A week in the coaching life of Arizona State’s Todd Graham, Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez
Aug 29, 2015, 3:02 PM
It’s no secret that football coaches, particularly those coaching at the collegiate and professional level, keep some of the most exhausting work schedules around. Between practice, meetings with players and coaches, game-planning, recruiting, entertaining boosters and game days, a week in the life of a coach allows barely enough time to eat and sleep.
In other words, preparation and preparedness becomes paramount.
Such is the case for two of the Pac-12’s most recognizable faces among its coaching ranks in Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez and Arizona State’s Todd Graham.
An article by SB Nation writer Bill Connelly takes a deep dive into what exactly goes into a game week, featuring detailed commentary from Rodriguez, Graham and five other FBS coaches.
For Rodriguez, the advancement of technology has worked wonders in terms of optimizing the time available to coaches and players during a given week. The challenge, however, according to Rodriguez, is ensuring he and his coaching staff don’t put too much on their team’s plate.
“It’s so much easier now. I tease our [graduate assistants]. We had 16 millimeter film and had to be in the dark room. They can do as much in two minutes as we could in two hours. It’s so much easier to create cutups. Our players can be watching themselves an hour after practice on their computer. You can do so much, but you have to be careful that you don’t do too much.
“We can’t overload these guys. If we want to add a play, we take one away.”
When it comes to Graham, the Texas-native emphasizes a motto that states, “complexity in organization means simplicity in operation.” Essentially saying, the behind-the-scenes work that takes place during the offseason — or more specifically, the game week — goes a long way in establishing an organization-wide expectation and work culture that allows coaches and players to perform without hesitation on game day, having already had the process impressed upon them. The object of this creed is to replace confusion or apprehension with know-how in moments of sudden adversity.
“I think early in the year, you get surprised. But once you’ve got six or seven games underneath you, it’s different. That’s why injuries and personnel adjustments can be so important. We lost our starting quarterback [Taylor Kelly] in Week 3 last year, and that impacted us. You can only give one QB reps during the season, so we had to adjust on the move and within the game.
