Alex Atkins talks about value of first scrimmage in evaluating players' progress

Florida State recently hosted its first scrimmage of the spring, and that provided the coaches with all the learning material they needed for at least another week or so.

The scrimmage was all about sussing out exactly what the Seminoles could do, putting down a “baseline” so that coaches can come back and evaluate off it.

It’s a stamp in time, so to speak.

“The first scrimmage is always the eye-opener, because every practice we’ve had has been in the practice facility,” offensive coordinator Alex Atkins said. “Now that’s the first time a lot of them have been on the field inside of Doak.”

There was a simple message that the Florida State coaching staff pushed out to players before the first scrimmage began.

“The big thing we pushed was everything you do before you hit this stadium is in preparation for what you do in the stadium,” Atkins said. “They had 90 amazing catches in practice on Thursday. If you don’t do that on Saturday, you didn’t prepare to do it when those opportunities come.”

Everything, in other words, needs to build upon itself. It doesn’t do a ton of good to learn one technique here while letting another slip there.

Fundamentals are the base layer, then the knowledge can be added on top of that. That’s where trickier things like how to play within a given scheme on either side of the ball come in.

But it’s all set up in a way that Florida State’s coaches can first evaluate off the first scrimmage, then build.

“The big thing is the build-up of how you’re going to operate when you’re out there by yourself,” Atkins explained. “And that’s what the evaluation piece is. Now this is the first time a lot of them are going to get a game-graded script, where it’s like a game. So we’re going to break this down just like we break down a game, we’re going to give you grades, we’re going to tell you where you are.

“And the biggest thing when you know what you’ve got is the response that you go from here forward.”

Some players will not have graded well in the scrimmage. Others might have graded fine in one area but not so much in another.

That’s OK. What Florida State’s coaches are looking for from here is improvement based on the things that were pointed out as problematic areas in the first scrimmage.

“Then once you see that is when you can kind of, all right, he fixed this,” Atkins said. “This was a problem, he had his hands wide, he had a bunch of holding calls, he got fatigued and couldn’t get in a stance. Then once they respond and correct those things now their confidence grows, they know what we want.

“Now I can give you a little bit more to grow once you’ve showed me you can improve from your baseline. That’s the focus of where they’re going to move forward before we start tinkering with other things.”