I'm not stunned by any of this except Evans leaving [one wonders about Filer, too]. That will be a shame. But I've been listening carefully to what Coach says and who he doesn't talk about. He personally put Riddick at wide-out and then chose TJ also as a golden-haired boy in the spring. He is making decisions based upon what he thinks thew real potential to help his system may be. He's told us that he's been wowed by Shembo and stated pretty clearly that he wanted playing time for him. He's told us clearly that he's impressed with Spond [frankly I am too.] He gave other guys a lot of chances and, in his mind, they did not stand up. Neal did. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When McDonald went down, he was screwed at a position that he already thought was weak--seemingly, in his read-between-the-lines way of communicating such matters, the weakest or at least most unstable part of the defense. [yes despite all the negative talk about our safeties, I heard him say many good things about three of them regularly, and hardly ever such a statement about persons such as Evans, Filer, Kumara, and the mass of second level d-linemen and linebackers---Cwynar is the exception, and on occasion, Hafis Williams]. Rees is the talent, not Montana, in his eyes, and Rees has gotten some of this special commentary here and there ---almost never Montana. Cave over Wenger is a similar situation. Kelly said: when Cave blocks you, you stay blocked; but he doesn't always block the right guy. When Wenger blocks, he always blocks the right guy, but they don't always stay blocked. Kelly goes with Cave--why? Kelly believes that he can teach up the talent. If you don't have it, there's nothing he can do. Or if you can't learn, there's nothing he can do. Maybe Evans couldn't learn quickly enough.Nor Filer.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------He says nine freshmen will travel--a clear statement that he's not impressed with some of the veterans. These depth chart reports thereby don't stun me, nor even surprise me. Kelly believes in no in-built biases---just who is performing. If that's a freshman, in he goes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The two real downers about all this are 1) the impending transfer of Evans [and I'll bet it's not the last]; and 2) the "news" that some of our personnel are apparently not as good as we would fantasize them to be. Such reality checks might indicate to us that we're not quite as loaded as blue-sky optimists would like. I, by the way, still think that we're pretty loaded at most starting positions and some depth positions and that, and Kelly's empirical performance approach, will win more than the last coach did even in a beginning year.
