The Gainesville Sun's Brandon Zimmerman reported from Wednesday's session a few nuggets of good news. Redshirt freshman WR Deonte Thompson looked really good and really fast. He says Carlos Dunlap looks like Al Horford in a football uniform and performed well. The punt block drill gets Meyer fired up more than anything, and it looked good. Joe Haden looks confident and could have a breakout year.
Sophomore Lawrence Marsh and JUCO transfer Troy Epps look like the starters at defensive tackle for now. John Brantley throws a nice ball, better than the descriptions of Cam Newton earlier in the week. Frankie Hammond, Jr. also had another acrobatic catch.
Probably as a result of the lackluster effort, Meyer chose to close practice on Thursday and Friday. The days had originally been earmarked for open practice, but he probably felt that the standing room-only crowd yesterday distracted his team.
That's disappointing, but there's nothing written that requires his practices to be open. No doubt the some of the regulars on Gainesville's sports talk radio are bemoaning the further erosion of access into the program for "the average fan" that they've been mourning ever since Meyer arrived.
More information to come once post-practice reports come out from Thursday.
UPDATE
The Sun has an article up about how the other tight ends on the roster must step up. Towards the end it describes the insane hoops Tate Casey had to jump through to even be back this year.
Casey looked good as a freshman in 2004, but the most notable thing he's done since Meyer arrived was catch Tim Tebow's first jump pass. He's a good blocker though, so
he'll get time on the field. I can also tell you from personal experience that he's a good guy. He also likes to wear a Minnesota Twins hat because it has his initials on it.
There really isn't much else to report since practice was closed and all of the attention in the post-practice interview with Meyer was rightfully about CI. The only other piece of information I could find is Meyer saying that the injury "puts a dent" in the plans to have two-tight end sets this fall. In other word, they're pretty much scrapped.
If you're looking for a positive in this (not that there's much of one), it's that it allows Casey to get some real playing time his final year and gives Hernandez some of the spotlight. He showed some flashes last season that indicated that when it's all said and done, he could end up being better than Ingram.
No doubt about it, though—the Gators are worse off for this happening.
We're going to send you the most entertaining Florida Gators Football articles, videos, and podcasts from around the web.
15 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete