Quick Note on Babers Presser at Media Day

So I listened to Todd Walker's interview with Coach Babers in Detroit yesterday. You can too. As usual, mostly not a lot of news. The offense will take off between the 4th and 6th game, everyone worked hard in the off-season, etc.

The one thing I thought was interesting was that Coach says that the training camp will be more physical with more live tackling than there was last year, when he said that he was in "we don't grind, we find."

He went on to say that we have to find out who is willing to get physical, so we don't put young  men in positions where they cannot perform.  I thought that was very interesting. I know there was a lot of frustration last year, including here.  Coach Babers is positive in public--and he said on his first day that his model was Art Briles, who (Babers says) takes things in stride and thinks about what has to be done to adjust.

That can be frustrating when it doesn't match the observed reality.  And then when he fell into excuse-making from time to time (which is different from being positive) it got worse.  Babers has, in fairness, taken a couple actions that indicate that he understands that the approach taken with the BG defense last year was not effective...first, the staff shake up and then second this acknowledgment that the defense had people on the field who were not ready to play.

These are positive signs.  The results will speak for themselves, but I do sense that Babers is looking at things critically and is willing to change how he does things, which not everyone is.