Walked off the plane at Bradley this afternoon and hurried home for coach Randy Edsall’s afternoon chat with reporters.
Here are the highlights.
– UConn RB Donald Brown isn’t among the three finalists for the Doak Walker Award, an award for the nation’s top running back.
Shonn Greene of Iowa, Knowshon Moreno of Georgia and Javon Ringer of Michigan State made the final cut.
Rarely does Edsall talk about individual awards but he wasn’t too pleased that Brown wasn’t among the top three for this one. Brown remains, of course, the nation’s leading rusher.
“To me that’s a disappointment. I think he should be,” Edsall said. ”You’re the leading rusher in the country. What else would you have to do? … Just because he’s not from a supposedly big-name school?”
Not sound like a homer (D’oh!) but I think Edsall’s correct on this one.
No, Brown isn’t a shoe-in to win the thing nor perhaps should he. But I don’t think there’s much doubt he’s among the top three this season.
Ringer will probably win and he deserves it. But Brown might deserve a little better.
– As an aside to this topic, the top three were announced for many of college football’s individual awards Monday. Brown’s was hardly the biggest snub.
I know it’s just punters and it’s no big deal to some people, but how is Cincinnati’s Kevin Huber not among the finalists for the Ray Guy award?
That guy is the best punter I’ve seen since Reggie Roby. Roby is the former Miami Dolphin punter who could measure the hang time of his punts with a calendar.
– LB Greg Lloyd is almost assuredly out for Pittsburgh but he could be back for UConn’s bowl game.
“He’s still in school,” Edsall said. “He’s just dealing with a personal issue right now.”
Aaron Bryant played pretty well in his spot against USF and is the likely starter in two weeks against the Panthers.
– The coach thought his defense played well (and it did) but the Huskies gave up four “big” plays for a total of 109 yards.
“I thought there were six plays in the game that were very, very critical,” Edsall said. “I thought we played well defensively for the most part, except for those six plays: the four big plays and the two third downs in that last drive. We had a chance to make them punt earlier in the possession, which would have given us the ball back and maybe we wouldn’t have had to use our time outs.”
– Edsall echoed what smart observers (Yeah it was me, how’d you guess?) remarked on Sunday night. Left tackle Will Beatty had an excellent game facing USF’s George Selvie.
It appeared Beatty used excellent technique (I can’t believe I just wrote that).
“Will Beatty played very, very well. I thought he did a tremendous job on George Selvie,” Edsall said. “That might have been Will’s best game of his whole career at UConn.”
– By the way, no time or specific TV (ESPN or ESPN2) for the UConn-Pitt game Dec. 6.
ESPN has invoked the power of the six-day window in this case.
Translation: TV bigwigs want to see what happens next weekend to determine how attractive this matchup is as compared to others they have available.
- Neill
