The different conferences and the NCAA have yet to determine when college athletes will be able to return to their respective campuses to resume training, but once social distancing guidelines were extended through the month of April any hope of the Notre Dame football team making up its remaining 14 spring practices was all but eliminated.
“Would I have liked 15? Sure. But I’m not going to go into the season with trepidation that we’re not going to get prepared to play whomever we need to play,” Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said on the local radio show Sports Beat. “We’ve got a veteran football team that knows how to play the game. I watched our first practice. I kind of know what we have.”
While it is good Kelly is confident in his team’s ability to perform, it is still hard to ignore the notion that it is a competitive advantage for the 2020 Notre Dame opponents that were able to host more than one spring practice.
The NCAA allows all Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams 15 spring practices, which includes a limited number of fully and partially padded affairs. Notre Dame’s first and only spring practice was on March 5, but other schools began in February.
At this time, it is unclear if the NCAA will do anything to rectify the spring practice discrepancies, such as by allowing teams to make up missed spring practices with extra OTAs over the summer.
2020 Fighting Irish Opponent Spring Practice Breakdown
• Clemson — 9
• Western Michigan — 8
• Louisville — 7
• Stanford — 7
• Wake Forest — 5
• Georgia Tech — 5
• Duke — 3
• Pittsburgh — 3
• USC — 1
• Navy — 0
• Arkansas — 0
• Wisconsin — 0
Connecticut and Coastal Carolina are the only two FBS programs to complete all 15 of the allotted spring practices, but Clemson — which has been to the College Football Playoff in each of the previous five seasons — actually leads all Power Five conference members with nine.
“We were able to have nine spring practices,” Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said on a video call with the media. “We had a full scrimmage, a lot of meetings. Obviously, we had 15 mid-years. We got a good start, but we’re very fortunate and feel good about where we are from a football standpoint.”
Just behind the Tigers are the Western Michigan Broncos, Notre Dame’s third opponent of the 2020 season, with eight and Louisville and Stanford each had seven.
The good news for Notre Dame is that the Fighting Irish play Clemson, Louisville and Stanford half way through the season (assuming there is a 12-game season), when the benefit of extra practices should be minimized.
On the other hand, the first two opponents of the season, Navy and Arkansas, both had zero spring practices
But as Kelly has said many times, the most important aspect of preparing for the 2020 season will be having enough time for conditioning over the summer and that the team begins fall camp on time.
If that happens, he's confident the team will be ready, even after just one spring practice.
“We’ve got a great staff,” Kelly said. “If we have the ample opportunity to condition and prepare our football team from a physical standpoint, we’re not going to fall into a position where we’re not going to be prepared to be the best version of our 2020 football team.”
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