SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In a refreshingly honest moment on the day he and his San Francisco 49ers teammates reported for training camp, wide receiver Torrey Smith made it abundantly clear what he's most looking forward to during the preseason.
"Camp being over," Smith said, a grin creeping across his face. "Yeah, easily camp being over."
It's going to be awhile before Smith will get to celebrate the end of camp (and the beginning of games that count). In the meantime, Smith and his teammates are taking solace in the fact that though the end of camp is a ways away, the end of each day of camp will come much sooner under new coach Chip Kelly's schedule.
While the Niners have only unveiled the schedule for the first two weeks of camp, the common thread among those workouts is that they all start at 10:25 a.m. PST. Kelly's practices, which are known for being fast-paced and rep-heavy, will last no longer than two hours and some will clock in at an hour or 90 minutes.
When the 49ers aren't practicing, they'll be in meetings but Kelly's approach is meant to be uber-efficient wherein his team gets just as much or more work done than other teams around the league but in less time. On most days, it's a safe bet that players will have completed their mandatory duties by around the early evening.
"For me looking at camp, it looks like the best camp schedule I've ever been a part of," Smith said. "(John) Harbaugh out in Baltimore, you get it in and you work your tails off. So a lot of guys are used to the (Jim) Harbaugh here as well. And last year, coach (Jim) Tomsula, he worked our tails off so the biggest difference will be with this tempo. But me just glancing at this schedule, it's going to be the best camp schedule I've ever been a part of. We actually get to see daylight when we get out. That'll be another cool thing."
Around the league, coaches all have a different approach to the time they're allotted with players on the field. The 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement allows for players to participate in on-field work for no more than four hours each day with a limit of three hours for the only allowed padded practice on a given day. Many teams don't practice for a full three hours but will go for at least two in the afternoon with an hour or so walk through in the morning.
For the Niners, there's plenty of logic behind Kelly's schedule. San Francisco has 10 a.m. starts scheduled against Carolina, Buffalo, Miami and Chicago this season. Only the Dec. 18 meeting at Atlanta doesn't come with an early start among the 49ers' trips outside of the NFC West division. San Francisco played in five games with the early start a year ago, going 1-4 in those matchups with the lone victory coming in Week 13 against Chicago.
"I think I'm going to like it," safety Antoine Bethea said. "We have a lot of games on the East Coast where kickoff time will be 10 o'clock (our time) so we start practicing now at 10 o'clock and when the games come, it won't be a surprise to us."