Clawson Presser--Troy Edition

So, Coach Clawson had the first of his weekly pressers today, and you can view them on bgsufalcons.com. I've taken the liberty of excerpting the interesting parts to get at the luscious minutiae that the truly unbalanced fan craves.

First, as we all know, Matt Schilz is going to start at QB.  In fact, Coach Clawson said that it was not a difficult decision.  The difficult decision is for back up, and at this point we should pause for a moment and think about the health of Mr. Schilz, because Coach says he is not certain that any of them could go the distance.  

Aaron Pankratz is listed as the #2 but that is mostly due to familiarity with the offense.

True FR Trent Hurley distinguished himself as well.

Later, he talked about the fact that Schilz took no scout team reps last year, and got significant reps with #2 and #3.  I have been wondering recently what would have happened if Sheehan had been injured.  Pankratz was listed as #2, but I wonder if Schilz would have had the redshirt pulled off it was early enough in the season.

He says that the key thing for a young team is not to beat yourself, and they keep track of mental errors at practice.  The count has been going steadily down, which is good.

In terms of big improvement, the kicking game has gotten a lot better (special teams preview will be tomorrow), the front 7 on defense is something he seems excited about, and we have the WRs to spread the ball around.

Larry Blakeney, Troy's Coach, is a sick 19-0 in home openers.

Coach also talked about improvement at TE.  Of course, in our previous set, the TE was not a prized commodity, so we only had two last year and Scheidler was injured much of the time.  This year, Nick Rieke (the returner) is much improved, and Alex Bayer is also looked at highly.  He almost was un-redshirted last year.  Finally, True-FR Tyler Beck will play this year.

If you look at the depth chart in the game notes, we have a ridiculous number of freshman in the two deep---18, according to Coach (I haven't counted, but I will post on the depth chart tomorrow).

He does note that the staff did work players who were redshirting into practice reps last year in preparation for this situation.  He mentioned Kamar Jordan and Schilz specifically.  This is interesting foresight because what it means is that important reps were being given to players who were not going to play at all.

So that's the Clawson presser as I saw it.  The rest of it was compliments about Troy, Jernigan, etc.