Three observations on Alabama State football after Black and Gold Game

Alabama State football capped off its five-week, 15-practice spring period with Saturday's Black and Gold Game at ASU Stadium.

As spring 2020 was cancelled due to COVID-19 and the FCS played its regular season during the spring in 2021, this was the first Black and Gold Game in three years.

The Hornets lacked enough players to split fully into two teams, and only part of the afternoon consisted of 11-on-11 football. Still, the presence of fans and the Mighty Marching Hornets brought some semblance of a real game.

Here are three observations from Saturday and Alabama State's spring as a whole:

Takeaways from the game

Two weeks ago, new coach Eddie Robinson Jr. praised the Hornets' interior defense while adding he wanted to see more pressure on the quarterback.

Saturday, Robinson thought ASU's pass rush was the best it's been all spring.

"We've got some young guys at the defensive end spot," he said. "We have to put pressure on the quarterback to be successful. They did a good job today."

Robinson thought the Hornets' running game picked up towards the end of the scrimmage, and the quarterbacks generally made solid decisions. That is, when they got the ball. A handful of botched snaps killed plays before they got going.

Robinson also wants to shore up penalty issues that plagued ASU earlier in the spring and were on display Saturday.

"I'm just a big discipline guy," he said. "... Biggest thing is just situational football and making sure we're being smart about what we're doing."

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Four quarters

This spring was the first spring practice period for many Hornets, save for a number of older players. In January, Robinson made those in the former group aware of what to expect.

Robinson analogized the season to one year-long game. The first quarter — January and February — should consist mostly of conditioning. The second quarter, spring football, is all about fine-tuning.

"When you segment it like that with athletes, I think they like structure and order," Robinson said. "Once they have structure and order, they can kind of see exactly where we're going."

Unlike in an actual game, there's no halftime — "if you're an athlete, you're an athlete 365 days a year," Robinson said — so he expects his players not to slack off in May before summer school and team-led workouts begin May 30. Robinson envisions the summer months, or the third quarter, to be much like January and February.

"Fourth quarter is the season," Robinson said. "What I told them, like a football game, is if you don't do the right things in the first, second and third quarter, and all of a sudden you want to turn it on at the end, then it's too late."

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Attention to detail

Alabama State is Robinson's first coaching job at any level. Thus, this spring was a somewhat eye-opening experience for him.

Among the many things Robinson learned: while he considers himself to be pretty organized in his own life, keeping an entire college football team on schedule is another animal.

Robinson's responsibilities don't end on the football field. Even making sure there's enough water for the parents of recruits on visits, he said, comes back to him and can have major consequences if not handled correctly.

"Everything you have to do, you can't take for granted that it's automatically going to happen," Robinson said. "You got to assign somebody to do it and make sure that there's accountability."

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Jacob Shames can be reached by email at jshames@gannett.com, by phone at 334-201-9117 and on Twitter @Jacob_Shames.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Alabama State football Black and Gold spring game key takeaways