Another light day of interviews (we got head coach
Gene Chizik and cornerback/de facto team spokesman
Walt McFadden), but there were some notes to come out of it:
- Fullbacks John Douglas and Jason King will not make the trip to the Outback Bowl after being arrested for driving under the influence in separate DUIs this month. “Right now, they will not be making the bowl trip,” Chizik said. “Without going into detail of circumstances, they have been suspended from our football team to this point.” Chizik said both have practiced some since the incidents.
- After a flurry of recruiting gets early this month, Auburn’s coaches are on an NCAA-mandated break until the New Year. The NCAA recruiting dead period started Sunday and runs through Jan. 1. Coaches cannot have face-to-face contact with recruits on or off campus and are restricted to one phone call per week with prospective recruits. “I think we’re sitting about as good as we can be sitting with most of the guys we have left out there that we’re recruiting,” Chizik said. “It’s a period of time where they get a little reprieve and a little break from all this, but we’re going to continue to recruit them hard within the rules, whatever we’re allowed to do with our one phone call a week.”
- Auburn signed four players — two from high school and two from junior college — last week who plan to enroll in January. The Tigers also hosted quarterback Cameron Newton, the No. 1 junior college player in the country, on an official visit last weekend. Auburn can add one more mid-year enrollee who would count against the 2009 class. The Tigers have 22 other commitments for 2010. They can sign up to 28 in February.
- Chizik said he’s set up practice in Tampa to closely resemble a normal week. The team will have four practice days and a walkthrough once it arrives at the bowl site. "We’ll kind of get back in a true game week mode to the way we practice," Chizik said.
- The players aren’t the only ones getting a break this week. Chizik said the coaches will work some today and Wednesday before taking the 24th and 25th off. They’ll meet again in Tampa on the 26th. “It’s family time and they need a break,” Chizik said. “We all need a break.”
- The NCAA allows teams to hand out some SWAG to its players prior to the bowl. The Tigers’ haul includes a rolling suitcase featuring an Outback Bowl logo, a plaque with a team photo and a gift card to Best Buy.
- Auburn has worked its young players plenty in the last week of practice, but that trend appears to be coming to an end as game preparation for Northwestern begins soon. "We’ve done a lot of work with them," Chizik said. "Tonight at the end we did some scrimmage things with the younger guys and tried to get them some reps in there. Don’t know if we’ll necessarily be able to do that every day down there. We anticipate possibly doing that once. But we’ll continue to work those guys even through practice. We’ve got some good work with our younger guys in individual groups and keeping them with their position coaches longer, which I think has helped. As far as what we do with the team, it won’t be as much as we’ve done here."
- Northwestern, as we've written before, likes to throw the ball a lot. A perfect way to finish the season for McFadden, a cornerback looking for a busy day. "Just by scouting them, they don't really throw a lot of deep balls," he said. "They throw a lot of short routes. That's going to make a challenge for me to come up and make a lot of tackles. That's just something I want to do -- say I'm not scared to tackle. I'm not just a Deion (Sanders) guy."
- McFadden, describing his second-to-last practice at the Auburn facility: "It's sucks. It sucks from the get-go because they always have the young guys beat up on the seniors. That's the sucky part of it. Then they want to carry them off the field. It's a great feeling to be able to grow up as a young man and learn from this facility, all the coaches, all the Auburn fans. I believe I can take this anywhere after this life has gone and passed. It's helped me out."
3 comments:
Is it just me or are there more kids messing up now compared to a few years ago?
Maybe more a getting disciplined and we're just hearing about it...who knows. Either way hard to say with only one year of data you know.
I hate how on some other boards these guys' character is being destroyed. Douglas is a good kid, great head on his shoulders, but made a HUGE mistake, which I am sure he is more than paying for.
Post a Comment