“Their heads were spinning. It’s a lot; there is a lot going on for them. A couple guys had flight delays, a guy missed his flight. They get in here and we rush them around and they get a lot of stuff thrown at them. They had an operations meeting today and a brief player development meeting today so they had a lot of stuff thrown at them. Their heads were spinning to stay the least.”
On the first day of rookie mini-camp...
“Again, there are some physically good-looking guys. As far as the practice went, their heads are spinning. There were a lot of errors out there for sure. There is no doubt about it. We haven’t watched the tape yet but I know it is bigger than a handful. It’s hard to evaluate them off of one practice but if by the eye test, I would say there are some guys that passed it clearly.”
On the rookies needing to hustle from day one...
“That is what I tried to point out. It is serious business. They will be 28 workouts behind when they come onto campus so they need to understand the severity of their situation. Just to give themselves an equal chance to compete they can’t waste a day. When they go back to school they have to be working out and once they get here they have to have to put the pedal to the metal. If they don’t, they are not going to have an equal chance to compete because they are already behind. It is an important situation to understand.”
On what he hopes to get out of this weekend...
“First and foremost, we are trying to orientate them to what we are doing, what to expect to give them (which is) a briefing to what is in store and what is ahead of them, the conditioning, the strength portion, to give them a little taste of the system. We don’t want them doing too much so they can’t even function. If you throw the whole playbook at them they are not going to be able to practice, it’s not possible. It’s more to orientate them to what we are doing, what we are about, but at the same time not putting too much in their laps and getting a chance to look at them physically and up close in personal in the pads running around. Also it’s seeing if they are able to comprehend what we are asking of them and seeing if they are able to turn that into doing it the right way. It is a definite evaluation weekend but it probably weighs more heavily to them figuring out what we are doing.”