabama to lose focus? You think other good SEC teams are taking it slow this spring? Of course not. Every rep counts, and the veterans have got to continue to get better unless they want to get beat out by freshmen.
Tennessee is learning a new defensive scheme under Bob Shoop while opening up their offense more under Mike DeBord at the same time. Even without Dobbs, every one of these 15 spring practices has to count.
It’s also on the coaches to make sure the players stay focused, and to Butch Jones’s credit, he appears to be working hard to do just that. Jones has not been complacent and was openly not happy with his team’s approach Tuesday.
If anybody can get that lack of focus corrected, it’s him.
More volunteers: Tennessee Men's Basketball: 5 Times the Vols Blew a Chance to Reach the Final Four
But Tuesday’s practice has to be a mishap. It can’t become a trend for the players, or that mental weakness will carry into preseason practices and the start of the regular season. They have to take every snap and every drill as seriously as possible.