Spring Scrimmage 2: A Productive Day

For the second time in 2008 the Demon Deacons scrimmaged on BB&T field, working for nearly two hours in the most game-like environment they’ve had yet this spring. The weather made things a little bit interesting, raining right up to the start of scrimmage and threatening with thunder throughout, but the scrimmage went off without a hitch and the Deacs were able to do exactly what they wanted to do today.

The first series of the day pitted the first string offense against a second string defense. As coach had promised would happen, the offense put a much greater emphasis on the run game and the improvement was evident. Josh Adams carried the ball on the first six plays of the day, gaining positive yards on nearly every carry and racking up more yards than he did in the whole scrimmage last Saturday (I don’t have the stats yet, so I’ll update this post with exact stats sometime this evening).

Adams looked particularly good running the ball to the outside, but was able to consistently pick up at least a couple yards up the middle as well. There is already noticeable improvement from this first string offensive line, who provided a much more consistent push and seemed to have a much better grasp on their assignments. Although the running backs didn’t always find them, I though the line did a much better job opening up holes. It was definitely a better day for the run game.

The highlight of the drive was a 20+ yard play action pass to TE Ben Wooster who had another solid day, even if he didn’t stand out quite as much as he did last Saturday. The drive, which started on its own 35, eventually stalled just inside the red zone, and Swank capped it off with a 30 yd field goal.

When the 1^st team defense got a look at the 2^nd string offense it looked very strong. Stanely Arnoux made a couple of big hits, and the D line dominated the line of scrimmage. The secondary did give up a couple of good pass plays, including a 40 yard pass from Hodges to Devon Brown (Y’lou), however when the offense got down inside the 10 the defense stepped up with a solid goal line stand to force another swank field goal.

For the 1^st team offense’s second series Brandon Pendergrass was the running back instead of Josh Adams. Pendergrass carried the ball 4 straight times, gaining at least 5 yards on every carry on the backs of another good series from the first string offensive line. Defensively, DE Tripp Russel looked great, making three tackles for a loss, including one sack and one play where he did a great job staying home on a reverse. Riley had one great scramble on the drive in which he pump faked a throw that made DT Dennis Godfry to jump up in the air, and then darted past for a big gain. The drive ended on a busted play where Riley and Brandon weren’t on the same page, but Sam Swank drilled home a beautiful 50 yard field goal.

The rest of the scrimmage featured a mix of players the coaches wanted to get a look at, mostly second and third string guys with some starters thrown in there on occasion. Center Ryan Britt struggled to make good snaps to the quarterbacks throughout the scrimmage, while the 2^nd and 3^rd offensive line units struggled in general, drawing the wrath of Coach Lobo. Tristan Dorty stood out defensively, making some great plays to get in the backfield and make tackles.

Skylar Jones didn’t end up playing very much because he aggravated a hamstring on his first series and had to come out. The injury did not appear to be very serious. Junior WR Casey Hill, who caught a TD pass last weekend, got twisted up while being tackled and severely injured his right knee. He was down on the field for nearly 10 minutes and was later helped out of the stadium with an immobilizer on his right leg. We’ll hope for the best, but it didn’t look good.

D.J. Boldin has another solid performance catching the ball, the highlight being a 40 yard touchdown catch on a play action pass from Brett Hodges. “I really think D.J has had a good spring, period,” said Coach Grobe. “He’s done well in everything we’ve done – practice, scrimmage – he’s just a different guy right now. He’s matured and he’s coming into his own right now. Mentally he’s got it, he’s catching the ball well, he’s blocking well, he’s doing a nice job running with the ball after he catches it. I just hope I’m not speaking too soon but I think he’s a guy that is going to be a go-to guy for us next year. He’s still got some weight to lose. He’s got his weight down really well to this point but I think if we can get another 10 pounds of him by the time we come back in August he’ll just be a completely different guy. I’m really pleased with DJ.”

The defense looked solid all afternoon, making lots of good plays despite a few costly mistakes. The defense’s big highlight of the day was a 40-ish yard fumble return for a touchdown by DT Michael Carter.

Penalties were Coach Grobe’s biggest concern immediately following the scrimmage. “We had too many penalties today. Some of them were just full speed get after it penalties and stuff happens once in awhile but today we just had some silly penalties that aren’t really avoidable right now. A lot of them are by younger players who get a little bit overzealous at times and plan on the edge. We like for guys to play on the edge, they just can’t go over the edge. That’s something we’ll continue to work on and hopefully by the time we tee it up next year we’ll be ready to go.”

Like myself, Coach was also felt better about the running game today. “I thought we ran the ball better today. That was kind of a point of emphasis last week. I think Josh (Adams) and Brandon (Pendergrass) and C.J. (Washington) all had some good runs. We’ve got running backs right now who don’t mind going north with the football. We’ve probably going to see that we made a couple of mistakes. 2 or 3 times we had plays that had a chance to get 2 or 3 yards inside and by bouncing outside we’d end up losing three or four yards. We can’t do that, the idea is to minimize your losses. Overall I think we’ve got running backs that can run inside or outside. They’ve got enough speed to get on the perimeter but they’re not afraid to get up inside. We’ve probably got to do a little better job just seeing what’s in front of us and remember the key is not to go backwards. I though the offensive line was better today in the running game. Our defense didn’t blitz as much today as we did last week, we played a little bit more base defense, but I thought typically that hurts you running the football when people play more base stuff. So I thought we ran the ball better today.”

Despite the frustrating penalties, Grobe’s overall impression of the day was positive. “All in all it was a good scrimmage, a real physical scrimmage, more physical than last week. It was probably good to call it off when we did because our guys were just about to get lathered up and probably could knock each other out. I thought we had a pretty good scrimmage with good plays made on both sides of the ball.”

The team knows it has plenty of things to work on before traveling to Waco at the end of next August, but everyone expects that. Right now it’s just good to see everyone out there learning and working hard. The mistakes are part of the spring, and they don’t detract too much from what has generally been a very positive period of work.

There’s one week left of official spring work, culminating with the spring game next Saturday at 1:00. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible out there.