Random thoughts on a quiet week in ‘Canes football

I started writing this thinking it was going to be good and the more I wrote the weirder it got. I hope you’ve enjoyed a little time off from college football and are ready for the Super Bowl, spring football hyperboles, and the NFL Draft to heat up.

If you’re bored, Lana Del Rey put out a new video recently. As did Beach Bunny and they’re less known so listen to that one, too.

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Mock Drafts

Mel Kiper Jr. came out of hiding to post his first ESPN NFL Mock Draft for the upcoming 2021 NFL Draft. Kiper’s mock is behind a paywall because Disney/ESPN don’t have enough money already.

Recent mocks from multiple sources have had both Greg Rousseau and Jaelan Phillips landing in the 1st round. It’s an interesting draft once again for the NFL as the COVID-19 pandemic is still impacting the United States more than 10 months after the first series of shutdowns took place in March of 2020.

The Senior Bowl is happening in ‘21, but the NFL Combine has been shutdown for this year and Pro Days might be a little trickier moving forward. Any players that were considering leaving early for the NFL Draft might have decided to come back if the combine would have been their biggest benefit.

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Recruiting site weirdos

When this tweet was text to me earlier this week I absolutely cracked up at the entire premise. The picture of the youngster, the “‘30” for his graduating class, the fact that this website QBHitList.com actually tried to “evaluate” a toddler, and then felt it was ethical to give him only one star out of five!

The recruiting process was weird before COVID-19, and has taken some strange turns since the pandemic. The “7-on-7” world definitely is getting more press, although not quite up to the AAU Basketball level just yet. California has seen the club level of high school aged football come into existence due to the shutdown in the state, but that could potentially halt once restrictions lighten up.

High school recruitment, and transfer portal re-recruitment, are like dating. Of course players like to put their name in the portal and get re-recruited. Recruitment is courtship. There are calls, emails, texts, memes, fancy lobster dinners, jet flyin’ and limousine (read: giant loaded Tahoe) ridin’ “dates” with Monster Energy Drink chugging old white guys who just threw their lip of Copenhagen in the bushes of the steakhouse parking lot before walking into dinner with your mom.

When Darnell Jefferson pondered the timeless question of ‘Where for art thou dancin’ honeys?’ Bud Light Kaminski put Mr. Jefferson in the phylum of worm feces, and the class of freshman. So yeah, I would want to be re-recruited, too.

As Rob says about the rival coach trying to bring him back home to #RunItBad or #Makethecribgoodish in front of the home crowd (or in High Fidelity about sex, why Rob said it doesn’t matter here):

Yes, you do. You have great lingerie, but you also have the cotton underwear that’s been washed a thousand times, and it’s hanging on the thing and, and they have it too! It’s just I don’t have to see it because it’s not in the fantasy.

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Penalties

The ACC plays some painfully sloppy football. You can just flick on a random ACC football game on a Saturday afternoon in the fall and see stalled drives and terrible offenses. There’s bad QB play, penalty killing drives, and an overall boring offensive product. So how bad are the penalties in the ACC?

Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Seven ACC teams are in the bottom-25 or so of the FBS (out of 127 teams) in least penalties committed per game. The most penalized team in FBS in 2020 was Toledo. The Rockets committed 9.67 penalties per game! The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets were the ACC’s worst offenders. Geoff Collins’ squad committed 8.90 penalties per game, good for 122nd in FBS.

The Hurricanes were 112th in the nation committing 7.82 penalties per game. The other teams at the bottom were Syracuse, UNC, NC State, Pittsburgh, and Florida State. The least penalized team in the ACC was Notre Dame. The Irish came in 11th and committed 4.42 per game. Surprisingly, Virginia Tech was the least penalized regular-ACC team with 5.27 per game.

What does this typically mean? That the program lacks mental and emotional toughness. No, I’m not implying Coach Feeley up the barf bucket count during his 300’s and 110’s.

What I’m saying is completely different, the players seem to fold mentally and emotionally under duress. That has nothing to do with bear crawls, it has to do with being able to stay focused cognitively on the mission even while stressed mentally (sloppy holding calls, false starts, encroachments) and emotionally (cheap shots, late hits, trash talking).

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Spring QB’s

Rumors are abound that N’Kosi Perry and Tate Martell are only back in Coral Gables, FL to knock out some spring classes and graduate. Honestly, good for them (and I mean that, it’s normally a condescending phrase but this time, really, good for them). They got a free college education and enjoyed SnapChat and Instagram like no other.

But with D’Eriq King sidelined with a torn ACL, that leaves three unproven QB’s waiting for some big time spring reps. FINALLY. It’s about damn time Miami got young quarterbacks some reps behind an offensive line with at least a glimmer of a pulse and with skill guys that hopefully belong in the ACC.

It’s also time for Miami to figure out what they have in Peyton Matocha and Tyler Van Dyke, and to see if the young stud Jake Garcia is ready for the ACC as a young incoming freshman. Having these three battle it out for first team reps in the spring will do nothing but improve their ability, and up the competition ante in the locker room. Good!

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Plyo of the week

Clemson Baseball!