We just had a super Saturday in recruiting. James landed three commits for 2014 with high three-star running back Dallas Rivers of Stone Mountain, Georgia, solid three-star safety Emmanuel Smith from Murfreesboro, Tn and solid three star corner/safety Bryce Lewis of Liliburn, Ga all committing to play for us in 2014.
Watched film of Dallas and loved him. 247 has him as a highly ranked three-star, but after watching his film, Dallas is a no doubt four-star. I don’t know why those guys rate Dallas any lower than four. He is fast, very strong, breaks tackles, took it the distance on about every attempt I saw him run, he’s just a fantastic running back. Awesome addition to class. We need running backs in this class. It would be nice to add a couple more and at least one, but Dallas is an exceptional start. Excellent, excellent football player. Didn’t see any film on Bryce or Emmanuel, but saw an interview with Emmanuel and really liked him. Also in the interview was a teammate, an outside linebacker from Murfreesboro for the class of 2015, Josh Smith, who sounded like a great kid as well. Josh is somebody to look out for in the future.
Really pleased with this latest group. They join four-star quarterback K.J. Carta-Samuels and high three-star defensive tackle Jay Robertson in our ’14 class. Welcome aboard guys. Let’s go win championships.
Baseball took two of three from Florida over the weekend. Friday night was a tough night for Zo. Just couldn’t find the strike zone and gave up a three-run homer as we lost 7-1 to them, but Saturday we came back and pounded out 15 hits in a 6-1 victory. Connor had three hits, Conrad had three hits and two rbi’s and Vince Conde had two hits and drove in a run. Yesterday we scratched out a 5-4 win. John Norwood and Yaz with some tremendous hustle on the basepaths as John beat out an infield single to fairly deep short and Yaz scored from second on the grounder to clinch the victory. John did a head first slide to beat the throw at first with two outs, and Yaz just flew around third and barreled into home head first to beat the throw. It was awesome. Pitched decent. Tyler Beede moved his record to 6-0 with the win Saturday Night going 6.1 innings giving up two hits and no runs with four K’s and five walks. Tyler needs to get the base on balls down. He’s struggled a little bit with that this year. If he can, he will dominate. Steven Rice came in out of the bullpen Saturday Night and gave up one run in two innings. Steven pitching a lot better; throwing more strikes. Brian Miller was his typical stellar self yesterday going two innings and allowing no runs. I’ve noticed our bullpen is throwing more strikes now. They’ll get it going. Miller is awesome. Florida is a very young team, but as Corbs said yesterday, they remind me a lot of our team last year. They’re going to be very good by the end of the year. We moved to 21-4 overall and 5-1 in the East. We’re on top of the East, one game ahead of Kentucky.
Brandt didn’t have a good tourney this weekend. Hope he can get it back together this weekend at Houston. Coming back after injury and playing in a big event like the Arnie is tough. Need Brandt to get back in form this week so he’ll be ready for Augusta. Luke is the first alternate so maybe he’ll get in too. Looks like Eldrick will win, thought it’s getting pretty interesting. Eldrick at -13 and Rickie Fowler at -11 through 15. Fowler playing well, so Eldrick could be in for a fight.
Bracket doing pretty well. My wife’s is doing awesome (i picked it but she’s just a winner). Would like for Ole Miss to have won last night. I’m in 2.7 mill and change place, tied basically with Obama in the 72.3 percentage. Have the Ville beating Miami in the championship. I figured out there are about 9 million players in the ESPN bracket. My wife is in the 98.6 percentile, she’s in 166,000th place. Pretty good stuff there. Got Miami beating Ohio State in hers.
Next year at this time, I hope our team will be in the Sweet 16. Think we have the team to make a deep run in ’14. The whole team returns and we played so well in the tournament, just ran out of gas on Saturday against Ole Piss. They turned out to be a pretty good basketball team though. They should have beaten LaSalle last night. Henderson got hit on the arm before he put up a shot at the end, but the refs didn’t call it. Then LaSalle hit a layup. Ole Miss was a very nice offensive team, but was a little weak on defense. That cost them last night.
With Kede, Dai-Jon, Kyle, transfer Eric McClellan (who’s apparently awesome), the phenomenal Kevin Bright, Rod, Josh, Shelby, James Siakam ( James can be a player), A.J. Astroth (who looks potentially good) and four-star center Damian Jones coming in, we have the makings of an excellent basketball team. Very excited about next year. We should be special.
Football practice going very well. A lot of competition out there. Ready for Ole Miss on August 29 (Thursday) at 9:15 PM ET/8:15 CT on ESPN. Should be electric in the stadium. I know we’ve got a lot of work to do until then, but ready for it.
Baseball hosts Lipscomb tomorrow night at 6:30 CT, then UT comes in this weekend. They’re better, 3-3 in East, 13-10 overall. Looking to take care of business tomorrow night against Lipscomb, which has struggled, then sweep the Vols. Saturday Night’s game at 7 ET/6 CT will be on CSS.
Check with you later.