New Prairie View Panthers football coach Tremaine Jackson makes no bones about it. He is all about violence on the football field, and for Jackson, it’s not something you can see, but it’s an energy he can feel and hear.
And on this Wednesday night of spring football practice, Jackson was calling for it. “Let’s go! Violence!” he demanded of his players.
Jackson says it’s coming. He sees it in flashes, and more importantly, he hears it as the spring ball winds down.
“I’m listening for a certain sound, and that’s the violence that we are talking about,” Jackson said to the Defender. “It’s a violent game, played by violent people, violently and it ain’t no way around that. The sound is coming.
“Hopefully, by the time we get to the end, it’s sounding like it needs to sound so that I know we are playing violently.”
“We’re looking for effort. We going to evaluate talent but right now I’m looking to see if guys will do exactly what we tell them to do. I said in my press conference, we don’t negotiate with kids. You do exactly what we tell you to do so that we can get to where we need to go to. If you do that then everybody will be fine.”
Tremaine Jackson, Prairie View Panthers Head football coach
Welcome to a whole new level of intensity on The Hill.
There is a new voice and new sound and it starts with the Panthers’ 41-year-old blunt-talking new coach.
The buy-in has been made by those who choose to stick around after Bubba McDowell’s contract wasn’t renewed at the end of last season.
“I love it,” said quarterback Lucas Coley, who played at Arkansas and University of Houston before arriving at Prairie View last summer. “That’s how I grew up. `You are going to do what I say or you are not going to play. We are not going to get far as a team if you don’t know how to adapt to how I’m teaching the program how to act and behave.’
“He’s been to places, he has won championships. So nothing he is saying is coming from a place of egos. It’s coming from a place of experience. Everybody is buying into that and working day in and day out. It’s awesome. I love it.”
Discipline. Adaptable. Accountability.
Those are the words you hear being thrown around most when it comes to the new Panther way. Being 10 minutes early everywhere is the standard. Being on time is late.
“The biggest difference is they are holding us accountable,” said defensive tackle Jamal Marshall, who is on his third head coach at Prairie View after starting out under Eric Dooley before McDowell. “It’s just like the smallest details whether it’s being on time … We have to show up everywhere 10 minutes early. Just little stuff like that. That’s been the biggest change I’ve seen so far.”
As much as spring has been about evaluating talent and introducing the new and old players to the new Panther way, it’s been about getting everybody used to a new set of expectations and doing things around the program. Jackson is coming off leading undefeated powerhouse Valdosta State to the Division II Championship Game, while the Panthers are coming off a 5-7 overall and a 3-5 SWAC finish.
“We are just in the process of trying to build this culture and the way that we play now,” Jackson said. “We build the way we play now … Everybody talks about what Prairie View football was and what it should be. This is the way we establish our culture, the way we do things and we are in the infant stages of it, but it’s going pretty good. Our kids are willing, that’s the biggest deal.”
As expected with any coaching change and given the nature of the transfer portal and NIL, Prairie View lost a few players, like William Boone, who left to play for Super Bowl-winning head coach Bill Belichick and the North Carolina Tar Heels. Jackson even lost some players during spring ball.
But Jackson is okay with the defections and excited about the 19 new mid-year transfers who are going through spring practices, including Valdosta State transfers Ty Brown (right guard) and Sterling Roberts (middle linebacker). Jackson anticipates additional additions once the transfer portal opens again this month.
“Everybody didn’t make it with us. Some guys got out of here earlier when we first got here just because it was too different. And that’s okay,” said Jackson, whose plan is to end spring practices on April 17 but the format was still undetermined at the time of this story. “We are just glad to have the guys we are with and we are working to get better and better every day.”
What has been interesting is that the quarterback room didn’t suffer any losses but made some additions. Cam Peters, who started the majority of the games last season, is back, as are Timothy Barrington and Coley, who had won the starting job last season before suffering a season-ending injury on the first play of the first game.
“They were talented. Schematically there are some things we might do ourselves that they did before,” Jackson said. “But we felt like in what we do now, those guys fit. So I wanted to keep them around and put them through our program and our system and coach them our way. And they have adhered to it. They’ve made some plays, so I’m really proud of those guys because they’ve had a couple of coordinators since they’ve been here. And then the guys who transferred here last year, they’ve had a couple of coordinators in their career, too.
“So there is just a lot of football being taught in a lot of different ways. Those guys are adapting to the way we do things.”
Jackson, however, isn’t quite ready to name a starter or frontrunner for the job. He even alludes to the possibility of additional bodies to the current five-member quarterback room by the time fall camp starts.
“We ain’t even close. We won’t name a guy until we get to August,” said Jackson, pointing to the Labor Day Classic season-opener at Texas Southern. “We’ve got five guys out here and there are going to be some more on the way. We are really going to fight it out in the summer and through fall camp and then when we get ready to play that Week 1 game, we will name somebody.”
