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Random musings after spring scrimmage #2

College football’s foot fetish, scrimmage 2 “stats,” women’s volleyball, and the lift of the week.

By Justin Dottavio
NCAA Football: Cheez-It Bowl-Oklahoma State vs Miami Douglas DeFelice-USA TODAY Sports

Spring football gives us college sports fans something to talk about during the doldrums of post-March Madness life. The Hurricanes held their second scrimmage of the spring, Manny Diaz’s third spring as the head football coach, Friday night. Why not spend some time over analyzing fake stats during a fake game?

Let’s also talk about college football’s weird fascination with feet, NCAA Women’s Volleyball getting the same raw deal as the Women’s Basketball tournament, and of course a Lift/Plyo of the week!

Spring Scrimmage #2

The Hurricanes held their second scrimmage of the spring, this time under the Friday night lights of Hard Rock Stadium. The U will tie the bow on spring football Saturday, April 17th at 11am on the ACC Network.

Spring scrimmage stats without context are sort of arbitrary, however, it’s good to see Tyler Van Dyke taking advantage of whichever defense he was going against (1’s? 2’s?). It’s also good to see Charleston Rambo getting involved in the action.

Offensive stats:

Defensive stats:

You know our boy Marsh was excited to see Van Dyke ball out in the scrimmage.

Manny Navarro did a solid job of covering the scrimmage on The Athletic.

Is college football weird about feet?

For years we’ve heard the podiatric (I made that up) phrasings from college football analysts about someone’s ‘dogs’ for years. Feet have been: nimble, fast, good, guys have been light-on them, and they have eaten or not eaten. Now they can even be “bad!” But has the college football world slipped into an all out foot fetish?

Above- Georgia Tech running backs coach slash former Buffalo Bills running back Coach Choice has invented a new one for me. I’ve heard of the stupid ‘slow feet don’t eat’ but “bad feet don’t eat” is a new one, even to me. What makes a good foot versus a bad foot? And do the Yellow Jackets have college football’s biggest foot fetish?

Miami’s Coastal counterpart, the Yellow Jackets, seem to be foot obsessed. Let’s hope for their sake they’re more obsessed about putting the football in the end zone than they are about the footwear on their coach.

NCAA Women’s Volleyball

After the fiasco that was the NCAA Women’s Basketball tournament you would think the NCAA would have learned their lesson. Right? Right? Wrong. The NCAA’s Women’s Volleyball tournament won’t have TV commentators for the first two rounds, the women cannot use locker rooms at the facility, and the overall vibe of the tournament is ‘less than’ compared to, say, FBS spring games on the ACC Network or the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament.

And...

And...

This final tweet has been debated at times on the internet. Sport Court is a common ‘flooring’ for women’s volleyball at the pre-college level. Volleyball is one of the biggest club sports in the United States and the majority of college volleyball players are recruited based on their travel teams rather than their high school performances (think: AAU Men’s Basketball).

Is Sport Court giving athletes an unnecessary amount of pounding on a brutal surface? Yes. Should women’s volleyball athletes have to practice on it at the highest level? No.

Just more of the same from the NCAA and Mark Emmert regarding women’s athletics.

Lift of the week

Kind of like how Time’s “Man of the Year” didn’t always go to a male we should be looking up to (uh, Hitler) the same goes for life of the week. World class athlete Derrick Henry did a stupid pushup routine that only the internet would think is beneficial in any single way to Mr. Henry’s football career.

Henry, chiseled like a God in a Greek statue, can do just about whatever he wants and get up looking like, well, a Greek God. Then there are other NFL running backs who tried to match Henry....

And Handoffback Ryan Tannehill got in on the action, too.

In the end, it would be cool if dude’s just trained for power and speed. Want to know why your favorite player tore his or her hamstring? They probably didn’t sprint to max velocity one single time during the off-season, or in camp, or in practice. Oh they did bosu ball pushups. They did gassers. They jogged around town and maybe even “ran hills,” but did they sprint to max velocity? Probably not.