Auburn is the latest program to break away from the traditional spring game format.
Auburn football is the latest program to alter its traditional spring game format.
Auburn athletics announced Tuesday that the annual “A-Day” game will have a new look this year. The event, which will be held on Saturday, April 12 at Jordan-Hare Stadium, will now be a public practice beginning at noon CT and will last approximately an hour. Before the practice, an alumni flag football will take place at 11 a.m. CT, with the event concluding with an autograph session with head coach Hugh Freeze and Auburn players. The event will be free to attend.
Freeze spoke on the format change during his Tuesday press conference, where he doubled down on his dream of playing another team from Alabama instead of the usual intrasquad scrimmage.
“I don’t know. I’ve tried for years. I’ve also tried to get a spring game to be with another team in your state and have a day where we give it all to foster care of the state. Everybody gives 10 dollars to come to the game and you play a game, and let’s adopt a charity in your state, and that didn’t get any traction either. I think we are the only sport that doesn’t have some competition with another school at any point during the year. The NFL does it three or four times. Everybody else – baseball, basketball – gets to go scrimmage somebody else. But for some reason that’s been off-limits for us. It hasn’t gotten any traction. I do think with all the changes in the recruiting calendar that there might be some momentum for people to listen to what I’m saying. Let’s let our kids train all spring and give us 10 days like the NFL at the first part of June and let’s do some OTAs then, and let’s just train all spring. I think we would be healthier. I do think that has a fighting chance. There’s going to be some changes coming in the calendar, there has to be. So it might have a fighting chance. I do think the days of a spring game where you are televising that and the portal opens the next week, that just doesn’t make much sense. I think those days are kind of over of doing that. We went down the list of injured guys, and trying to divide up and having some kind of spring game just doesn’t make as much sense as us doing what we did today. We’ll have some live periods, but it will be more of a practice format.”
Because of the new format, A-Day will no longer be streamed live by SEC Network+. Instead, footage of A-Day will be used as part of an All-Access show that will air on SEC Network later in April.