After fights break out at a training camp practice, it’s not uncommon to hear coaches bemoan the scuffling as both an injury risk and a diversion that gets in the way of beneficial on-field work.
Given the number of fights that broke out at Thursday’s joint practice between the Browns and Colts, you’d expect to hear responses like that and Colts head coach Frank Reich said, via the Indianapolis Star, that he wants to “continue to try to eliminate those things.”
The reaction was a bit different on the Browns side. Head coach Freddie Kitchens’s message to his team after Wednesday’s practice was that “we’re not going to back down anybody” and said after the session that he felt it was received.
“These guys are resilient from the standpoint of we can identify a problem and these guys work to fix it,” Kitchens said, via Cleveland.com. “We identified that problem last night, and they came out and fixed it. . . . We just have a way that we are going to treat our practices. That is how we’re going to practice. It doesn’t matter who we’re going against. We learned a lot about ourselves from the standpoint of that’s how you have to approach it. You keep your tempo. Let everybody else adjust to yours, not the other way around.”
Kitchens was happy about the way his team practiced and he’ll get to see if it carries over to the field when the two teams face off in Indianapolis on Saturday.