Marshall University Athletics
BOGACZYK: Holliday, Herd Put Camp in Rear-View Mirror
8/29/2015 12:00:00 AM | Football
By JACK BOGACZYK
HERDZONE.COM COLUMNIST
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – For Marshall’s 2015 football team, the term “August camp” was relative.
Technically, the Herd’s two-week camp period ended a week ago. But because of how the calendar falls this year – and for this major college football season with 12 regular-season games fit into 13 weeks rather than the 14 of recent years -- Marshall had another week of workouts prior to really getting on its game face.
So, after Saturday’s game-type intrasquad scrimmage at Edwards Stadium, it was finally time for the Herd to seriously look forward to the Sept. 6 season opener when Purdue becomes the first Big Ten Conference football team to visit in Herd history.
“It couldn’t come soon enough,” Coach Doc Holliday said when asked about the end of a 22-day practice period that started Aug. 7. “No, it’s all good, you know when there’s a game-type scrimmage like it was today, the (opening) game is getting close.
“I know our guys are ready to go play somebody else, so it’s time to start our preparation and we’ve got to do a great job starting (Sunday).”
No statistics were kept for the session, but assistant coaches manned their upstairs booth as they would for a game. Holliday was more interested in one kind of teamwork, he said, rather than success on offense or defense.
“It’s a ‘hard’ scrimmage so that they can harden things up, trying to get things substitution-wise and I didn’t see a lot of errors as far as substitutions were concerned,” he said. “And we were trying to see that more than anything else … We were trying to get the right personnel groupings on the field and I thought it worked out pretty well.
“We substitute a lot, with the way we play offense, the way we play defense. We run a lot of guys in and out of there, so it’s important we’re all on the same page.”
The Herd coach, entering his sixth season with a program coming off a national ranking and a first Conference USA title, said no decision has been made on the camp-long battle for place-kicking duties between Amoreto Curraj and Nick Smith.
The announcement on who gets the job is likely to come at Holliday’s regular game-week press conference on Tuesday. The Herd’s opening two-deep also will be revealed then, too.
There was one noticeable difference to the 100 or so spectators attending Saturday’s session. The offense wore the team’s new white (road) jerseys. In last season’s opening win at Miami (Ohio), some players – most noticeably former quarterback Rakeem Cato – said the green jerseys being worn for the first time were too tight.
Holliday wanted that potential situation alleviated this season, although the Herd won’t wear white until a Sept. 12 visit to Ohio for the “Battle for the Bell” rivalry game.
“We wanted to get them to wear them once in a practice,” Holliday said. “(On Friday) the defense had them on, today the offense. We wanted to get them on, make sure they were the right size.”
Asked if he thought his players were excited about wearing new jerseys, Holliday grinned.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think the real excitement is that camp’s now over, and we go into game preparation. I guess that’s more important to them that what that jersey looks like.”
He was happy that for “the first time in several years,” he said, the first week of fall semester classes (held last week) didn’t coincide with opening-game prep week.
“The last couple of years, I’ve been really nervous as the head football coach,” Holliday said. “There are always distractions that first week; guys can’t find their classes … young kids, class changes and just all the stuff that happens with all of the people coming on campus, those things.
“So, there are a lot of distractions that first week and this is the first time in a while we’ve been able to get through those and now next week our preparation should be ready to roll because there can’t be any distractions.”
