Changes won't be all too different for fall camp per Brown

Changes could be coming to fall camp but that wouldn't mean as much adjusting as you’d expect on the surface at the majority of college football programs.

The changes are expected to be presented by the Football Oversight Committee after the results of a five-year concussion study were released.

The study was released in February and was funded by the NCAA and the Department of Defense. It tracked head exposures in six Division I college football teams from 2015 to '19, finding that 72% of concussions occurred during practice and nearly 50% happened in preseason practice, despite it representing just one-fifth of the football season.

Total head impacts in the preseason occurred at twice the rate of the regular season according to the results.

Now, while it certainly isn’t official, momentum is building for alternations to the way fall camp operates.

It is being considered to reduce the number of full-padded camp practices from 21 down to 8, the complete abolishment of collision exercises such as the famous pad-popping Oklahoma drill and limiting the number of scrimmages a team can hold to two per camp down from three and a half.

And while that sounds like a series of sweeping changes to the core of what fall camp is about, in reality it isn’t all that much different from what is currently being done.

“I don’t know a single college football program where you have 25 practices and can go full pads for 21 if you wanted to but I don’t know anybody that’s doing that,” head coach Neal Brown said. “I don’t know anybody that was doing more than two full scrimmages as it was anyway.”

So while it may seem that it could be a massive overhaul, many teams including West Virginia, have been trending that direction already without the legislation in place.

“It’s not going to change a whole lot. I know it’s not going to change what we do a whole lot, but since I’ve talked to other coaches it’s not going to change what they’ve been doing,” Brown said.

The biggest difference Brown has seen suggested comes in the sense that players would be able to wear spider pads in those helmeted practices that would allow players to cover up their shoulders should they end up on the ground. But overall, outside of the elimination of some classic camp drills that have been used for years, the end results aren’t going to affect too much.

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