Ah, the first day in pads. Let's look back at what happened on Saturday.
-- Quite a few USF fans noticed Colby Erskin's latest knee injury, as did both Scott and Greg. It's not clear how serious it is, but if it's another bad one it will definitely end his checkered college career. Of course some people out there might be perversely happy about this piece of news, but that's not really called for right now. This makes four knee injuries in five years for Erskin, and hopefully the cumulative effect isn't going to cause any lasting problems in his life after football.
-- In addition to his note about Erskin, Greg Auman caught up with USF's newest scholarship players, Donte Spires and Mistral Raymond. He also mentions that Skip Holtz may use the last two scholarships at his disposal on other walk-ons who distinguish themselves.
-- Scott Carter talks about Holtz's plans to redshirt his three gigantic freshmen on the offensive line, Jake Kaufman (6'9", 362 pounds), Tony Kibler (6'4", 355), and the fantastic and aptly-named Quinterrious Eatman (6'6", 340). Offensive line is one of the few positions with enough depth to let the young guys sit for a year, and Holtz wants to take advantage.
-- GoUSFBulls.com's Training Camp Central for today has a picture of one of my favorite drills - it's the special teams drill where the punters use volleyballs instead of footballs so that the guys coming after the kicks don't get hurt by the ball.
-- Watching Skip's press conference from the end of practice (same link as above), it sounds like the usual training camp story where the defense is ahead of the offense. The defense is learning their blitz packages and stunting and twisting on the line, and that doesn't help the offense nail down the plays that are hard enough to master against a base defense.
-- Loved Skip's line about how he wants B.J. Daniels to be able to "make plays with his mind". It was great that Daniels could run around and make plays last season, but it broke down into streetball way too often. It's not a sustainable offensive strategy.
-- Both Greg and Scott have longer features for their Sunday papers. Greg talks about Skip Holtz's attention to detail and rebuilding programs (not this one), and Scott writes much longer about Evan Landi than I did.
Today's the last practice in Tampa until August 23. After the early afternoon workout, the team heads across the state to the Vero Beach Sports Complex for two weeks of practice and distraction-free bonding.