Week One of Spring Ball In The Books

The first week of spring ball 2009 is in the books and I couldn’t be more pleased with the way the first week went. I felt that players competed hard from top to bottom, which made the practice week go by quickly because we were all having so much fun.

On the offensive side of the ball lots of our plays are hitting and hitting fairly often. The defense has gotten theirs too, but I’m used to the defense nearly dominating because early on, the defense is almost always ahead of the offense. I’ve never played defense, but I’m going to assume it’s because they have to think less and just fly to the ball. Early on in a training camp or spring ball, the offense has to get used to running new plays and securing the football at the same time.

The last two practices of this week were in full pads, which was a relief in many ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to run up the middle full speed with no pads on, but let me tell you, it can get a little dicey. With the first two unpadded practices, I’m lucky I had no unfortunate collisions because I got the ball and just ran full steam ahead – pads or no pads.

But back to today. We didn’t waste much time in getting the pads popping, as we did a drill known as “The Oklahoma Drill” to me, but I guess we could call it “The Hoosier Drill”. It was straight up old school – three lineman from both sides of the ball lined up across from each other while a ball-carrier set up behind the offensive line. Cones were set up on the outsides so the ball-carrier knew where out-of-bounds was. The objective was for the offense to score in three tries and for the defense to stop them.

Guys were getting pancaked, shalacked, hogmollied, and tossed! It was great. With every play that was made, guys were hooping and hollering, jumping around, slapping each other’s helmets and just hyping things up! It was a sight to see. That definitely set the tone for the remainder of practice. We went full go during our inside run periods and the last two periods of full-team drills. I broke a nice first-down run at the beginning of the period and a there were a few good runs from both D McCray and Shawn Major-Winston. The QB’s and WR’s made lots of plays as well.

I have to give a shout out to cornerback, Richard Council, for making a great interception yesterday in practice. Numerous others made great plays during the week but props goes to Richard because he dropped somewhere around six potential interceptions during last season, so us guys have been all over him all offseason for that. Nevertheless, he’s worked hard to improve his hands and the hard work is showing on the field.

We have Sunday off, a morning lift on Monday and we’re back at it on Tuesday. Tune in then for more IU Football Spring Ball features/news.