News bullets and other items:

• This is not a drill: the spring game won’t be a punting competition. In Baxter’s words, “We won’t kick at all in the spring game [except] maybe field goals or something.”
• Kickers and punters are kicking into nets; kickers haven’t kicked at uprights yet. Baxter is breaking down their mechanics and rebuilding and doesn’t want them worried about results yet.
• If the list he showed us is any indication then anyone who wants to compete at kick or punt returner should get a chance. Baxter had 14 guys try returning kicks yesterday.
• Baxter didn’t go on any recruiting trips. Harbaugh instead opted for him to stay in Ann Arbor and start installing his Academic Gameplan.

What's the good news?
"There's a lot of good news. We get paid to coach a kids' game. We wear the clothes to work that you'd wear to cut the lawn, and we get paid really good to have a lot of fun so good every day."
MGoQuestion: Maurice Hurst tweeted yesterday that he's taking 18 credits and that you're helping him with that. What can you do to help someone who's taking that many credits plus has the time demands of football?
"Well, one of the things that's been kind of the subject and topic of my life's work is helping young people be effective students, so I'm not only helping him I'm helping all these guys. But that's been Coach Harbaugh's mantra since we got here is we have student athletes, okay? And it's one thing to say you have student-athletes and it's another thing to live it, so when we got off the airplane he had me install the Academic Gameplan.

“We got off the plane on- I believe it was whatever day January 8 was, but we started that Monday at 6:15 and we met every night, and he left me home all the way through recruiting. I never went out. I was here every night with our players and we installed our Academic Gameplan system, of what we call the Champions Program, and we begin laying the foundations of being effective students.

“One of the things that I've learned over time is never sell yourself short as a teacher. If we can get guys to know all the complexities of our defense and our offense and our pass protections and all those kinds of things, if I can get a guy to run 60 yards full speed into another guy [then] we can teach them how to take notes. We can teach them strategic planning. Generally that's what's happening."
How much of your day is spent doing that versus Xs and Os and on the field type of work?
"It just kind of depends. I won't speak specifically about any player, but I'm going to meet one of them tomorrow morning at 7:30 and we'll eat breakfast together and we'll look over his strategic plan and that kind of stuff, but for the most part I'd say 90% of my day is spent on Xs and Os. When it comes to the Academic Gameplan stuff, I mean, I copyrighted the program in 1999 and I've been teaching it in one form or another since I was a graduate assistant in '86 so I don't need to spend any time on it. We can get it up and running at a moment's notice."
What are some of the things that constitute the foundation or is it tailor-made to each individual?
"The foundation for academics? Okay, simple. It's really simple. They all have a planner and that planner's called a GPS, which stands for guidance, performance, and strategy and in a nutshell we don't take notes, we take answers, just like all of you are doing. You're not taking notes, you're taking answers, And it's strategic planning, prioritized daily task lists, and essentially we show them- because in college you deal with a syllabus, and basically it's how to take this chaotic world and go chaos to concept and process to product.

“It's just – it's a way to process the information that's coming in because really when – I know when I went to college I was probably not just the last generation but the last year, I graduated high school in '81 in college and '85, and never touched a computer. Never touched it one time. So I would equate it to- when I was in college we were still using encyclopedias, looking stuff up in the card catalog, and kind of drinking out of a garden hose. Now they are drinking out of a fire hydrant and you have to help them sort through that chaos if they're going to be effective students."

[After THE JUMP: A “radically different” approach to special teams]

So it's like time management.
/stares quizzically
Is that a factor?
"Okay, it's funny you say it's about time management because that's one of the most common terms used, but I really don't believe you can manage time because to manage time you have to control it. But you can control the events of your life through the decisions you make so that's where we spend a lot of our time is on the decision-making and prioritization of things."
You copyrighted this. Is it strictly for student-athletes or-
"It's for any student from seventh grade through law school.  So, I know that probably one of the largest consumers of this stuff is middle schools because that's the first time in young people's lives where they have a different teacher for every subject. It's called interdisciplinary education, which is a fancy term for teachers stay put and kids move, but I know my wife has taught it to her law students so it's for anybody."
In terms of the special teams aspect of your job, you had a year off. How different are you as a coach because of that?
"Oh, I'll tell you. You know, I've always kind of been privately jealous of faculty that got to take a sabbatical and so I was afforded that luxury and I used that as an amazing sabbatical year. I checked off some items on my bucket list that wouldn't make sense to anybody else. I got to do some things like that.

