Alabama football hydration: Tongue tests and twice-hourly bathroom breaks? | Goodbread
The old adage that encourages us to practice moderation in all things undoubtedly has good intentions, but apparently, it's not an absolute.
Not if you're an Alabama football player and, during one of the hottest Tuscaloosa summers in recent memory, you're tasked with staying hydrated for peak practice performance. Crimson Tide offensive lineman Tyler Booker told The Next Round podcast that players are encouraged to consume up to a gallon and a half of water a day.
That's 192 ounces (192!).
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That's a dozen 16-oz. bottles; Booker said he achieves the goal with three bottles per meal and another three during team meetings.
If you're old enough to remember when football coaches used to make salt tablets available to players under the misguided premise that they helped prevent dehydration (own hand raised, unfortunately), you can't help but wonder just how close we all came to imploding into a dehydrated cloud of dust a couple generations ago. You might also be old enough to wonder how many bathroom breaks 192 ounces of water demands (there's that hand again).
Enter Alabama center Seth McLaughlin, who was asked about this hydration regimen Monday.
"We’re chugging water day-in and day-out," McLaughlin said. "If you’re doing it right, you’ve got to go to the restroom every 30 minutes."
And what if you're doing it wrong?
I can remember five-minute water breaks, mid-practice, being pretty much the sum total of a high school hydration program. If you were a freshman at the end of the line, like the last dog at the bowl, you'd have to tilt the cooler toward you to fill a three-ounce paper cup. Apparently, that was barely enough to hydrate us for the stretch period.
The science of major college football has become a downright marvel.
It can track the practice speed and fatigue of every player individually via in-uniform GPS monitors. It can rehab an injury with zero-gravity treadmills that allow an athlete to run with any desired percentage of body weight taken off a twisted ankle or knee. And now, it can even tattle on players who aren't getting in their 192 ounces of H20. It's the hydration police! And they're not asking — they're telling — players if they're consuming enough fluids.
"They have these little devices, (they) walk around, dab it on your tongue, and it pops up a number to see if you been hydrating or not," McLaughlin added. "(There's a) scale — hydrated, not hydrated, mildly hydrated."
Bobby Bouchet would've been proud.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23 and the Talkin' Tide podcast. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Goodbread: Alabama football hydration program demands tongue tests?
