Yesterday was our final day of position specific drills. We worked on offensive skills before making a competitive game out of our Oklahoma drill.

The offensive linemen and TE’s worked takeoffs, board drills, finish drills, and combo + zone drills. We have worked through some of our problems in technique and definitely looked better yesterday than we did on previous practice days. We still have some “warts” (as UK coach Rich Brooks would say), but the improvement is there.

The skill players worked takeoffs, ball drills, routes, and stalk blocking technique.

Following about 45 minutes of drill work we moved into our Oklahoma competition. We divided the players up into two teams and these teams competed against one another for about 25 minutes in the Oklahoma drill. We set cones about 15 yards apart (length) and the offensive team was given 3 downs to score. One of our teams scored 4 times before the other scored at all. The final score was 5-2 in the game.

More importantly, Brandon Smith showed great improvement and did a good job carrying over the drive blocking technique from drills into a “live” situation. Parker Anderson continued to do a nice job securing tackles. Cash Staley also did a solid job, defensively. I thought Chris Hendrix and Josh Gibson had some nice individual plays on the defensive side. John Gillespie and RJ Lasoya were able to close down open running lanes quickly.

One thing that we must get better with is learning how to compete and learning how to handle adversity in game situations. Nearly all teams will face adversity each game. The teams that handle adversity well and continue to compete at a high level are much more likely to have consistent success. Yesterday’s competition afforded us the opportunity to try to work on that and then have a long talk, afterwards, about the importance of such things. Needless to say, sometimes your mental and/or psychological approach is more important than physical preparation.

It was good to see the weather get back up into the 70’s. The rain is supposed to hold off until this evening so we should have near perfect weather for our last practice of the spring, this afternoon. Today, we will play another open-field type of game like we played last Monday. Tomorrow, I will write an entry concerning practice #10 and then (probably next week) I will write an entry tying together some of my thoughts on spring drills as we begin to head into summer drills.