Say what?! Translating the peak college football coachspeak from Week 8 – Jim Harbaugh is feeling good

The Big Ten was back and college football was so much better for it.

College football coachspeak has gone up a notch with the Big Ten returning to action in Week 8.

We’ve done so well the last seven weeks gradually getting better at translating peak college football coachspeak. Dare I say it, if we led a Power 5 team for a day, we’d be able to spin it while trying to say next to nothing like these guys like it’s no big thing. Too bad we know better and we can interpret the truth through varying levels of intentional vagueness. Let’s interpret these five.

Some say less while others say more to get the exact same point across

Ryan Day on running up the score on Scott Frost and the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

“I just want to publicly apologize for that to Scott (Frost),” said Day.

Coachspeak Translator: Running up the score on an inferior opponent rarely goes over well for one’s reputation. Too bad Day’s college coach was Chip Kelly at New Hampshire. It’s in his blood to blow out an opponent spectacularly. While he may feel remorse, it may have made up for a few targeting calls earlier, as well as Nebraska threatening to go rogue. We’ll never know.

Dabo Swinney trying to be positive about his Clemson Tigers not blowing out the Syracuse Orange.

“I just want to make sure I’m at the right press conference here,” said Swinney. “We did win the game, I think. Am I in the right spot? You don’t usually score 47 points if you don’t have the right energy. We made some mistakes. It’s not energy when you don’t make a certain play, or snap the ball over a head. Just didn’t execute, but at the end of the day, it’s not easy to win.

“There’s a lot of teams out there that would have lost this game with some of the mistakes that we made. We won the game by almost four touchdowns. I’m not getting any questions about ‘Proud of you guys for winning the game.’ It’s a lot of negative questions. You’re not going to get any negative stuff from me.”

Coachspeak Translator: Swinney wants to remind the college football media that he coaches the best team in the country, regardless of how trusting his Clemson Tigers were at times vs. the Syracuse Orange. While he is right, he is also deflecting a ton here because he isn’t fully ready to admit his team could be challenged by Ohio State, the Alabama Crimson or someone else.

Jeremy Pruitt on how the gap between Alabama and Tennessee is closing, but it’s so not.

“I was on the other sideline three years ago,” said Pruitt. “You think I didn’t see that? I can assure you that the gap is closing. That might not show on the scoreboard today, but the gap is closing, I can assure you that.

“And that’s one thing that’s frustrating to me and it’s frustrating to our players. Okay, there are times that we’ve done some really good things but as a team, whether it’s, you know, offense playing really good and the defense playing really good and special teams.”

“We’ve not put any of that together. And that’s what the elite teams in our program, and in our conference that’s what they do.

“They don’t have any bad plays. They don’t make many mistakes. They make the other team beat them. And there are times that we’ve done that this year but we’ve not done it for a whole game, even the games we’ve won, right?”

“We’ve not done that so this will be a great opportunity this next week to go back and see where we’re at to see where we’ve improved. And from that will have an opportunity to kind of fix the things moving forward.”

Coachspeak Translator: Thankfully for the love of God and all things holy, this isn’t a Butch Jones redundant cliche spectacular. But why do we feel the same way about it? Pruitt is blunter than Jones, but guess who got to smoke victory cigars as an Alabama intern? Jones. The gap between Alabama and Tennessee isn’t the Cumberland Gap, but the Grand Canyon. Sorry, not sorry.

Jim Harbaugh on his team getting a huge road win over the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

“Yeah, I really did. I really trusted our team,” said Harbaugh. “I believe in them in that way and every way. This is a high-character team. They’ve been through a lot, it’s been well-documented. They stick together through all things. They’ve really displayed that high-character. I just trust them. Just wanted them to do that because they’re talented guys.”

“Put talented guys out there like Joe Milton and see what happens. Let everybody be surprised by how good he does. That’s what I envisioned, that’s how I visualized this game going. Trusted Joe to do it and he did it. Like I said, can’t stress enough, quarterbacks in their first start on the road against a good team on the big stage, he was cool as can be.”

Coachspeak Translator: Beneath all the sentence fragments, you can tell Harbaugh really likes his 2020 Michigan Wolverines. The players on this roster have been through a lot, but their mental fortitude may guide them to more wins than expected. They weren’t expected to blow out Minnesota in Minneapolis on Saturday night. This could be a special year in Ann Arbor.

James Franklin on the Penn State Nittany Lions getting upset by the Indiana Hoosiers.

“First of all, like always, you’ve gotta give Indiana credit,” said Franklin. “They played well, and we didn’t. Not a good combination, especially early on.

“We did not play well. In really six years at Penn State and 10 years of being a head football coach, we have not been a team to get penalties. And we have not been a team to get turnovers. And tonight, we had both. We had 10 penalties for 100 yards, which is very uncharacteristic of us. And we had three turnovers.

“A lot of different situations came up through this game, a lot of different plays. We finally got into a rhythm in the second half a little bit but you can’t not play well on the road in the Big Ten against good opponents, and we didn’t do that early on.”

Coachspeak Translator: Franklin is concerned about the lack of discipline on his football team. It’s apparently something he and his program take great pride in. However, the issue might have more to do with a lack of star power more than anything. He understands his team must play fundamentally sound football to beat middle-of-the-pack Big Ten teams like the Indiana Hoosiers.

So what can we learn from this week’s rendition of translating college football coachspeak? When a coach speaks concisely, maybe even in sentence fragments, there is a greater level of honesty present than when they use a lot of words to say very little. When you speak bluntly, you don’t ever have to worry about covering your ass after a bad loss that is 100 percent all your fault.

Having big Big Ten personalities in our lives again makes for more robust coachspeak lessons.

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