“Everything’s calculated. Everything’s regulated. There’s obviously science behind it,” McCarthy said. “We’re in-tune with the conditioning of our players. The commitment the players made in the spring was evident, and I like what I’ve seen so far with what they’ve done away from here. … This is all by design.”
One classic coaching idea is to make practice harder than the games, and to ensure that players can still execute at a high level even when they might be losing steam in the fourth quarter. McCarthy emphasized late-game scenarios at the end of Wednesday’s practice, as if every play was the last play.
Why? And why spend so much time on it on the opening day of camp? Because that’s how life is in the NFL.
“If you look at a 17-game season — and really the numbers haven’t moved a whole lot in my time in the league — eight games in a year, on average, come down to the last series,” McCarthy said.
That’s McCarthy’s reasoning for establishing their understanding of situational football, particularly in crucial moments, before the calendar even flips to August. He wants his players to be sharp in those instances as soon as the first preseason game a couple of weeks from now.
And there’s no doubt that a Week 1 game counts just as much as a Week 17 game in this league. By extension, McCarthy isn’t treating practice No. 1 any different than he will No. 15.
“The execution part, we have a ton of work to do. That’s what training camp looks like,” McCarthy said. We’ll get in pads next week, and pads won’t be consistently low enough. It looked like a normal starting day. I was trying to watch the individual players, particularly, in the fundamental work. That’s usually where my eyes go, to see if [the young players] are closing that gap with the veterans. I thought we got off to a nice start.”