“I got to visit some programs like Duke, for example, which was a program that was a perennial underachiever that has become relevant. I got to go see- I got to go take my daughter to college and check her into the dorm like every other parent would, which I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do. I got the chance to spend my other daughter's senior year at home with her. And you never get a second chance at your number one priority, and there's a bigger title and it's dad and I have never taken that responsibility lightly, so being that I had the opportunity to be my wife's husband and my kid's dad and then to do some things professionally. I've never had the chance to visit other football programs during the season which was pretty amazing to do that, so it was a real luxury, a real blessing, and a real major year of growth."
In terms of special teams, what are the things you think the guys have learned the most from you in this period of time?
"I would say that it is a radically different approach than maybe what they were used to. That's not drawing distinctions or anything either. Pretty much I've had that experience anywhere I've gone that it's a radically different approach. But, you know, special teams is really not a difficult area of the game schematically. It's a difficult aspect of the game fundamentally, and so probably – I keep journals.

“I keep pretty exhaustive journals because writing crystallizes your thinking and so my epiphany of 2003 is I had gone from 1986 to 2003 pretty much correcting the same stuff in October and November that I was correcting in March and April and I finally got to the point in my career where that got old, and so I knew I had to do something about it. So what we do we've done since 2003 which is going on 13, 14 years now, right? Or whatever that number is – 12, 13 years, is developed a series of drills that teach the techniques.

“And so one of the phrases that the players have heard me say till they're sick of it is the drills are the techniques, the techniques are the plays, and the plays are the games. We are building this team from the inside out and the ground up, teaching them technique and fundamentals, teaching them the art of contact, teaching them to escape contact and really teaching them where home is. What I mean by home is, you know, when we get to September, October, November it's going to get hot out there. It's going to get dicey, and if you can't bring a kid back to someplace that he's familiar with then they spend the whole fall lost and I just don't enjoy managing chaos. So this is really outcome based teaching and, like Stephen Covey would say, ‘It's beginning with the end in mind.’ So these players right now don't really have any idea what one of these team plays is going to look like but when we go to the fall and we say 'You've got him' that's going to trigger a picture. Make sense?"
Are you pretty happy with the way they've responded so far?
"I'll tell you, I am happy and it's a real credit to Brady Hoke and the guys that have been here because they recruited some high character kids that really work hard and are bright eyed and bushy tailed to come to work and practice. These are long practices and they do it with a smile.

“I'll tell you, Coach Harbaugh has an interesting philosophy. Let's say you practice two hours like Chip Kelly. He's a fast practice guy, right? Practice two hours. Over 15 practices that means you practice 30 hours. We're going to practice for 60. It's all within the rules. One of the things is we're getting to play football, which is really fun."
It sounds like the fundamental, breaking-it-down approach takes a little longer on special teams. Are you finding you spend a little more time doing that than most other places?
"You know what, we pretty much have the amount of time that you'd have somewhere else. Coach Harbaugh commits good time in the meeting room and on the practice field to it. He believes in it. Wants to be good in it. This is really for the most part the first time in my career that I've just coached special teams. I've been a position coach my whole life, but with where we're at at this point I think sole-focused time and energy on making that effective is going to pay off for us."
During times in practice where special teams aren't going are you pitching in with a different unit for working with the specialists?
"At this point we just really have… I'll take a diversion here. When I was in Arizona, when I coached at the University of Arizona, I met a guy named Mike Hargrove, who was the pitching coach of the Cleveland Indians and he ended up becoming the manager. I'll tell you something, that guy really taught me something because I got to go for spring training with those guys and sit out in the bullpen and watch professional baseball coaches handle pitchers and you know what? It really triggered something in me that like – you know all these people that say kickers are different and all that other kind of stuff? The only reason they say that is because they don't really understand them but they're the first ones putting their arms around their necks when they put a ball through the uprights that wins a game for you, alright?

“So really what we're doing is what those guys in pro baseball call a bullpen. They take them and those pitchers spin a ball into a net and they work mechanics and they rebuild them kind of from the ground up, and that's what we're doing here is I'm taking these guys and they are kicking way less than they probably ever had and we're rebuilding them from the ground up.

“So, I know Andrew David is coming, for example, in the fall and he's a good player and we are happy to have him coming, but at this point I have to go under the assumption that we have to coach these players here and make them effective and expect them to win for us and then when a new player comes in that can impact or change a situation then that's gravy but I'm taking this opportunity to coach the kickers and punters and snappers and make those guys as effective as they can possibly be."
Have you had freshman kickers come in and be able to adapt and get the job?
"Sure. Andre Heidari did it for me at USC so yeah. I've had seniors leave and freshmen come. I've had walk-ons beat out scholarship players. I've had scholarship players beat out walk-ons. There's nothing political about how we feed our families, so the best player is going to play at that position. And really it's a real easy position to determine because it's not subjective. I mean, the ball's between the poles or it's not. The ball's outs of the end zone or it's not."
Without Andrew [David] here who's placekicking for you this spring?
"Well, they all are. Kenny [Allen] and Kyle [Seychel] and Ryan [Tice] are all doing it but when you go out there you'll see- did you see one field-goal today go at the uprights?"
We didn't watch practice.
"Okay, well let me save you some time. No, not one field-goal went at the uprights today. We are not going to do one ounce of team work, meaning put it all together, so those guys are individually working on snapping, holding, and kicking, kicking into nets and working on their swing and I can tell you this: we'd go down there and if you were watching you'd see balls going all over the place, okay?

“But one of the things is if you're going to- imagine being a swing coach in golf, for example. If you're going to take and break a guy's swing down and maybe change it a little bit you can't expect him to be hitting great drives down the middle and all that stuff because there's going to be some glitches but it's March. I'm not really worried about March, I'm worried about September. But if we don't take this time to make some fundamental changes in their swing, in their approach, in their functional movement, their mobility, their core, all that kind of stuff then we'll never have the chance to change them."
You said you don't like managing chaos, is that what you said?
"I don't, right."
But special-teams a lot of times is chaos in many instances. How do you-
"Well, this is not meant to be a sarcastic response. It would be chaos to you but it all makes sense to me. What happens is you put a strategic plan, you go out, you execute that plan, and you can watch it happen in slow motion. Now, you see 11 guys hit the line of scrimmage on a kickoff and some guys drop and block and it probably looks like nuclear fission to you but to me I can see every part of that in slow motion."
Is the problem getting them to see the same thing?
"Well, they don't have to see it. They've just got to own their part of it. Make sense? So the chaos that I'm talking about is that if a kid cannot execute, for example, the art of contact fundamentally then you really can't execute a play."
Without seeing them actually kick… You were talking about golf. If you are at the driving range you're hitting balls constantly and seeing where the ball's going but they're not kicking much so-
"They're kicking but we're just kicking into a net."
But you don't know where the ball's going...
"I have a really good idea where the ball's going. Yeah, I have a really good idea but the thing is if you're going to work on their swing you've got to take the results away because they'll worry about the results and I'm not worried about the results, I’m worried the swing. We get that right [and] the results will be there.”

In the return game do you have some playmakers back there do you think?

“Well, I can tell you. I can tell you this, let me just do this.”

/pulls out a bunch of papers from back pocket and shuffles them

“Here’s who I looked at today. [Jourdan] Lewis, [Delano] Hill, [Dennis] Norfleet, [Freddy] Canteen, [Blake] Countess, [Jehu] Chesson, [Amara] Darboh, [Jabrill] Peppers, [Brian] Cole, [Jeremy] Clark, [Antonio] Whitfield, [Wyatt] Shallman, [Jack] Wangler, [Brandon] Watson. That’s who I looked at today. One of them’ll be out there.”

Can you do both [Ed.- have someone who returns kicks and punts]? Have you had that before?

“Absolutely! Nelson Agholor just did it as USC. Marqise Lee’s done it. Robert Woods did it. You rarely have a guy do both kick and punt, but in the return game it’s…sure you can. It’s a different skill set, which is what you intimate with your question there. It’s a different skill set, but my job at this point is not to pick a starter, name a starter, or even be thinking about a starter. My job is to build as much depth as possible.

“Zach [Eisendrath, football SID] was in there earlier today when I was talking, and I was saying, ‘Look, I’m just trying to build a GM car where you can take the carburetor off an Olds and put it on a Buick and keep rolling.’ So build as much depth as possible, okay? Somebody will be standing out there in that stadium in Utah. I’m not sure who that’ll be.”

When will you get your first look at actually kicking at the uprights and putting the team together? [Will you do that] at all during spring?

“We’ll do it towards the end. We won’t kick at all in the spring game [except] maybe field goals or something. But special teams is a unique thing and this is what’s unique about it, because when you finally launch that kickoff team and that kickoff return team live it’s the first play of the season. You never practice it live, and that’s one of the hairy things about coaching it. You can scrimmage your offense and your defense and all that kind of stuff, but nobody’s going to do a live kickoff and kickoff return. Nobody’s going to block a live punt off their own punter, and so we’ll work all the way up until that time, ‘til the launch, and then let ‘er rip.”

Going back to building depth, why is that important not just on special teams but overall and doing it this time of the year?

“Because football is a game of attrition mentally, physically, and emotionally. The team you start training camp with is not going to be the team that you have December 1st. There are guys out there right now that in most people’s minds [say] ‘Oh, that guy’ll never see the field’ that’ll be on that field. There’s a guy that you don’t even know his name that’s going to make a play this season, and I don’t know his name either. Like Pat Hill taught me, that’s why they put the big ‘C’ on your chest. My job’s to go out and teach, coach, and develop and bring them all as far as we can.”