The Pivot Point of the Offseason
May 18, 2009, 9:10:14 AM by Bob Gretz - FAQ
http://www.kcchiefs.com/media/images...20883720071339Monday is the moment where the Chiefs off-season pivots.
Until now, most of the attention around the team’s facility has been about the body, as the players have gone through the strength and conditioning program with four workouts each week.
Monday, the learning process begins in earnest as the Chiefs start their OTA sessions.
Under NFL rules, teams are allowed to have 14 of these practices in the off-season, along with a mandatory three-day mini-camp. All of those sessions for the Chiefs will go down in the next five weeks.
With the practices also comes classroom time, as assistant coaches and players review tape and exercising the mental side of the game.
“We’ve got a lot to learn in OTAs, we’ve got a lot to teach,” head coach Todd Haley said of the coming sessions. “We got to introduce them to the way we want to practice (in the earlier mini-camps), now we get to go full go, with the rookies and the vets together, we’ll get those guys all working together. We’ll get a picture of what we look like. This is a very key time of the year.”
Since the off-season program began, Haley has purposely kept the attention on strength and conditioning. He did not want anything getting in the way of the Chiefs becoming stronger and in better condition. The competitive workout sessions have been going on for over a month and they’ve gotten the attention of the players.
“We’ve had 65 every day (for strength and conditioning) and I’ve been happy about that,” Haley said of the attendance at the workouts. “I think everybody is on board right now. We’ve started to build that foundation with the work that we are doing and we have to continue to understand it’s still the ground floor, and we can’t get too far ahead of ourselves in any area.”
Now the mental part of the game comes into play with the OTAs. The schemes on offense and defense will begin to play out, as the coaches open the playbooks and give their players more than the little taste they’ve had so far.
http://www.kcchiefs.com/media/images...40526330220224All of this is another rung of the evaluation process for Haley, his coaching staff and GM Scott Pioli. They will watch to see how quickly players are able to take what they see in the classroom and put it in practice on the field. They will watch to see how quickly a player corrects his errors from one day to another. They will observe how players blend with their teammates.
There’s really nothing about any of these sessions that won’t be evaluated. Pioli talked at the end of the NFL Draft about how the personnel process never ends. He and his coach have to see if they have the type of bodies they need to win football games. If these sessions show they do not, then they may have to dig deeper in the personnel pool before the start of the season to find some players who can make the team better.
For everyone with the Chiefs, the start of the OTAs signals another chapter in the rebuilding process under Pioli/Haley.
“Everybody is getting excited now,” said Haley. “This is when it gets rolling. It’s when you start installing. It’s when it has that real football feel, the daily grind.”
It starts Monday.
