Excellent win for Derek and the program.  Some stellar individual efforts from Patton Robinette, Stephen Weatherly, Caleb Azubike, Ralph Webb and C.J. Duncan. Patton was 15-of-21 for 147 yards and a touchdown through the air, and ran for 35 yards on six carries with  a TD.  Stephen, who was a constant presence on defense,  executed one of the plays of the game with his block of a UMass punt in the fourth quarter that he  scooped up and scored on from 11 yards out. Stephen hesitated for a second, then just busted threw the line and blocked the punt beautifully. The ball rolled around and Stephen gathered it up and scored. What an athlete!  Caleb “Zu” Azubike had a couple of sacks,  seven tackles, including three for a loss of 17 yards, and was a game changer for the team on defense. Ralph Webb, our stud redshirt freshman tailback, ran for 116 yards on 26 carries and got us a seven. And C.J. Duncan, our scrappy, athletic redshirt freshman wide receiver, probably made THE play of the game with his amazingly acrobatic catch of a Patton deep ball, which looked like it was going to be intercepted by the UMass defensive back at the UMass four. C.J. just stole the ball from the cornerback as they were going to the ground and set the offense up for the winning score. The win may not have been pretty throughout the game, but really it was overall. Any win is a beauty. We’ll take 37-34. The players seem to be finally acclimated with our coaching staff and the coaching staff to the players. Now we’re ready to move forward and do some damage.

South Carolina will be tough, but it’s at home which is a very good thing. The Gamecocks may be a little overconfident after their scintillating 38-35 victory over them Dawgs last Saturday at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia. So we may be catching them at a good time. Dylan Thompson is becoming an excellent quarterback. Pretty big believer in Thompson. They’ve got good backs, wide receivers and an outstanding offensive line. Their defense is shaky though. We’ve got a lot of good football players too; guys who’ll play on Sundays. As a matter of fact, Adam Butler, Zu, Stephen Weatherly and plenty of others look like they’ll be missing some church Sundays in the fall in a few years because they’ll have a job to do that day and they won’t be able to make it to the sanctuary unfortunately. But, hopefully, they can go during the week sometime and then in the offseason. But I see these guys playing in the National Football League. Luckily, we’ll have them all for one or two more years after this season. I see some of our other guys with that potential too. This team is interesting. It’s a talented group which are trying to find the right chemistry. That’s what our coaches are looking for too. Last Saturday was a huge step in the right direction

The NFL is  down the road for Zu, Stephen, Adam and others. Right now we need to worry about beating South Carolina. Patton will need to play well, both in the running game and the passing game. We’ll need his leadership. It looks like true freshman Wade Freebeck will be playing as well. I hope Patton can play most of the game, and we can get super redshirt freshman wide receiver Jordan Cunningham,  running back Jerron Seymour and some others, involved in the offense. Derek likes to use the tight ends and we have some good ones in Steven Scheu and Davis Dudchock among others, so would like to see them play a big part in the offense against the Gamecocks. I’m sure Derek and Coach Karl Dorrell (offensive coordinator) do.  If the O line can handle a somewhat suspect Gamecocks defensive line and suspect defense in general, we’ve got a shot. Can we win? Yes. Will we win? It’s going to be a hard game, but one we could come out on top of if we take care of the ball, have good sustained drives, make some explosive plays offensively, and contain Thompson and his weapons on offense. Their line is good, so Zu and Weatherly will have to find ways to put pressure on Thompson to help our secondary in coverage. We’ve definitely got a shot.

May have the Samir Sehic announcement in this blog because he is announcing while I am writing this (***Note-Samir committed today). Samir would round out an awesome fall class along with four star center D’Jerry Baptiste, high three-star small forward Joseph Toye, and high three star shooting guard Camron Justice. Watched film on all three guys. Excellent basketball players. Like I wrote yesterday, D’Jerry is just so agile and athletic. Really like what we can get from D’Jerry in a front court with Damian Jones and Luke Kornet next year and Samir also if we land him. D’Jerry can be an enforcer, really board and scores well. Joseph looks like an excellent player with high athletic skills, good shooting and excellent leaping ability for cleaning the glass. Camron is an outstanding shooter. He averaged 25 points his junior year in Kentucky and shoots 41% from trifecta. With Camron, Joseph, the four studs we have coming in this year in the backcourt along with small forward Jeff Roberson, we should be loaded in the backcourt next year. And we have Cornell transfer Nolan Cressler, who is a sharpshooter and will be part of the team next year. Nolan is supposedly an outstanding shooter; Shan Foster-like.  Really pumped for next year’s team and psyched to see what this year’s squad will do. Like our new young assistants, Derrick Jones and Adam Cohen, who will take our recruiting to a new level and already are. Both guys are young–Derrick in his early 30’s and Adam in his late 20’s–they’re energetic and they’re making some real inroads in recruiting.

