Only prOb I really have is the expected slant toward the kids that people want to do well generally freshmen.
True, although the coaches seem to be confirming a lot of it, and not all of it is prompted by specific questions about freshmen.
For example, Tracy Howard earned a black jersey. Maybe it was a motivational ploy for McGee, or maybe it was just part of the plan to get everyone working with the ones, but he seems to be legit.
Realistically, were everyone healthy, Tracy Howard looks like the only freshman right now who is STARTING--Duke maybe some kind of co-starter in the committee and maybe Flowers can truly push Henderson. Howard may not be much of a surprise considering the alternatives--not unlike DVD starting in 2007. So, again, this team is not going to win games because of a lot of guys we're talking about. We're going to win/lose based on Rodgers, Telemaque, McGee who is 3/4's of the secondary. But Howard is the guy who we hear about all the time. Do you really think that Howard is THAT much better than Telemaque? Was Finnie that much better than the other corners? Turned out no and the old guy from Wake was the guy the coaches played.
I think the freshmen amp the excitement and I hope that the give us an exciting team that tries hard, but they won't give us a good team. Tracy Howard is extremely likely to struggle. Even Ed Reed wasn't that good as a freshman. It doesn't do the coaches much good to tell you where a freshman is weak, and we tend to blow their positive comments out of proportion. Incidentally, this is why a lot of kids "regress." We tend to vastly overrate their freshman performance and then when they are truly relied upon as players we appreciate their deficiencies and blame somebody. This may happen to Perryman a bit this year now that he's supposed to be our best guy rather than Spence whose importance dwarfed Perryman in laughable fashion. We'll see.
I'd get excited if somebody told me Curtis Porter is dominating out there.
