I’ll field questions about the team but briefly, the next two weeks our guys will finish up the class work and finals come after that. Last year we weren’t sure we had anybody. Drew played really well for us, Aaron had a good spring, as well. This spring has been a flip, both those guys have done a great job. One real positive, I thought about this this morning, last year at this time I don’t know if we’ve seen a worse place kicking exhibition over the course of the spring. The areas where we were young last year, some of the guys, I think about a guy like Logan Jones, Nick DeJong, they’re relatively young as players, the kind of improvement and confidence they have now compared to a year ago. Interesting to see how they filled in some of the new guys coming up that are going to be filling the voids, see how they progress. It’s been fun to watch the newcomers, the 11 guys that joined us, two guys out of high school, then everybody else obviously a little bit older. That’s the thing we’re trying to work on right now, just the chemistry. That’s a reminder of the leadership we graduated, the quality of players we’re graduating. Riley Moss, out there talking to him about it. Certainly, we wish all the guys the best. We’re going to see that coming up with the draft this week. We have a lot of work to do, a lot of big leadership void to fill, then obviously we lost some really good players. We are a new team, no question about that. I always use that illustration to our players: they can be getting better and improve if they are paying attention and taking the coaching that other guys are getting. Just told me that he’s really paying attention. Impressive for a kid who is a true freshman. I remember distinctly he came back on a Tuesday, made a blitz pickup. His first year, we didn’t play him in our first game, in Soldier Field, going to start him the next game. I always go back to the Bryan Bulaga illustration. You got that going on.Įven the guys that weren’t practicing, there’s still an opportunity to get better and improve. You always have a fair amount of guys that are not practicing in the spring because of injuries, surgeries they may have had in January, that type of thing. It’s probably more about the individual growth of a guy, not so much a cohesive thing. I think the last couple weeks we’re seeing things, sometimes just little things, on film, but things that maybe give you some indication that the players are catching on from something maybe they weren’t doing well two weeks before or even one week before that. We’re hardly a finished product right now, but I believe we have improved. It’s fun to see how they respond, improve. Probably the purest opportunity to get guys to learn. There’s a lot of good meeting time in between workouts, more so than even August. We’re not game planning, not in a rush to get to Saturday. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about spring practice is it’s pure football. It gives us a chance to evaluate not only how their football skills are going, what their attitude is, their work ethic, those type of things, ability to concentrate. It’s fun to be able to get on the field, see how guys are growing, improving. We finished up the season last year, you come back in in January, a big training period. Spring football is an important phase, an enjoyable phase from the coaching standpoint to see guys get a little bit of measurement in terms of what kind of improvement they’ve had, what kind of growth they’re showing. Spring football is a really important phase for our team. They deserve a medal or maybe they need to get their brains checked. I think they stayed that way the whole practice. I see two of your associates out there right now on the field wearing sport coats. Appreciate the fans that came to be out there, too. I think we had five straight days we were out. Kind of ironic that I would classify this as one of our better weather springs. KIRK FERENTZ: First of all, thank you for being here and covering this. UI Football Autograph Policy and Procedures.ISAAC - Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
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