One of the famous unwritten rules of coaching is that there can (and always will be) disagreements in the meeting room, but once the staff leaves the room with a plan in place, everyone acts as if the consensus plan was unanimous all along. Each idea -- whether it be scheme, scheduling, personnel -- is the best idea ever, and the whole staff is in total agreement.
That, of course, is totally contrary to human nature yet a requirement when you're running an organization as large and complex as a college football team.
And so it's always interesting to see what changes interim head coaches make once the team is placed in their hands, because those changes are ones they would've made before if only they had the power to do so.
At Wisconsin, that was the Monday schedule.
Paul Chryst had the players meet with coaches at 7:30 am. Mondays before a 9 a.m. walk-through, which inevitably required coaches to process the previous Saturday's game and begin having a plan in place for the following week's game by late Sunday or early, early Monday.
Now under Leonhard's leadership, though, those meetings and walk-throughs do not happen until Monday evening.
“I think (the change) is huge for coaches really having an extra 10, 12 hours to detail this thing up,” Leonhard told the Wisconsin State Journal. “I know our players felt a huge difference. I think with our confidence in how we presented the plan, felt like we wasted less reps on a Monday as you were close to having the answers but maybe not all the way there. So just some little things scheduling wise right now, and practice, I think they felt a difference. And hopefully they see that we have confidence in it.”
“When you wake up on Monday, you’re like, 'Ah,'" linebacker Nick Herbig told the paper. “Not the fact that you don’t want to practice, it’s like damn, we already are back into it. I felt like this way we can get a little more sleep. You kind of wake up like, 'Oh, we’re going to go work out, we’re just going to go get after it with the guys, get a little sweat in, not have to worry about practicing, not have to worry about knowing all these plays.' We’ll worry about that later on in the day. And it gives the coaches more time to get a better plan for us too, so I think it benefits the team as a whole."
Northwestern is not a good football team right now, and so it's entirely possible that a work week that began at 7:30 a.m. Monday would've still led to a victory on Saturday.
But, in the world we live in, Wisconsin didn't meet until 5 p.m. Monday, and that work week resulted in a 42-7 Badgers victory.
Of course, no one's suggesting that the time of Monday meetings determined the outcome in the game, but all the decisions before and afterward did.
It's Monday evening as we post this, which means Wisconsin is now beginning work on Saturday's trip to Michigan State (4 p.m. ET, Fox), which shapes up as another winnable game for the Badgers.
String a few more good work weeks into a few more Saturdays like the last one, and Wisconsin could find the Monday schedule adjustment could soon lead to countless other changes, big and small, and those could be made on a permanent basis.