Pokes Practice Report: Sawvel Delivers an Early Wake-Up Call

LARAMIE --  If Jay Sawvel was handing out grades Tuesday, let's just say, no one landed on the honor roll.

Wyoming's first-year coach said he had to stop the sixth practice of the fall and gather his team at midfield.

"I mean, it was real simple today, I called everybody up, ripped their asses, and we went back to it," he said with a shrug.

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What transpired after that animated wake-up call took on more of the appearance of what Sawvel was looking for, but he still called it a "C-" type of day.

"We should be getting a B+ and an A in the class," he continued. "That was my expectation."

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The Cowboys first day in full pads included a gamut of situations on the North 40 practice fields. There were a plethora of blitz packages, two-minute drills, goal-line scenarios, third-and-short attempts and plenty more during this two-plus hour outing. The last eight or nine periods, Sawvel said, were much improved, though admittedly the offense wasn't exactly put in "conducive situations."

You know, just like in a game, he added.

Before that, this workout included procedural penalties, a lack of finishing plays and even a blocked punt.

"I thought today we kind of were stuck in mud for a little bit," Sawvel said. "I about had to reset the practice clock to period one. That was a sincere thought ... There's an expectation level that we need to practice to all the time. We were a little short of that for a little while today."

Coaches and players were scheduled to meet with the media at noon Tuesday inside the High Altitude Performance Center. That didn't happen.

"I thought we need to maybe stay out there," Sawvel said half-jokingly, referring to starting practice over from scratch. "You guys would have been here till about four or five o'clock waiting for me."

Here are some other tidbits from Tuesday's meeting with the local press:

* This will be Sawvel's fifth season on the Wyoming football staff. Just two of those games have been played on natural grass. The first came at UConn back in 2021. The following year the Cowboys played in Provo, Utah. A third is on the horizon. The home of the Arizona State Sun Devils, Mountain America Stadium, also features the real deal. Is that anything this team needs to specifically prepare for? "Their grass would be like a putting green, probably," he said. "So it'll be really nice to play on." In other words, no biggie. The Cowboys have been practicing on the North 40 in Laramie, which is all natural unlike Jonah Field. That serves a couple of purposes, Sawvel added. One, it's cooler than the turf. Secondly, there is plenty of room for all the units to be working at the same time.

*  The news wasn't all doom and gloom on this day. Sawvel admitted he was in "glass-half-empty mode" but still found some positives. Redshirt freshman receiver Justin Stevenson made a pair of impressive third-down catches. Evan Svoboda was twirling the football better on Tuesday after a rough outing on Monday. The rest, well, he's waiting to watch the film. Overall, though, the effort was where it needed to be late. "We're at the end of that practice and people are not on the ground. People are still competing and fighting," he said. "We're down on the goal line doing stuff and we're getting good work in on a day-to-day basis. I think that's the biggest thing to it, is that even on a day that I felt like we weren't as clean as what we needed to be, we made progress at things ... Some days you're going to shove things forward 100 yards, some days you're going to shove it forward 10 yards. I don't know how far we shoved it forward today, but it went forward."

* This was the second of six consecutive practices for this Wyoming team. That will culminate in a scrimmage Saturday inside War Memorial Stadium. "I want to ride them a little bit in this first scrimmage," Sawvel said, adding that the first team will take roughly 35 snaps, which has not always been the case under former head coach Craig Bohl. "Then the next scrimmage I can, you know, back off the first group." Why is Sawvel doing that? "I always want stuff to be hard, you know? And stuff to be stressful," he added.

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