DESHAZIER: Kellen spoke about your looking for ways to make sure that the players are in good recovery, able to go for as long as possible, as quickly as possible.
RATH: The cool thing is, there's so much data that we can look at. So, one of the things we look at is force plate. We're testing our players at least weekly on a force plate. This is a pressure platform that goes into the ground and we're looking at almost 100 metrics per jump; every player is jumping at least three times. This gives us things like reactive strength index, we're looking at concentric power at 50 milliseconds. We're looking at these things that give us, what's in effect, muscular fatigue markers. So now we can go into the body and say physiologically, I can be talking to Erik McCoy and say, 'Hey, Erik, how do you feel?' And E could say, 'I feel great, I feel fresh.' But then I take some of these other markers and these data points that are objective by nature and say, 'Hey, do you know you're down 10 percent here, you're down 12 or 15 percent here?' And we can start to stack the objective measurables on top of the subjective. I'll always want sports science to reaffirm what my coach's eye is telling me, just like in a scouting process. If you're (Assistant General Manager/Director of College Scouting) Jeff Ireland and (Executive Vice President/General Manager) Mickey (Loomis), I want the data to reaffirm what the eye is telling me. Same thing with sports science. So we can apply these methods, but the objective data gives me an objective number that's quantifiable, and then that allows me to dig in for deeper context and talk to a player. If it's still (McCoy), 'E, how are you feeling?' 'Oh, my legs are a little fatigued.' 'That's interesting because these markers show me this, this and this. Here's what we can do, though. Let's do hot-cold contrast, let's do some implementation for some recovery stuff.' And then I can go to the guys on the medical side and we can partner together and build this collaborative approach to make sure that we're heeding the player from all angles to get them recovered so that they can go out there the next practice day and compete.
DESHAZIER: Is there such a thing as the secret sauce to keeping guys healthy? This team ran through a rash of injuries the past two seasons. I guess you can prepare as much as you can prepare and still, things happen.
RATH: There's some luck involved, obviously. It's football. I would say this: Football is a 100 percent injury sport, it just differs on the variable and the levels and, really, the strain of what it is. If I had to give you one word of how do you lessen the chances of injury, how do you mitigate the injury exposure? For me, it's 'collaboration.' And I say collaboration because it starts with the head coach buying in to whatever the program is or the system. It's how do you practice? How long are you in the building? How much psychological stress are you placing on players from meetings and from timing and things like that? Are you allowing adequate time to eat nutritionally? Then it's a collaboration between the sports medicine staff, the sports performance staff – it's collaboration to make sure everyone is on the same page. And then, that trickles down to the assistant coaches to make sure that their drill selection is in alignment with the intensity and the standards of what we're trying to elicit out of a certain practice level, because every day's intensity is not going to be the same. There's going to be days where we need more – more high-speed yardage, more high accelerations, more high decelerations. And then the ultimate collaboration comes with the players. The players' buy-in is the single most important thing. They have to trust us, there has to be this common cause that comes together where they say, 'I know that they're going to put us in a position to be successful because they've shown us, they've built it through consistency and they've showed us that they know how to set this up and my body feels it and I feel it,' and there's that trust factor. Football is the greatest team sport. Without collaboration, there's no team that's going to be able to go and capture a championship, let alone win games.
DESHAZIER: What have you seen in terms of player buy-in so far? (Safety) Justin Reid said he likes what has happened with the combination of conditioning and OTAs.
RATH: I think it's been good, it's been positive. We've gotten really positive feedback in regard to the players' understanding. So, our job as coaches – everyone in the building, anyone who works here – our job is to educate the players and explain the 'why.' Why are we practicing at a certain intensity today, why are we balancing that with maybe weight room exposure, why is this intensity higher here, why is it lower here. And going through that educational process because a guy like Justin Reid, he's a smart player. He understands and he's been around, he's seen different ways to do it. So understanding what's going to work in New Orleans, because we have things like heat, humidity – what other physiological factors that we have to play around because in the grand scheme of things, we can use that as a leverage to our advantage. If we have to go play a hot game in Carolina or in Tampa, we're going to leverage the heat and the humidity. There's ways to do that so we can physiologically adjust and be ready to go compete in those games and those environments.