Jeffery Johnson sat out practice this morning, but he was not wearing a boot or a brace of any kind, which could be a good sign for Tulane 10 days away from its next game at Army. Obviously Johnson would be a huge factor in the middle against the triple option.
Running back Amare Jones (broken nose) and defensive tackle Alfred Thomas, who got hurt against Houston, too, did not practice, either, but there is no reason to put anyone out there who is not 100 percent with so much time left before the game. This was the second of three practices this week but the only one open to reporters, with Tulane taking tomorrow off to lift weights, returning to the field Friday and skipping the weekend before beginning normal game week prep on Monday.
Willie Fritz on Johnson: "We feel like he's going to be fine."
Fritz on Amare Jones: "A hand got underneath his face mask. He's going to be fine. He didn't have surgery, so he's good."
Tulane spent a lot of time at the end of practice today on scout teams. With the various guys missing or resting, Juan Monjarres, Cameron Sample, Mike Hinton and normal LB Malik Lawal got some reps as a unit. Patrick Johnson rotated in for Monjarres a little later, with Noah Seiden (who absolutely will not play against Army) and Jamiran James inside along with Hinton at the other end spot. There's nothing wrong with Davon Wright, who made a monster play on Houston's final series, or De'Andre Williams, but Tulane is getting as many players ready as possible for Army, where depth should play a huge factor.
"It's very important," Fritz said. "When they come off, you've got to be tough and firm and hold the point against these guys. We've got enough mass up there where we feel like we can do that. There's a lot of natural double teams that they have, not just the guard and the tackles and the centers and guards but also with the tackle and slotback. Getting some bigger guys and some mass helps you."
The offense line remained the same as the last three weeks. Tyler Johnson, who has not played since getting hurt in practice the week after the opener, practiced with the second unit today just like he did last week.
Tulane has been called for 16 false starts through four games, and it culminated with seven against Houston. The guilty parties were Ben Knutson four times, Joey Claybrook four times, Tyrick James three times and Jalen McCleskey, Jaetavian Toles, Will Wallace, Timothy Shafter and Keyshawn McLeod once. The Wave felt like Houston was simulating the snap count, and Army has a reputation of doing the same thing, but it is still is priority to get this issue fixed.
"That's what we thought (Houston was simulating snaps)," Fritz said. "We had some guys saying that they were yelling stuff down there. Who knows what was going on? We made a big point of emphasis in the fourth quarter to emphatically tell the refs to make sure they tell them (to stop simulating snaps) and it didn't happen after that, so I don't know. But we've got to do a better job of that. We just have to make sure we're going when we want to go, not when they're telling us to go."
When the schedule game out, Fritz noted the advantage of having 16 days to get ready for Army, but he's not developed any false sense of security with the extra prep time. Army has lost only three games since the start of 2018, and two of the defeats were in overtime at Oklahoma and Michigan (the third was at Duke in the '18 opener). The Black Knights have won nine in a row at home, though against the opposite of a murderers' row (Liberty, Hawaii, San Jose State, Miami Ohio, Air Force, Lafayette, Colgate, Rice and Morgan State).
"We are going to find out (how much of an advantage the long break in between games is)," Fritz said. "It sure is nice to have. What they do is just so unusual. You only have a few teams in college football that do it, so there's not a whole lot of carryover with what our offense does compared with what they do, so you've got to balance and maintain the speed of the games. We're still going to do a little bit against each other, but also we're really working on what they do and what's sort of unique about what they do.
"Second-and-7 is a good play for them. Last year I believe they were 31 of 36 on fourth downs. They led the nation with an 86.9-percent conversion rate. Most of the time you talk to your defense about three-and-out takeaway. These guys you got to talk about four-and-out takeaway. They are not scared to go for it on fourth-and-2, and when they do throw, they've got guys going all over the place."
Fritz preached keeping an even keel at all times, but it will be a challenge for this team coming off the tremendous high of the Houston comeback and going on the road for a non-conference game.
"One good thing is we had time off," he said. "We had three days off and then we came back on Monday, lifted and met, watched the video tape, put them (Houston) to bed and started on Tuesday, so that was good."
I have already written about the big defensive plays on Houston's final possession, but today I got to get Fritz's reaction to them. He was just as impressed with Chase Kuerschen's open-field tackle of D'Eriq King at the 4 as I was.
"Big tackle," Fritz said. "It was huge. He'd missed a few in the game when he led to early. It's all about strike timing--my distance from him, his distance from me, how fast he's running, how fast I'm running, all those different things. He really did a nice job of executing that tackle. It was one of the big plays of the game, and then on the next play, Davon Wright had a big play. There were a bunch of big plays on that final series defensively."
Safety Larry Brooks made two big plays in a row, carrying a receiver out of bounds before he could get a foot down to prevent one completion and breaking on a ball to deflect it at the last second on the next snap.
"Larry played well," Fritz said. "He did a good job. He's put together back-to-back really, really good games."
I will put the Houston game to bed myself after this thread but I had to ask about the fake kneel down against today since we barely got to talk to guys after the late Thursday game. I would not have written about the play obviously if I had seen Tulane practice it, but I definitely never saw it practiced. Fritz said Will Hall introduced it in the spring and they worked on it some more in preseason camp, adding he had seen it run 10 times and probably had been run more than that since he misses some of the offense while he splits time between offense and defense during unit periods.
Fritz confirmed Gus Malzahn's quote about Tulane calling a timeout to prevent Auburn from running a similar play near the end of the first half earlier this month.
"Will actually saw it," he said. "He said they might be running the kneel play, and shoot, we had three timeouts to burn, so we called a timeout and just talked to our guys, hey, we better be ready to play this play, they may run that play our offense does. Then they went to something else."
Fritz said the call was easy to make because there was no real danger even it it failed.
"Let's say that Amare gets tackled, if you take a knee down there, it's the same thing," Fritz said. "We just have to be firm with our protection and our guys did a good job with that. The best thing he did was get out of bounds. He got everything he could. If we had gone towards the middle of the field, we would have had to call a timeout and now you have to use the sidelines, you probably can't throw it to the end zone, you're probably not in field goal range, so really good work by him not getting everything that he could. A good job by Darius Bradwell not pushing the guy in the back who was chasing and running. It was just a smart football play getting out of bounds."
Here is the story I wrote for The Advocate:
https://www.nola.com/sports/tulane/article_ca35dd22-dfd5-11e9-b761-a7b87de41ef4.html
I talked to Hall, McMillan and Kuerschen today and will have those quotes tomorrow.
