Practice Recap from GBMW

We don't know who this guy is—he doesn't identify himself by name—so we have no way to verify anything he's saying. He's counting on us to accept on faith that his observations are accurate. I'm putting it into the "interesting, but not necessarily the truth" category myself.

Quite the writeup.  There's just one thing I find hard to believe:

Last year he made a few nice throws with a defender in his grille because he only had one read on most plays – if it wasn't there, he tucked and ran.

Was this really true?  I can hardly remember Denard ever tucking and running on designed pass plays.  I can't believe he just had a single read that often.

Nice to hear they're doing full contact drills.  Didn't RR say they didn't do much of that due to lack of depth?  I think that's what I pinned for poor tackling last year.

NM...and not serious..kind of

not only TARD CITY but TARD CITY USA

i can't wait until chris rock and michael schofield are both starting, than someone else can relive the pain that i went thru trying to find out scouting information for them.

I'm tempted to say tl;dr but I can't lie -- I read the whole thing.  It hurt my head a bit, yes, but after applying a filter I was able to enjoy the content.  I think there's good stuff in there.

Could they maybe enlist a volunteer student (or maybe just a sharp 9th-grader who did well in grammar) to wordsmith their posts?  How nice would that be?

Love the 'raw feed' from the practice and some of the anecdotes about Coach and Ricky Powers. No idea whatsoever about the more editorial stuff. I find it hard to imagine that we can't take one of the most exciting players in the country to line up under center and make it work.....

The quality of their writing has gotten better, though, since the golden days of PAD LEVEL.

(PS: No, I'm not them)

I have observed probably half of the practices this spring and cosign much of this report. He has some obvious prejudices though.

He is fairly accurate in stating that the first string DL is probably the best unit on the team. The second string D is really not all that good, or at the very least not ready outside of Black,T. Gordon,Robinson, and Jake Ryan. Cullen Christian will be a solid player eventually, but he needs a little more seasoning. He was way too hard on Marvin Robinson at this point in time with the looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane bit. The scheduled practices are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and Marvin has class on Tuesday, so obviously missing 1/3 of the practices will put him behind the others. He is currently backing up Carvin at FS, but Marvin will be in the rotation somewhere, possibly at both safety positions. Ideally, I think he takes a run at Jordan Kovacs this fall.

He is fairly accurate that there is nobody that is taking hold of the RB position and making themselves the clear #1. The coaches are very eager to get Thomas Rawls on campus.

I am not sure if the Talbott brothers will ever be much of a factor. Terry recently had back surgery, and Terrance missed a lot of the spring because he was contemplating how bad he really wanted to play football in the offseason. He had left the team for a few, but is back now, and has to earn his way back.

He is accurate that Drew Dileo is burning up the depth chart, and that Devin Gardner will be a stud in this league.

He was on the money with Denard struggling the past couple of days, but let me provide some context. Denard had been doing pretty well the first couple of weeks. He has started to struggle as spring went on as he had to grasp more and more of the offense. Making a college offense 2nd nature has been Denard's biggest struggle as soon as he has stepped on campus. I am not saying he is dumb by any means, because he is a very bright kid. However, when things start moving fast for him, he gets excited, and thinks about things way too much rather than just trusting what he is seeing out there. Rich only ran about 60% of his offense as well with Denard because Denard would overthink things too much. He has such a strong desire to be a perfect quarterback that he sometimes doesn't rely enough on his God given talents, and trusting what he sees. He can make every throw in this offense with accuracy. He just needs more reps to gain some much needed comfort, and probably a break from the pressure of practice to study on his own. Being comfortable in the offense has been Devin's largest tangible advantage over Denard over two coaching regimes now besides the obvious protypical size.

He also mentioned that he would feel more comfortable with a healthy TW at FS. TW will be coming back at corner, and there is a fingers crossed vibe that Troy will even be the same player he was. Troy had a pretty devastating injury. Carvin has pretty much locked down the starting FS position as of now barring a bad summer. Besides of the obvious players who are already proven, Carvin, Cam, and Jake Ryan have been the most impressive defenders that I have seen when I was around.

What I take huge exception were his obvious prejudices about Rich Rodriguez. Rich made a lot of mistakes over his tenure here, but making past players feel welcome was not one of him. His bias got in the way of accurately telling the stories of the vibe of the coaching clinic week during the Rodriguez era as well. I am good friends with Gary Moeller, so I have had pretty good access to the past 3 coaching regimes, and Gary was always at practice during the Rodriguez era, and was very supportive of Rich. Jerry Hanlon was always at practice. There were always former players around when Rich was there, and he encouraged the players that were there to tell others to stop by as well. There was really no need to bring up the former staff in his report.

Instead of nit picking like one of those snob judges on Dancing with the Stars or whatever, we should thank this person for bringing us first-hand observations and valuable insight.  He was there, he took copious notes, he wrote a long detailed piece to share with others. He is giving great value to the community here.  I say make it a diary. Granted,  it isn't overloaded with supposedly meaningful stats that most of us have never heard of. It also isn't oozing with unproven conspiracy theories about how prior coaches were done in or the new coach was selected.

So maybe it isn't diary or feature post worthy.  Until proven otherwise by events, this is akin to a really good TomVH update about recruiting as far as value. 

passing this blog by a mile.  the brain cook needs to concentrate less on his witty writing style and amatuer analysis and get in there and dig for more observations.

i could be rong,. but......