Forget about the now vacant UK head basketball job for a moment. It’s spring football time in KY!!!! Come on, didn’t you see all of those empty seats at the Ohio St/Tennessee Regional Semifinal last night. That’s right, all of those fans are camping out for tickets to their spring football games.

There has been only one year (spring of 2004) that I was able to have a spring game to finish up our spring drills. But, yesterday we tried the next best thing by playing a little open-field game to finish up our spring practice session for 2007. We actually played two different games and switched the teams around for the 2nd game. One thing that we could definitely see is that our kids are definitely out of shape right now. That was evident during the 2nd game, but is to be expected in March.

Some of the players who provided some strong play yesterday were:

WR/DB Davon Gill — maybe the most productive player yesterday scoring 2 or 3 TD’s

OL/DL Josh Gibson — making a more conscientious effort to get off the ball better

WR/DB Tyler Ray — made a couple of big catches and some nice tackles

WR/DE John Gillespie — Did a fine job, defensively

DE Cash Staley — made some good tackles and had the best hit of the day

TE/DB Zach Hounshell — did a nice job in coverage and made a couple of tough catches

TE/DB Parker Anderson — continued to do a solid job of tackling and running with the football

FB/DE Jansen Penman — made a few key tackles and added some solid runs

As a team, the biggest strong point that I saw was blocking. There were many occasions were offensive players were sprinting downfield to pick up key blocks that allowed the ball carriers to get extra yardage. This open-field type of game is not very linemen friendly, but they did a nice job blocking, as did many WR’s.

The one thing that I was most disappointed in was our coverage. For whatever reason our coverage wasn’t near as solid as it was last Monday. We also dropped a few too many balls. These are things that we will be able to fix in June during our work in passing practices and passing games.

We have plenty (and I mean plenty) of work ahead of us. But, I told the players yesterday that I felt we had a very productive spring. I mainly wanted to focus on basic skills dealing with blocking and tackling and we saw marked improvement with the kids we had. Overall, I am pleased with the effort that the kids showed in spring drills. I am obviously pleased with the improvement, as well.