The practice this morning took place in an overcast sky. They changed fields from the normal one to the far left field – their normal field looked pretty chewed up. Because there were at least a number of people there the bugs on the far side weren’t nearly as bad.
During the warmups Chris Samuels was really jawing it up with Champ Bailey and David Terrel. He was talking about signing a Rap deal and other stupid stuff. He was pretty funny, and had a lot of guys rolling.
They practice started off with the Offense staying on the far left field and the defense moving back to their normal far right field.
The RBs started off with Handoff drills and cutting drills. The interesting thing in the RB line up change, Sultan McClough was second in the rotation after Trung. Chad Morton sat out the practices. When they did the Cone drills (4 padded cones with the RBs going through them) it was clear that the larger guys really had more “umph”. Thad Buttone practically knocked all the cones over while sultan barely moved them. Kenny Watson also really looked powerful.
They did some quarterback drills, including Danny boy was third in the rotation, but for the first 90 minutes of practice, looked lots sharper than Rob Johnson. Rob Johnson got a lot of “coaching” from Spurrier duing the passing drills. Spurrier was working with him on how he holds the ball prior to release. Incidentally, Hamden was working with the RBs on throwing to them, so he was not included in many of the QB drills.
The WRs did some out drills, running around the cones. Then they did short passing drills, but their concentration level did not appear high. Scott Cloman (19) dropped one here.
The Defense did a really wierd drill where they had some defense guys acting as offense. These guys put wierd color gauze coverings over their helmets (green, yellow, red). The defense was practicing offensive motion adjustments.
They got down to doing some scrimages near the goal line going the opposite direction. These turned out to be great RB drills. This where were Trung Canidate basically stole the show. He looked awesome today. He ran three great routes outside in which he basically blew by the defense. He looked far far better than the rest of the running backs. Sultan was again second in the rotation but seemed to try runs up the middle, which were not very effective for him. Rock Cartright also had a good run. In a number of these plays, Lavar Arrington was lined up outside of Bruce Smith at the line of scrimmage, almost like he was going to play DB on a post runner.
They started doing FGs, and John Hall looked terrific except for one miss around the 30 yard line. He boomed a few from 42 yards that went through the top of the uprights – they could have easily gone 10 yards further. I think Hall is going to be terrific this year, although the coaches did not seem too pleased with the line play on the field goals.
The practice ended with about 30 minutes of low contact scrimages (without top pads on) from about the 35 yard line. Ramsey looked pretty sharp, and was releasing the ball quickly. In his first rotation up (lasted about 4 plays) Rob Johnson had no completions. He looked horrid. Weurfle came and threw a terrific pass to Gardner who dropped it. Afterwards though, Gardner had like 4 outstanding catches. Weurfle tended to throw quick short passes mostly though. When JOhnson came out for the third time, he seemed like a different passer, and hit like 3 great passes.
The Best line of the day came at the end. Smoot and Coles were working against each other at our side of the field and were mouthing off to one another. Coles was saying, “Your looking nervous smoot, your lookin nervous!” After the play Coles said smoot was lucky that it was not thrown at him, where upon smoot fired back that Coles was blanketed. Coles again said “you’re looking nervous”. Smoot fired back a beauty – he said, “The only time I get nervous is when my girlfriend gets pregnant!”
The crowd and the reporters/photographers all laughed our ass off over that. Smoot then intercepted the very next play thrown by Johnson to Flowers right in front of us. The crowd went wild again. Champ had one interception on the opposite side on Scott Cloman.
There was one real scare. Coles caught a pass in traffic on the opposite side of the field and slid down, only to get kneed in the face by Matt Bowen (41). Coles stayed down for like 5 minutes. The crowd expected spurrier to go *sh$t*, but he seemed pretty calm about it. Ramsey came over and looked pretty pissed off though. All I can say about Bowen is he better be hiting opposing teams like that. Coles got up and got back into the drills five minites later.
Again, overall, it was a good practice. Trung Candidate definitely stood out head and shoulders about the other RBs. Garder, except for his one drop looked terrific. Weurfle seemed to light a fire under Johnson’s ass, so maybe he was a good pick up.
Also, sort of a downer, because they were on the far side of the 4 fields, it was an easy walk for the players away from all the kids wanting autographs. Nobody signed autographs today.
Edit: This blog was archived in May of 2016 from our original articles database.It was originally posted by Noel Dickover