The Chapman family home in County Westmeath is on sale. As it was used as a nursing home before it „is surrounded by institutional buildings of outstanding architectural mediocrity“, according to the „Irish Aesthete“. This is the house Thomas Chapman grew up in and where his estranged wife and four daughters lived after Chapman left his family for Sarah Lawrence/Maden/Junner. Before, the Chapmans had rented their own accommodation, Clonhugh, as Westhill was still owned by Thomas‘ parents.
Poster for the launch of Hustles, a publication published by Local Studio documenting their first five years of practice with photography by David Southwood, illustrations by me and Kasia, essays and book design by Gabrielle Guy
In the second half of coordinator day at UK football practice, defensive coordinator Rick Minter talked about Florida's offense, stopping the run, a few players climbing up the depth chart and more. You can see a transcript of his comments below:
Florida seemed to get a lot better last week…
All down through the years, I used to watch Boise State as a spectator and I would say 'Man, that really is one of the better offenses I've ever seen.' I'm talking execution, diversity, razzle dazzle, execution. That's now what it is. It's Boise State offense with really fast players. They're doing a better job each and every week of getting better with Brent Pease running the show down there now. They're doing a good job. They offer up a lot of weapons, a lot of challenges, but we have a lot of work to do between now and the time we get on the plane to go down there to play an SEC game.
Well, we need to keep practicing. We have to hold our edges when it's time to hold the edges and take our proper gaps when it's time to. They have a lot of different kinds of ways to run the ball that will challenge you. They run right up the middle. They run the power run game much like Western Kentucky did. That's a sign of a physical team when they try to do those kind of things. They also run a lot of jet sweep mentality plays where they're coming from the outside with their wide receivers and their hybrid athletes, those types of things. So they have a lot of ways to attack you in the rushing game, and they're getting production even from a wildcat quarterback who took one for 80 last week against a solid defensive team in Tennessee. They're very diverse. Much more so than what I remembered in the past. So the challenges are great but we have to get out there and see what we can do.
Has Dakotah Tyler made a charge in the last few weeks?
Dakotah is getting better each and every week. I hope to see his play production and number of plays increase each and every game. We look forward to getting him on the field. He is in our sub packages already right now, but I'd like to see him get more playing time on a regular down basis.
With their diversity do you have to go more toward your base package this week or get more sophisticated?
We don't have much more than our base in terms of personnel. What we do…if I told you what we were going to do I'd have to kill you. Anyway, we have a mix of three-down, four-down schemes within our packet as we always do. But we're playing now with Taylor Wyndham at that rush backer, Bud Dupree at the inside linebacker and we'll go back and forth a few times when one of them needs a blow one way or another. We're trying to get our best eleven out there and do what those guys can best do. We have to get better at stopping the run. There's no doubt.
Thomas Chapman was listed on the depth chart this week. Could he play and end his redshirt season?
It just depends. Right now there's been some discussions about utilizing him. I don't know if that's been a total determination just yet. We want to be fair to the kid and fair to our program at the same time. If we need a guy, then we need to play him. But if we could get by without using the kid just for a few plays here and there then it would be more fair to him not to do that. Perhaps that would be announced more later on. I'm not hiding the answer. I don't know the answer right now. There was talk about him getting more involved with us but it centered on another issue. We have a few guys banged up and that sort of thing. We'll see how our health comes out by the end of the week.
How has Taylor Wyndham done dropping back in coverage?
I'll tell you what. He came within a near miss of winning the game for us the other day covering a flare route out of the backfield where he almost picked the thing. Guess if he'd had a little different vertical, you know. But it was a heck of a play. He's a good enough player for us to play that hybrid position. Yet he's more of a traditional 4-3 defensive end. We've always known that all along. Right now, he's doing a great job of doing a lot of dual roles at that job, at that particular position that we call the rush backer. It's allowed Bud to go in and play the WILL backer, so Taylor has done a nice job.
How did they practice coming off a loss?
Tuesdays are always much different than Wednesdays because today is the first day we've seen them since Sunday. All we do on Sunday is watch the film, correct errors and all those sorts of things. We didn't even go out because Rock (Oliver) takes them and exercises them, lifts them and runs them and all those kind of things. We're always a little sluggish, just playing reps on Tuesday, then you have the mental saturation going in when you introduce things for the very first time. Tomorrow's practice will always be better than today's practice in terms of bounce and a little more secure, all those sorts of things.
But did you see any effect from Saturday?
No, no. I think coaches drool over the past more than players. I think probably by midnight, the players are moving on. It's what we try to encourage them to do. You want them to hurt when you lose because you invest everything you have in the game, but by the same token when the sun comes up the next day, you have to put it behind you, move on and get ready for the next week.
What do you do to try and turn people over more?
We're trying to strip the ball more, trying to play the ball in the air more, just haven't really come that close. One thing you have to realize, we had a chance to pick a ball off toward the end of regulation, you like to see that when it's snared out of the air. We haven't given up very many X-plays in the passing. Most of them have been short, controlled passes. There are a lot of reasons why, in particular when people can run the ball on you, we're not making them throw the ball downfield.
Fortunately, we haven't let too many over our head or anything like that, but we have to stop the run better to make them throw more. That will put more balls in the air. It's kind of a chicken and the egg deal. But they're throwing a lot of short passes. Other than the first play of the game the other night that was 29 yards I believe, we didn't let a pass go but 13 or 14 yards. That was their style. They were a controlled passing game. The one interception we got was a tip. That happens occasionally. We haven't really had a whole lot of opportunities to be honest with you. We'd like to have a few more, them try to make them, but we haven't been that close on some of them.
What happened on those one-yard runs on the goal line?
Very poor defense. Very poor defense. One was what we call a gap-eight defense where they're on the one-inch line, so you want to try and get everybody down on the line. Make sure they can't go straight ahead and they have to go outside off-tackle. That was my fault for putting them in that alignment. But I was embarrassed by our defense on the goal line. I thought there were some improvements over the course of the game. I don't look at total yards, even though it wasn't pretty. I look at yards per. We were about 3.2. Whenever you allow somebody to run the ball 51 times on you, you don't just go on total yards and say you stink because you give up 160 yards. That's pretty good if they rush about 12 times, but if they rush 51 times for 3.2, they're not just beating you up and down the field. There was some improvement in the run game, not on those two plays, obviously. But there were too many three, four, five-yard ugly runs up inside. We're not getting off blocks and striking, knocking guys back. Then it's second-and-nine rather than second-and-five. That's what we have to get better at. Part of it is physical, part of it is our youth on the inside. We have to shake our guys up on the inside sometime.
