Joel Klatt highlights biggest concerns about Deion Sanders' spring game idea

Deion Sanders shared an innovative idea last week with his suggestion of college teams practicing and playing against one another in their spring periods. While he agreed with the concept, though, Joel Klatt isn’t sure if it’d work or how many other programs would be up for it.

Klatt broke down the thought from Coach Prime on his show on Monday. That started with his liking of it for teams at this point of their years, which Syracuse and Virginia Tech also liked based on their expressed interest in it with Colorado.

“From the football standpoint, I totally get it and I think this improves your team,” said Klatt. “There’s no doubt.”

That said, Klatt two or three cons as to why Sanders’ proposal wouldn’t work or couldn’t happen. Injuries were clearly the first of them as this would have players in more live scenarios against actual opponents, which would inherently put them in more positions to be unhealthy coming out of the spring.

“Now, what would be a negative? If you were playing devil’s advocate, you would say, like, the last thing I would want to do is create real action for starters that would lead to injury in the spring,” said Klatt. “You wouldn’t want to see that. I wouldn’t want to see that. No one would want to see that. When we see guys get injured in the preseason in the NFL, we hate it. Obviously, obviously.”

“So, if you are giving kind of, like, if you are giving a full practice? Because, when you’re practicing against yourself? I’ll be very honest. Starters rarely, if ever, are live. I mean, very rarely. There might be, like, ‘Oh, we’re going fast! This is 100%! We’re doing thud tempo!’. They call it thud tempo, which means go a hundred million miles an hour, as fast as you can but, as soon as you contact, pull up. That doesn’t work. That doesn’t work, okay,” Klatt continued. “So, injuries would happen if you’re going to bring other teams in and you’re going to practice against them. So you have to be okay with that, which a lot of coaches would not be.”

Outlook was then second for Klatt as he thinks some coaches would want to avoid the optics of it all. Whether healthy or not, he wondered if there’d be teams who wouldn’t put themselves in that position in the spring order to not look bad against another team before their season is even close to kicking off.

“You don’t generally have great numbers from a health perspective anyways. A lot of teams go through the spring and they’re like, man, we can only field, you know, seven offensive linemen total or six total defensive linemen. And so you don’t even have a full compliment of, quote, starters because a lot of those guys have maybe gotten surgeries after the fall. And so your team doesn’t look anywhere near what it would during the fall because you’re trying to prepare that team to be ready in September, okay,” Klatt explained. “So you don’t really have your full compliment, which means, you bring another team in and you look bad, you really think you wouldn’t be evaluated on that?”

“Now, maybe you wouldn’t get hired and fired based on that but everything counts when it comes to sentiment with your fanbase. If you had a tough fall as a coach and then you were, quote, on the hot seat for the next year and you had open practice against another institution and, all of a sudden, here comes another program into your practice facility and you look terrible? That ain’t gonna help you. And so those coaches won’t want to do this,” said Klatt.

Finally, Klatt just doesn’t believe that college football is in a place where this could happen. He sees far more important issues that the sport is having a hard enough time figuring out to add this on top of it all.

“Now, could it work? I’m not sure. I mean we can’t even figure out how to not have the transfer portal open during the season. Can we figure out how to have teams actually practice and scrimmage against each other in the spring for their spring game? Shoot, man. That seems like square peg, round hole right now as far as what the, quote, NCAA and powers that be are trying to figure out,” said Klatt. “Listen, we can’t even figure out how to play a competitive season and end that competitive season without the roster-building component starting. It’s crazy! It’s crazy. First and foremost, in order for something like this to work, we would have to have that ironed out. We would have to have that ironed out.”

Again, Klatt wants this because he thinks many, including players and fans and, therefore, networks, would want this. He just doesn’t think the game is currently in a place logistically where it could happen right now.

“Again, devil’s advocate because, all in all, I would be for this,” said Klatt. “I would be for this because I think players would be for this idea. But I just wanted to give you both sides of this.”

“Again, love the idea. Do I think it’s a hundred hurdles to try to jump over before we get something like this? Probably,” Klatt said. “So, let’s figure out the calendar and then, hey, Deion, I’m in, man. That is a great, great idea.”