After publishing a piece yesterday entitled "Can you effectively coach effort in your players?" a number of coaches reached out to me with their take on the topic, and a number of those responses were very interesting and may warrant another article in the near future.
Then this article from ESPN caught my eye on how Jimbo Fisher and his staff instituted a system for grading effort, in a very public way and I figured it was worth sharing.
Jimbo Fisher told ESPN that on the days leading up to the Seminoles first spring practice, in an effort to hold players accountable for their effort, Fisher and his staff put players in three different colored jerseys. It's not the first time I've heard of a program adopting something like this, and it seems like every off season I hear of a program or two who pick up and try it over the course of the off season.
Wearing garnett meant that the player's effort was good. White mean that the individual's effort was mediocre, and, as ESPN puts it, guys who had to wear orange (the color worn by conference foes Miami, Clemson, and their rival Florida) did so because their "behavior was so 'ridiculous' that it deserved dishonor."
Fisher went on to explain the system in further detail:
"There is a fine line between winning and losing, and it's always those inches, and that's what we've tried to emphasize," Fisher said. "We changed how we did [offseason drills] this year. We always told them how they did. We rated them every day.
"It wasn't in football positions or anything like that. It was all effort, but this is what we're teaching you to do. Whatever it is, do it. If you do that you will create a habit of going out on the football field."
Head here to read the full piece from ESPN, with more from Fisher on the system of accountability for his players' effort.