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FAYETTEVILLE — Friday’s scrimmage will be critical for a pair of positions with players still vying for spots on the depth chart.
In what will likely be the final full scrimmage of camp, head coach Sam Pittman said he is looking for improvement from the linebackers and tight ends, which are still up in the air as far as starters are concerned.
The first-year head coach singled out both positions following the first scrimmage last Friday and has since put a lot of focus on them in practice this week.
At linebacker, junior Bumper Pool and fifth-year senior Grant Morgan have received most of the first-team reps in video shared by the UA, but graduate transfer Levi Draper is expected to push for a starting spot. Fifth-year senior Deon Edwards, redshirt sophomore Andrew Parker and senior Hayden Henry are also thought to be in the mix for playing time.
The group as a whole, though, must get better at shedding blocks based on Pittman’s assessment of the first scrimmage.
“We have to go make plays,” Pittman said. “That’s what linebackers are supposed to do. We can’t run into an offensive line and not shed him and make a play. That’s something that we did not do Friday and we’re certainly working on it.”
At tight end, redshirt freshman Hudson Henry has been the presumed starter in what has been a thin position and he caught a couple of touchdowns in Friday’s scrimmage, but Pittman said he hasn’t yet established himself as No. 1 on the depth chart.
Fifth-year senior and former walk-on Blake Kern figures to be his biggest competition, but walk-on transfer Nathan Bax is also in the mix and true freshman Blayne Toll has moved back to tight end to create more depth.
“I think they have to become better blockers,” Pittman said about the tight ends. “The bottom line is it's just the strain of the finish. It's the want-to of wanting to whip another man's tail and we're getting closer with that tight end group.”
Of course, singling out those two positions as areas that could use improvement is just half the battle. At this point of the year, it’s too late for the Razorbacks to add anyone else from the transfer portal, so Pittman will have to roll with who he has.
With that in mind, he has set out to help the players at those spots get better in practice this week leading up to the second scrimmage.
“You can’t just say, ‘Okay, well we’re going to go out there and do the same thing and get better,’” Pittman said. “You have to make specific drills for those guys to get better. You can’t bench everybody and be mad at everybody.”
The solution has been putting the linebackers and tight ends up against each other in practice, encouraging more physicality.
“I think you can find out a lot about a man if he's in a one-on-one situation and there's no one to blame - it's not the right guard, left guard, the corner, the safety,” Pittman said. “We've tried to put them in a lot more one-on-one situations to see how they react.”
Pittman said he wants to see them upset if they get beat and excited if they win, but more than anything, he wants to see how they come back with the next rep.
It’s an old-school approach and the first-year coach is confident it’ll produce results when the two positions take the field Friday.
“It's been a physical two days, to be honest with you,” Pittman said. “It's been a lot of one-on-one, man-on-man. Football is just a bunch about who wants to whip somebody else's tail. That's what we're trying to get done in individuals."
