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CFL eliminates full-contact practices

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by KeyboardKing, Sep 13, 2017.

  1. KeyboardKing

    KeyboardKing New Member

  2. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    Won't happen. NFL QB play is so bad that they need the collision angle. Hard hits etc.
     
  3. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    Is that the Concussion Football League?
     
  4. QYFW

    QYFW Well-Known Member

    Sure. The NFL will take its cue from the CFL.
     
  5. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    I understand safety, but how do you play a game where you never practice what you actually do?
     
  6. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    John Gagliardi is nodding his head.
     
    Inky_Wretch likes this.
  7. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    Baron beat me to it, but I'll babble longer....

    I wish Boom was still here. We always had fun going back and forth on Gagliardi, all-time winningest college coach who never had tackling in practice. Boom would appalled at this news.

    In 10 years or so, maybe earlier, maybe later but at some point, an NFL team will eliminate all contact in practice, including in training camp (CFL is doing it in regular season; Ivy started doing this last year, league-wide). And there will be stories and TV features about how revolutionary it is. And all they will be doing is what Gagliardi was doing in the early 1950s until his retirement in 2012.

    The guy should really be getting consultation fees. He's 90 but mind is still supersharp and coaches should be making pilgrimages to see him. From the CFL story:
    Again, this is what Gagliardi was doing 60 years ago! And he won more games than anyone. What I'd always say in my back-and-forths with Boom was that I always thought Gagliardi's method would be even more effective at the highest levels, whether D1 or NFL. He always said they didn't need to teach guys to tackle when they got to St. John's because the guys were good enough and knew that. And that was at the top D3 level. Think about how easier it'd be to do it at the top levels. Mike Grant, Bud's kid, is the most successful high school coach in MN history. His coaching influence? Not dad, but Gagliardi, who he played for in the 1970s. He uses many of his methods. And I never understood why some coaches are really good at D3 level, move up to higher levels and are great, but people think John's methods wouldn't have worked at higher levels, even though those guys with traditional methods were nowhere near as dominant as St. John's.

    Gagliardi will always be unique though. No one, whether they eliminate contact or not, is ever going to be as ballsy as John was. Even in camp they didn't tackle. They didn't use blocking sleds or tackling dummies. No whistles. No calisthenics. And yet....all he did was win. In many ways, he's the future of football.

    It's my alma mater so I'm biased and I've talked with countless number of John's former players over the years. A d-lineman said coaches would teach them how to defeat tactics and practices were still fast-paced, you just didn't do the actual hitting. A top QB said it was about running play after play after play, and learning how to take angles, play smarter, etc.

    A few of my favorite John lines regarding the practices.

    And St. John' s had one of the best defenses every year in D3. The Mount Union dynasty in D3 has dominated for 25 years. Since '95 they've been held to 10 or fewer points 3 times. Two were against SJU. The offense wasn't bad either, set a college record averaging 60 in 1993. When SJU beat Mount in 2003 I'll always remember Chris Spielman on the broadcast, who was simultaneously superimpressed with the Johnnies' D and adamant that there's no way in hell he could have been a good player or thrived in that system. He had to hit! Not realizing, every player that has gone to SJU has probably had the same thought. To a man, SJU players always said it took one or two practices for them to realize, wait, why doesn't everyone do this?

    John became a high school coach at 16 when his head coach went off to WW2. He kept getting killed in practice and then in games because linemen didn't know what they were doing. So he cut out the practice hitting that only hurt your own players and taught the linemen how to actually block and who to block. He also never served as an assistant so never had someone telling him to change his ways.

    Apologies for the lengthy post, but even though he's had books written on him and countless features, I think his accomplishments and uniqueness remain underrated. If football survives, in 20, 30, 40 years, is there any doubt that every team's practice will look like a John Gagliardi practice from the 1950s? The 489 victories and 4 national titles aside, to be a century ahead of your peers is quite the legacy.
     
  8. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    I've always liked the Austin Murphy book on his SI sabbatical which he spent following around Gagliardi and St. John's (although Murphy's wife comes off majorly as a royal wet blanket).

    Some good stories from that book. I liked how Gagliardi would say that he stopped the tackling one year when the JV team beat the heck out of his varsity team in a scrimmage. The year Murphy was there, Gagliardi noticed that players kept getting hurt in the last half hour of practice, so he decided to cancel the last half-hour of practice. And Gagliardi hated calisthenics as a kid, so he didn't have his team do them.
     
  9. QYFW

    QYFW Well-Known Member

    An NFL team that did away with tackling when the others did not would be putting all its players in danger.
     
  10. BadgerBeer

    BadgerBeer Well-Known Member

    How much tackling is done today in an NFL practice? Isn't it mostly thud?
     
  11. Twirling Time

    Twirling Time Well-Known Member

    If you make it to the NFL level, you know how to tackle and block. At that level it's all learning schemes. You don't need to slobberknock 5 days a week like a middle school team.
     
  12. britwrit

    britwrit Well-Known Member

    Of course, there are exceptions.

    [​IMG]
     
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