The unanswerable question Will Muschamp faced from his players
When Will Muschamp hopped on the Paul Finebaum Show on Thursday afternoon, the Gamecocks head football coach found himself talking through something unknowable.
He’s overseeing more than 100 players and a large staff scattered across much of the Southeast. Players are figuring out remote learning, trying to find places to exercise in locations from the Atlanta metro area to South Florida to areas decidedly more rural.
And from many, he fielded questions about the plan, the overall scale of the coronavirus pandemic’s effect on the usual routine, and he could see something weighing on his players.
“Just the uncertainty,” Muschamp said. “There’s a lot more questions than there are answers. And it’s frustrating. They want some finality to something. They want to know when there’s an end date. There’s an end to the season. There’s an end of spring practice. There’s an end of the workouts. Our guys are so in tuned to that.”
He’s fielded questions about that, as life in a football program is built on structure. Workouts give way to practices, which give way to more workouts, a break, workouts, practices and then a season.
His team is still holding position meetings five times a week and staff meetings twice a week. Coaches are good at finding ways to stay busy, but the players can’t exactly load up on extra football things to do.
The coach told Finebaum he’d been pleased with how his players were handling it. New staffer Connor Shaw has been organizing events, including a Madden tournament, to keep everyone connected. But with more than four months until games and plans for the season being speculated about ad nauseam, there’s plenty of ambiguity about when the next step will come.
“Right now, there’s no end date,” Muschamp said. “There will be, but we just don’t know when it’s going to be. And that’s probably the most frustrating part of that for our guys. The most and the constant questions. I think they’re tired of hearing ‘I don’t really know right now.’
Workout challenges
One area Muschamp pointed to was the inability for players to life weights in many of their hometowns.
Coronavirus has shut down most gyms and schools, as weight rooms are particularly good places for the virus to spread. But it means players have had some challenges finding places to do their full set of conditioning work.
“Only about 30 percent of our players have access to weights,” Muschamp said. “We’re doing push-ups and sit-ups and body squats. It’s the best that we can do right now.
“They don’t have any access to the things you’ve got to do to prepare yourself for a training camp situation.”
Muschamp has put his own kids through a workout, having them push his SUV with him behind the wheel.
