Look around Georgia State’s practice field after a day of camp ends around 11 a.m.
Instead of hustling to the cold tubs or ducking out to enjoy their last hours of freedom before class starts next week, the players are still working as the MARTA trains speed by, the drivers honking a horn and offering a friendly wave.
In one corner the outside linebackers are working on shedding blocks. In another corner, the safeties and cornerbacks are doing improvised pass defense drills. The wide receivers are running routes.
There is one thread that runs through those groups: each includes a player who transferred from UAB after it temporarily and shortsightedly dissolved its program.
These former Blazers are helping Panthers coach Trent Miles teach his players what it takes to win on the FBS level. The Panthers, which have one win in two years, will open the season hosting Charlotte on Sept. 4.
“We aren’t trying to change a culture, we are trying to build a culture,” Miles said. “They are assisting in helping. The way they come out and prepare. The way they prepare in the meetings and their attitude in the locker room. It’s all beneficial to what we are trying to do.”
Miles said he and his staff met with dozens of UAB players, interviewing them to see if they had the character, smarts, toughness and passion for the game that Miles recites every day as traits players must have. Six enrolled. Five remain: safety Bobby Baker, wide receiver Nyiakki Height, outside linebacker Alonzo McGee, cornerback Demarco Davis and center Kelepi Folau. Baker, Height, McGee and Folau are working with the first team.
The UAB players on the roster know what it takes to establish a culture because they were once where Georgia State is now: a team with more losses than wins. Before going 6-6 last year, the Blazers hadn’t had a winning record since 2004. They had two five-win seasons twice during that span.
The key to that turnaround, and what the former Blazers said is the key to helping Georgia State win at the very least its first Sun Belt game in its second year of trying, is to make the team the focus.
“Everybody had to stick together and know it’s one goal,” said Height, who caught 22 passes the previous two years at UAB. “If you want a championship you have to take yourself out of the equation and make it about the whole team. I feel like it’s going in the right direction.”
That’s why you see the players, sometimes with the UAB guys, sometimes without, continuing to try to improve. It’s something some of the players did in previous years, but not in groups as large as this year. The team is deeper than it has ever been and competition for playing time more intense. Putting in that extra work may be the difference between playing time and the bench.
Quarterback Nick Arbuckle said Baker, who played three games at UAB last year before sustaining a season-ending knee injury, would bring the defensive backs to the practice complex during the summer, turn on the lights, and work.
“It shows now,” Arbuckle said. “These DBs, both ones and twos, are better than any DBs I faced in the Sun Belt last year.”
The UAB players see the camaraderie between teammates that they said they saw as UAB began to turn things around.
Folau said you will never see an offensive lineman sitting by himself in the cafeteria. They hang out together. They eat together. They do everything as a group.
“That’s the big key to everything: if you learn to play together you learn to win,” Folau said. “If we do something we got out as a group. That’s how it’s coached. We stay as a unit, work as a unit, play as a unit.”
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