Eagles’ lively practices have Wulff excited
Paul Wulff just shook his head and smiled after his Eastern Washington football team finished practice Wednesday morning.
That was his reaction to the spirited battles that took place when the offense and defense got together – spirited being the kind way to say there were more than a few post-whistle shoving matches and blind-side knockdowns.
“You want to go live?” Wulff shouted after one battle. “OK, we’ll go live.”
And that kind of spirit had the fifth-year head coach smiling with the season opener at Nicholls State in Thibodaux, La., just two weeks from today.
Still, Wulff has a few concerns, some of which will be addressed today in a 40-50 play controlled scrimmage at the upper practice fields starting at about 2:45.
He was not talking about the misfortune that has hit the Colonels, who fired head coach Daryl Daye on Sunday when academic fraud involving was discovered within the program.
Assistant head coach and offensive coordinator Jeff Richards was released but the status of the more than 20 players found to have taken a correspondence course from Brigham Young is not known.
Wulff is more focused on the Eagles.
“You’re probably not going to see a lot of reps for the No. 1’s on both sides of the ball,” he said. “We want to get a lot of work to see what the No. 2’s and No. 3’s can do.”
The reason, Wulff said, is because most practices have gone so well, “in terms of speed,” that the coaches want to identify backups and build depth.
“Defensively we need to get better and cointinue to fly to the football,” Wulff said. “Offensensively we need to have more consistency with the run and pass. Our line blocking and wide receiver play has been a little inconsistent thus far, but that is somewhat to be expect at this point. This next week we have to make a big step to develop that consistency.”
Meanwhile, Nicholls State director of athletics Rob Bernardi said, though a school release: “A strong justification for intercollegiate athletics is the development of character and integrity in the student-athlete. Clearly, when a member of the coaching staff engages in academic fraud, among the most serious of NCAA violations, someone must be held accountable. The assistant coach who committed the fraud and the head coach who personally selected the assistant coach and who was responsible for establishing the parameters within which that coach was to operate must be accountable in this situation.”
Apparently close to two dozen football players were in academic trouble and took a course through BYU. However, the NCAA does not allow correspondence courses to count towards eligibility.
Pictures and bios of Daye and Richards have been removed from the school’s website.
The investigation took more than a week and university president Stephen Hulbert told the local media on Tuesday, “It’s taking this long because at first we talked to the young men who were involved and they were dishonest. We checked on it and went back to the students and gave them an opportunity to come forward.”
Daye was not directly implicated but Hulbert said, “When you have more than 20 young men out of 90 who need course work for eligibility, you as a coach need to know what is going on. We are going to go forward. I could not sacrifice the integrity of the university.”