Spring games become endangered as paranoia sets in among football coaches

Welcome to SEC Unfiltered, the Paste BN NETWORK's newsletter on SEC sports. Look for this newsletter in your inbox Monday through Friday. Today, national college football columnist Blake Toppmeyer takes over.

College football coaches are, on the whole, paranoid fellas.

Nick Saban used to station police officers around Alabama’s practice field before the Iron Bowl to prevent enemy spies. If Connor Stalions had tried to steal Alabama’s signs, NCAA suits might have been the least of his problems.

Roster tampering ranks among a coach’s chief concerns nowadays. Technically, tampering is against the rules, but the NCAA has as much success enforcing tampering rules as Sisyphus did rolling the boulder to the top of that hill.

In general, tampering works like this: If a rival program spots a player it thinks could help its roster and believes that player might be persuaded to jump ship, that program gets a message to the player that it would love to have him, promising perhaps more playing time or a more lucrative NIL offer.

The spring transfer period – players may enter the portal from April 16 to 25 – particularly worries coaches. Their concern? A player will shine in the spring game, alerting a rival coaching staff to lure that player into the portal and poach him.

Nebraska coach Matt Rhule, citing tampering concerns, told reporters Saturday that he doubts the Cornhuskers will play a typical spring game this year.

“Last year, we were one of the more televised spring games," Rhule said, "and I dealt with a lot of people offering our players a lot of opportunities after that.

"To go out and bring in a bunch of new players and then showcase them for all the other schools to watch, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me."

Rhule and Nebraska brass are brainstorming other ways to showcase the team to fans.

Traditional spring games remain popular in football hubs like Lincoln, Nebraska, with 60,452 fans attending last year’s game at Memorial Stadium.

By dumping the spring game, Rhule would follow in Lane Kiffin’s footsteps. The Ole Miss coach ditched the Rebels’ spring game last year in favor of a carnival-like day at the stadium during which his players played flag football and also had a dunk contest, a tug-of-war and a hot dog eating contest.

Kiffin made no apology for nixing tradition, but he said he hoped rival teams would continue playing televised spring games for his viewing – er, scouting – pleasure.

"I would like people to keep playing spring games so we can watch all their players play in spring," Kiffin said last spring.

Kiffin will stick to his plan. Ole Miss once again won’t play a spring game and instead will repeat its carnival day.

At least seven SEC teams have scheduled traditional spring games, according to fbschedules.com. How many teams will join Ole Miss and Nebraska in dumping the traditional game?

Typically, spring games occur as the last of 15 spring practice dates allowed. This comes in addition to winter conditioning, summer workouts and preseason practice, which is accompanied by August scrimmages that typically are closed to the public.

In this year-round era of college football, teams don’t really need a spring game to prepare for a season that kicks off some four or five months later.

Tampering isn’t coaches' only concern with spring games, either. They worry about injuries and typically deploy vanilla play-calling so as not to give away anything too detailed about schemes, tactics or plays.

I won’t shed a tear if spring games die a slow death. They remain appealing to ravenous fans who want a sneak peek at the team and offer media some minimal information, but they’ve become so watered down that they provide fewer and fewer insights while still carrying the risk of injury.

The biggest downside to dumping spring games? These games had been a cheap way for a family to experience something resembling a college football game. Having an offensive lineman scarf down a few frankfurters isn’t exactly introducing little John and Susie to college football.

Ticket and parking prices soar for regular-season games, to the extent that college football threatens to become a luxury reserved for the well-heeled.

In a perfect world in which everyone followed the rules, I suspect most coaches would still embrace the value of showcasing the program to the public, including little John and Susie, with a spring exhibition, especially considering fan support is pivotal to NIL fundraising efforts.

In the absence of a perfect world, though, paranoia sets in, and spring games are replaced by fat guys eating processed meat.

Blake Toppmeyer is the Paste BN Network's national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.

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