BATON ROUGE — Prior to the start of the annual spring practice session, LSU head football coach Nick Saban spoke to the media on Wednesday about his expectations for the 15-practice period and about the overall condition of the team.
LSU COACH NICK SABAN PREVIEWS SPRING PRACTICE
“We have had an excellent offseason program. This will actually be the fifth and final week of the offseason. I really like the way the players have worked. We have had very few problems relative to guys making improvements physically in this offseason. Coach Moffitt has done an excellent job this offseason as always making some physical improvements with the players.”
“The first thing we would like to do this spring is establish an identity as a team. That is always the first objective. What are people going to say about this team when they watch them play? Do they play hard? Do they play with toughness and character? Can they compete for 60 minutes in a game? One thing we always want to establish is being dominant for 60 minutes. I still think that is the first thing we want to try to establish with this group. Second thing we want to establish is team chemistry, guys playing together, trusting each other, so that everybody feels that if everybody does there job and we all do it together then we will have a chance to be successful. Obviously, another thing you like to do in spring practice is improve the discipline and execution of what you are doing on offense, defense, and special teams. I think it is a great time for all players, especially young players who do not have as much knowledge and experience, to improve their understanding and execution of what they are supposed to do at their position. I think those are the things in general in terms of what we would like to accomplish this spring. I think there are three areas that we definitely want to address and improve. I think these things are all significant in having success.”
“The turnover ratio we had last year in the eight games we won was plus seven. It was minus eight in the five games that we lost. We put the ball on the ground too many times on offense, and we didn’t get enough turnovers on defense. That is something that we always try to emphasize that I feel like we need to improve on. I think in the secondary, it is big plays. We did a great job on the first half of the season of not giving up a lot of big plays. In the second half of the season, we gave up more big plays. I think you can contribute that to giving up a lot more points. So we want to get back to minimizing the big plays that we give up both run and pass. We need to make more big plays on offense because we probably made half the plays we made last year as we did the year before. Explosive plays, big plays, contribute to scoring points. That is obviously the objective of what we want to do on offense that we need to improve on.”
“We have a lot of players returning at certain positions. Other positions we have to establish starters. Those would be running back, linebacker, and probably safety on defense. I think most other positions, even though we lost players, we have other players that have a significant amount of playing experience, so we feel pretty good about the experience level. Special teams, we have some areas where we have to find starters at as well: long snapper, kicker, and returner. Our special teams were pretty good last year relative to SEC teams, but I don’t think we made the number of big plays in the second half of the season that affected the game on special teams as we did in the first half. That is something from a consistency standpoint that we certainly want to improve on.”
“Matt Mauck continues to make good progress with his foot. He will probably be in a red shirt on a limited status of some sort as spring practice goes on. He was doing about four-fifths of what everyone else was doing. He was getting a little soreness in his foot from one of the screws on his tendon. So about two weeks ago, they took one of the screws out and that probably set him back a little bit in terms of continuation of his rehab. He had to take about 10 days off, but now he is back into that and making good progress again.”