Silence is not golden

[News Bot]

Will Muschamp and I are just going to have to disagree on this.
He doesn’t allow his freshmen players to talk to the media. That means if Jeff Driskel throws for 400 yards on Saturday and Florida upsets the No. 1 team in the country you won’t know what he was thinking.
Which is silly.
I’ve dealt with coaches before who wouldn’t let freshmen talk until they played in a game, which is fine. It’s not ideal, but it’s understandable.
I just don’t see how a kid who has been on campus since January is any less capable of talking to the media than a kid who came on campus five months earlier.
Maybe you disagree. Maybe you feel like whatever the coach wants to do is fine with you. Maybe you feel like this is a sportswriter whining.
Or maybe you’d like to know what Driskel thinks of playing in Tiger Stadium.
Your thoughts?

Source: GatorSports.com - Dooley's Desk

 

[DRU2012]

You have a point, certainly...those on BOTH sides of this question could ask, "Where do you draw the line?"
I understand the Coach's thinking, both in practical and in theoretical terms. Probably its main application is in team-building terms: you build unit-cohesion and "elan" by requiring members to complete passage through a clear sequence of significant barriers, beyond each of which they earn deeper membership, higher status, and greater personal empowerment within the bounds of the "special group" that, in this way, they feel more and more an integral part of.
It works, too. Look at any effective military force's introductory training procedures to see this method's well-honed and virtually unvaried use across historical and national boundaries. The "newbies" always get a lot of freedoms they took for granted (in this case, the freedom to run their mouths off when a mike is shoved in their faces) suddenly withdrawn; those that may be returned to them are bestowed as precious emblems of their ongoing commitment to the TEAM, and its (and all its members, their "brothers in arms") commitment to THEM. Do not underestimate the power of this process in every facet of building a superior "fighting organization", which IS, after all, one description of what a really good football team strives to be.