As Fall Camp Opens Tom Allen Avoids the 'What Ifs' by Focusing on What He Can Control

Tom Allen wears a mask as the Hoosiers started practice Thursday Image: Indiana University Athletics

Written by Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

Fall college football practice starting on August 6th seems normal. This is the time of year when excitement buzzes around college football programs as they start their four-plus month journey to the postseason, when kids start back to school and you can feel the slight cool crisp in the evening air that signals football is back.

However, 2020 is not normal. What we so desperately want to feel normal is surreal and there is a tendency to get sucked into the abyss by focusing on the ‘what ifs’.

For example, when I report to school for my job as a physical education teacher there is a tendency to jump down the ‘what if’ rabbit hole. What if the school closes tomorrow? What if school opens as planned to full classrooms on August 17th?

Indiana head football coach Tom Allen had a pretty normal day on paper. It was the first day of fall camp for his 2020 Hoosiers, so he was back on the field directing practice. Afterwards he met with the media to talk about the upcoming season. Pretty normal…on paper. However, this is 2020. The meeting was on Zoom and the questions opened up many opportunities to jump down the ‘what if’ hole.

Allen has a strategy to handle all of the uncertainty. It’s pretty simple, yet sometimes very hard to pull off. Take one step at a time.

“We're going to focus on one thing and that's today” Allen said. “I can't control tomorrow. I never have been able to control tomorrow, but more than ever we have to focus on today. Yeah, we're going to have a plan but man, we had a lot of plans going into all this. Most of those plans have been scrapped. So, it's going to focus on the short term of today. We'll have a plan for tomorrow schedule-wise for sure, but we're not going to go much further than that.”

Whether you’re a teacher at an Indianapolis elementary school or the head coach of a Big Ten football team, that focus has to be laser like. Allen cannot focus on what will happen if camp gets shut down in two weeks. He cannot focus on what happens if games start getting cancelled and moved again.

‘Control what I can control’ has been my mantra as I head back to educating students and Tom Allen has a similar out look.

“We're going to control what we can control” Allen told the media in a Zoom call. “We have no control whatsoever on what happens across this country, what happens other places, but we can control our mindset, the way that we attack every single day. Our one word for 2020 is ‘Relentless.’ So, we're going to relentlessly attack today and control the things that we can control, which is our focus, our effort and the way that we prepare.”

Allen explained that it is his staff’s responsibility is to keep the players safe and healthy while also preparing them from a grueling 10-game Big Ten schedule that features five pre-season Top 25 teams in the Amway Coaches Poll.

An intense focus on the now is nothing to the Hoosiers under Allen and they have been dealing with the COVID pandemic since March so the Hoosiers have had to learn to live like this before today.

“That's the message and it's focused on a daily focus of that and not try to go beyond it because if you do, you get into a lot of what-ifs and a lot of different scenarios that we probably waste a lot of energy trying to figure out right now. I know that's not always comforting to not know where you're going to be, what you're going to be doing at certain dates, but it's reality and I think we've all been through this long enough to know that that's kind of what we've gotten used to in some ways” Allen said.

Much like the teacher planning for the 2020 school year, Allen can only take it one day at a time as to not fall victim to the ‘what if’ rabbit hole.