Having a healthy Jeff Driskel will be big for Florida. (Rob Foldy-USA TODAY Sports)
Several teams went looking for answers as they opened the gates to their stadiums and threw football parties in the form of spring games.
Some were traditional football games, but others were played with strange scoring rules and running clocks, but all meant the end of spring practice.
At Tennessee’s Orange and White Game, the Orange beat the White 129-100 in one of those games that utilized crazy rules for scoring so that nobody understood what was really going on. Nobody but the coaches, that is, and Butch Jones liked what he saw from the game.
“When I talk about a productive day, great in terms of putting everyone’s football identity on film. We tried to do a lot of things to change it up in terms of individual competitions and see who would respond. See who would want to be in the lime-light a little bit and see how they would respond with almost 70,000 people in the stands,” said Jones.
“Everything in our football program is based on the corps value of competition, competing for greatness so again we have great evaluation tools. Explosive plays offensively, I think we really improved our throw game but on the flip side of it, unacceptable defensively. We’re very, very thin there. We’ll welcome 18 new additions in June and I believe off the top of my head 16 of them are on the defensive side of the ball so we have to get them ready to play.
“We need to learn from our mistakes and correct them going into August camp. The biggest thing I’m most disappointed in that we need to take tremendous strides is our tackling. We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this spring in terms of tackling,” the Tennessee coach said.
“Overall, very, very productive spring … It was just a great, great day for Tennessee football.”
The quarterback competition between Nathan Peterman, Justin Worley Joshua Dobbs and Riley Ferguson got a lot of attention this spring. Worley had a big day Saturday finishing 11-for-13 passing for 151 yards and a touchdown. Dobbs, however, opened some eyes with his 6-for-9 performance for 199 yards and three touchdown passes.
Jones, however, says that no decision has been made about the starter.
“(It is) Ongoing, no time table. We have to take tremendous strides. We turned the football over from the quarterback position today. You can’t do that and play winning football so I’m very encouraged by where that position is in our program,” said Jones.
At Georgia’s G-Day Game, quarterback Hutson Mason passed for 241 yards and a touchdown to lead the Red team to a 27-24 victory over the Black squad.
“Hutson (Mason) did a nice job like he’s been doing all spring long, finding the open targets and getting the right protection. I thought he stood in the pocket and delivered it well and bought some time back there. I thought he did a nice job overall,” Mark Richt said.
“Faton (Bauta) I think made a wise decision to go with the normal colored jersey and play live. He showed what he can do athletically, and I thought he did a very nice job. Brice (Ramsey) struggled a little bit today with his accuracy. He and Jacob (Park) both threw a couple of balls that shouldn’t have been thrown, but that’s just the learning process that you go through as a young quarterback.
One area that Georgia looked to address this spring was the defense, which wasn’t up to par in 2013.
“It’s going to take some time before we can sit here and say what our lineup is going to be,” Richt said. “Our defense has a lot of freshman and junior college players coming in. In the secondary we have some younger players coming in with some ability who will give us a boost and fight for a starting job.”
Florida’s Orange and Blue Game featured offensive coordinator Kurt Roper’s new offensive tempo and quarterback Jeff Driskel’s return to action. Driskel is back after suffering a broken leg in the third game of last season. The fourth-year junior completed 19 of 33 passes for 171 yards and a touchdown.
“I thought offensively we had really good tempo today,” Will Muschamp said after watching the 23-23 tie.
“Our kids have been very receptive and have confidence in what we’re doing. I think it’s a good fit moving forward.”
At Vanderbilt, defense was the order of the day until late in the game. That’s when Patton Robinette led a game-winning, 65-yard touchdown drive to give the offense a 21-16 win in a matchup that pitted offense vs. defense.
“Our goal was to come out here and not saturate these guys with the playbook,” Vanderbilt’s new coach Derek Mason said, “but more or less find out what they know, what they can process, and to see the skill set and how they can play. I saw some really good things on both sides.”
With his first spring as a head coach under his belt, Mason was pleased, but he knows the Commodores still have a long way to go.
“You have to move forward. The thing I always tell guys is put it on tape; your tape is your résumé. So this was the last time for guys to push that résumé into the summer. So I’ll take a look at it, I’ll evaluate it, and I’ll let these guys go into summer workouts and then we’ll start fall camp.
“Remember, it’s a three-step process for us. Spring is the first step, summer is the second step, and fall camp is the third step on our way to kicking this thing off and getting where we want to go.
“Right now, we’re not very consistent and that’s a concern. We do have some guys coming in so it’s going to be interesting just to see how it works itself out. We have to be better and more consistent,” said Mason