Samir Sehic is now a Dore! The 6’8″, 255 pound Bosnian who now lives in Houston, joins D’Jerry Baptiste, Joseph Toye and Camron Justice in this stellar 2015 class. The early signing period starts November 12th for basketball. Watched film of Samir and love his skill set. He’s big and will get bigger, he likes to rebound and finishes extremely well. I’m not saying he’s Pau Gasol, but he really plays like him. He can stroke it from 15-18 feet consistently. Really like this final piece in this class. Just need to get them all signed up on November 12th. This should be an excellent basketball team next year. Hopefully, we can surprise some people and get in the tournament this year. Just depends on how our young guys develop in the backcourt. Derrick Jones is known to really develop big men, so that’s good for all our guys, Damian, Luke, Shelby Moats, who just got a job today with a renowned New York investment firm for next year, Josh Henderson, keeping my fingers crossed be can stay healthy, and James Siakam, who Kevin said  had an excellent summer. We’ve got a good team this year. Just depends on our young guards. They’re very talented and we do have Carter Josephs too, who is a tremendously hard worker and is pretty skilled at the point. Nathan Watkins can help us with his hustle and good shooting.

So everything is clicking. Bears and Jay had a huge win at the Niners on Sunday night. I didn’t expect them to win quite honestly. I picked the Niners on my regular blog. We had our starting center and one of our starting guards hurt and out for the game. Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffrey were probably at 40  percent coming into the game. Both stellar wide receivers had leg issues. We lost three defensive starters during the game. Safety Chris Conte sprained his shoulder after making a spectacular interception of a Colin Kaepernick pass, our starting defensive tackle Jay Ratliff suffered a concussion during the game and was out for the entire second half. Jay was playing very well too. And our always reliable and terrific cornerback, Charles Tillman, tore his triceps muscle during the third quarter. That’s a blow because Charles is such an incredibly awesome person and teammate, and was having an awesome first two games. He’s the only cornerback in league history to have 30 interceptions and 30 fumble recoveries. Charles is unfortunately lost for the season,. Hope to have him back next year, and maybe, maybe, in the playoffs. But Charles’ replacement, Kyle Fuller, our rookie corner from Virginia Tech, was incredible. He intercepted two Kaepernick passes that really won the game for us. The first one he just wrestled out of the receivers’ hands and made an excellent return to the 49ers five. The second was just a beautiful read on a downfield pass by Kaepernick. Kyle was covering his man on a 12 yard out and saw that Colin was throwing it to a guy five yards behind him. He read Colin’s eyes, moved back, and picked it off and made another excellent return. Jay and the offense took advantage of both ints turning them into TDs. Kyle is going to a sensational player for the Bears. He already is.

I’ll take a 40 percent Brandon Marshall any day. He caught three TD passes from Jay. Tight end Martellus Bennett caught the other. The Bears won 28-20 and Jay was 23 of 34 for 176 yards and four TDs with no ints. His rating was 119.2, which is excellent. Anything over 110 is outstanding. The highest rating is 157.9, but 119 is superior quarterback play. Bears @ the Jets next Monday night in the Meadowlands. Need to keep the momentum going. Brandon and Alshon should be a lot better by then. Brandon made this one handed grab for seven right before half that was other worldly it was so good. Alshon looked like he was bothered by his hamstring injury, and it affected his route running and speed. Both should be a lot better on Monday night, though Brandon didn’t look like he missed a beat despite being slowed up. Hopefully, we can get the running game going some more. But our offensive line was awesome in pass protection. Not sure if we’ll have our starting center and guard back, but our backups did a heckuva job. The Niners have a very good defense and a tough front, and we kept them off Jay for most of the night. Pumped for the team. Sorry for Charles Tillman though; such a class act. He was a finalist for  the prestigious Walter Payton Award in 2o07 for his philanthropic work. That award is for the entire NFZL. Charles had tears in his eyes when he was on the bench. He knew it wasn’t good. I felt so bad for him. He’s a really, really good guy. Hoping that Charles can get back at corner by the playoffs, when we get there. Kyle Fuller is doing an incredible job in Charles’ absence though.

David Price moved to 14-11 with a 7-2 victory over the Cleveland lndians last Friday night. Dave went 7.2 innings, gave up eight hits, one earned, with zero walks and seven ring ups. David now has 33 walks on the season and 250 strikeouts. That’s spectacular. David’s ERA is now 3.26. He goes again tomorrow night at Minnesota. The Tigers are @ 84-60 and a game and a half up on the KC Royals in the NL Central. Sonny didn’t get the victory Saturday night, but he pitched very well in helping the A’s beat King Felix and the Seattle Mariners. The A’s beat the M’s, 3-2. King Felix Hernandez didn’t get the loss; he went seven, allowing two runs, with no walks and eight K’s, but the A’s won it in the 10th on a walk by Seattle reliever Fernando Rodney that gave the A’s the wining margin@ Seattle. The A’s also won Sunday @ Seattle. Sonny went eight, gave up five hits, two runs, with two walks and seven K’s. He threw 96 pitches, 59 for strikes with 37 balls. David threw 106 pitches, 75 for strikes with 31 balls. Mike Minor got rocked pretty hard by the Rangers on Sunday. The A’s are 10.5 back of the Angels in the AL West, so that’s over, but they lead the wild card over the second place Royals. The A’s are 83-66 and the Royals are 82-67. It’s pretty important to get the home field advantage for the wild card game, a one shot deal, where you win, you advance, you lose, you’re done till late February. Pedro is lost for the season with a broken toe. There is a possibility he could make it back if the Bucs make the playoffs. The Bucs have the second wild card spot behind San Francisco right now. The Giants are 82-68 and the Bucs are 79-70. The Brewers are next at 78-72, so it’s a horse race to the wire. The Braves are now 75-75 and not looking too swift.

Will have more later this week. A lot of high quality visitors for the South Carolina game this Saturday. Will keep you posted if we get any commits.