CHANGE: Deacons seeking balance

When football practice begins, some things never end.

Most college players will say goodbye to summer this week and open their ears to familiar voices. They will hear coaches blowing whistles and blowing out slackers. They will endure lectures about apprehensive athletes evolving into manly men under the smoking sun.

Triple-option offenses come and go (and, in Georgia Tech's case, come back again). Sensitivity training and diversity training occasionally seep into the modern college curriculum, but training camp emphasizes a different value system.

The short version: Get tough. The long version: Get tough, twice a day.

The language seems universal. Duke even offers it now as an elective, with Coach David Cutcliffe as the esteemed lecturer from the SEC. In his debut last fall, the Blue Devils finished 4-8, which sounds modest until you realize that they won two games -- total -- in the three previous seasons. The Cutcliffe guys broke a 25-game ACC losing streak against Virginia.

He intends to raise the bar.

"You've got to find out if they're going to quit on you on the practice field," Cutcliffe said. "We were fragile a year ago. We're still somewhat fragile depth-wise and emotionally, but we can challenge this team. We couldn't challenge last year's team without just breaking their will. We're going to find out."

Wake Forest found out years ago that Coach Jim Grobe could break the pattern of football futility. His plan bore unimagined fruit in 2006, when the Deacons won their second ACC title in 36 years and reached the Orange Bowl.

They sniffed the possibilities early last season, knocking off division rivals Florida State and Clemson, but Navy intercepted four Riley Skinner passes and the offense sputtered at midseason.

"It was my fault," Grobe said. "We put too much on Riley Skinner at the beginning of the year."

After Maryland rolled 26-0 in the sixth game, Grobe backed off the pass-driven spread offense and shifted gears radically. At Miami the next week, Skinner threw only eight passes, and the Deacons ran the ball 52 times while losing 16-10. Stumbles against Boston College and N.C. State sealed Wake's fate, but a bowl win over Navy lifted the record to 8-5.

Grobe expects a lot from a stronger blocking line and returning tailbacks Kevin Harris, Josh Adams and Brandon Pendergrass. If the season started today -- and it doesn't -- Grobe would start Harris based on his past two games, but the coach said that Adams and Pendergrass outperformed Harris during spring drills.

"I didn't think those guys were very tough last year," Grobe said, "and I thought this spring I just saw some really mature guys. It looked like we had some guys that had gained in toughness. It looked like we were a little bit tougher group of running backs. I thought we were kind of cute last year. This spring, I thought we had some good, solid running backs."

Grobe and offensive coordinator Steed "Lobo" Lobotzke will seek an appropriate balance.

"Just throwing it isn't the answer, and just running it's not the answer," Grobe said. "But you've got to be careful that you don't get so hardheaded about tough-guy stuff and ‘we're going to run the ball' and ‘we're going to cram the football' and all that kind of stuff that you forget you've got Riley Skinner sitting back there. Our challenge -- Lobo's challenge, our offensive coaches' challenge -- is to be better at running the football but don't waste Riley Skinner."

Winners and losers

Whatever the balance between brains and brawn, no team enters college camp in a no-lose mood. Everybody loses somebody from the previous camp, usually somebody big.

Maryland lost more than that. At last count early last week, Coach Ralph Friedgen had lost 95 pounds. He weighed 401 at the recorded peak, and now he's down to 306.

The motivation: fear of dying and not seeing his grandchildren grow up. Plus, his wife stayed on the case. Friedgen, 62, tried a diet plan sold by a Maryland booster that emphasizes eating small meals often. It has worked well for about nine months.

Friedgen's hearing also has improved. He hears people whispering about him in stores and restaurants. The most prevalent remark in direct conversations: "You look a lot like that football coach at Maryland."

Tommy Bowden no longer looks a lot like the football coach at Clemson. He lost that job in the middle of last season. Bowden recently managed to sell his Clemson home for more than $1 million, cash, and moved to Florida with his wife.

Father Bobby Bowden shakes his head.

"Man," he said, "I'm sitting over there with property, and I can't even get nobody to smell it, and that son of a gun goes up there and sells his house for cash. Every penny I've got is wrapped up, and I can't sell nothing. Anyway, he's down in Panama City now. He has a condominium down there. He'll stay there and think about building a home there and walk up and down that beach. I told him he'd be bored to death about three or four games into the season."

Boredom will not sideline Skinner. He will hear those college cheers for the final time. Besides, they've already put him in the movies. Promos are now circulating for The 5th Quarter, the film about the Abbate family and the Deacons' 2006 season.

Skinner doesn't know the actor who plays Riley Skinner. "I think he has red hair," Skinner said. "That's what somebody told me." He grins and flicks the dark hair off his forehead.

If the cinematic quarterback is a redhead, he's probably a tough redhead, at least in August.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com