The season opener is three weeks from tomorrow and head coach Craig Bohl said, so far, nobody has been ruled out for the Lafayette game at the Fargodome. No players have left the team and no transfers have joined the team. There have been no position changes, yet.
Kind of boring, isn’t it? “We like it,” Bohl said. “We’re making progress as a football team.”
- Sophomore defensive end Cole Jirik would probably be a starter on most teams in the Missouri Valley. He made a couple of nice plays at practice Friday.
- Somebody put a few quarters into the defense, which cranked up the excitement meter all morning. “We talked about encouragement and taking that onto the field and the next play is going to be yours,” Bohl said. “Certainly, momentum comes into play in college football and you have to recognize that when things don’t go well, you have to find a positive and get back after it the next play.”
- The Blue Angels, practicing for their air show this weekend, made for a nice brief exercise in playing with noise.
- With the team in full pads, punter Matt Voigtlander was back as the full-time punter after one practice as a running back, where he played the previous three years. Running back Sam Ojuri is still out with a concussion.
Off topic here, but with all the conference upheaval in FBS, kind of interesting to see a parallel between the Texas-Texas A&M feud and NDSU-UND. If the Aggies and Longhorns stop playing in football (as it sounds they will if they are in separate conferences), that’s kind of the big level FBS equivalent to the Bison-Sioux feud that keeps them apart. Kinda reminds me a bit of the squabbles the two Dakota schools had back in 03.
There was no squable. The suzies were scared to play the Bison anymore.
UND was not afraid to play anymore. UND had won 11 of the last 15 games between the two schools and experienced far greater success at the D2 level during that time frame. The reason the teams stopped playing was the convoluted D2 playoff points system, which would have penalized UND for playing a D1aa game, even if they would have continued their dominance over NDSU and won those games.
Two different situations all together.
Has NDSU thought of taking a page out of the NY Giants book and start more than 2 defensive end types since they seem to be loaded at ends and kind of shallow at defensive tackles? My guess is not, but would be worth asking…
Jirik, Emmanuel, Boyer, Perry then maybe Stoczynski? What’s the current depth chart look like?
Also, any of the freshman D tackle types (Lisenby, Horvath, etc) have a chance of not redshirting?
I’ve seen Horvath get a number of reps with the first teamers, and while that might not mean much he did look awfully impressive on film during the recruiting process. Can’t say what that’ll add up to but hey, guy looks like a player.
Wasn’t there talk a while back about Stoczinsky moving over to DT with Emmanuel looking to start opposite Boyer? (BTW, can’t believe what a beast Emmanuel looks like)
Jeff, Bohl says nobody is ruled out for the first game. In your previous post you said Pomerenke is out 3 wks to a month with a MLC strain. Is it not as serious as you previously reported?
Justin Mourneau’s (sp) concussion “appeared to be minor” last baseball season. Turned out to be far from it.
These things are nothing near predictable.
Jeff: Nice article in the Sunday Fourm about Brent Vigen.