Aug. 30, 2009

(9:15 p.m.): WEST HARRISON, Ind. – With a week to play before UC kicks off its season with a jaunt northeast to face Rutgers, BK seems pretty pleased with how his squad has come together.

That’s what the past few weeks at Higher Ground have taught him.

“We feel we’ve developed the depth necessary to be Big East champs,” he said. “We had a lot of question marks coming in. We had some players that we thought could be Big East caliber, but we really didn’t know until we got the pads on and started to compete. Now, we can see we’ve got some pretty good depth over what we’ve done the past couple weeks.”

Questions? Yes, BK had questions. Although he’s downplayed the fact the Bearcats lost 10 defensive starters from last year’s squad, he still wasn’t quite sure how the relative newcomers would perform when they were the ones who would be counted on by others.

When UC returns to practice at Nippert Stadium this week in preparation for the contest against the Scarlet Knights, he’s got more answers than questions.

“We didn’t know anything about Brandon Mills – he redshirted last year- and now he’s in our depth chart,” BK said. “We didn’t know about Demetrius Jones, whether he could do it. Now, he’s our starter on the outside. We didn’t know about Craig Carey, who was learning a new position. There’s Sam Griffin, who’s up to almost 280 pounds and has proven to be a solid right tackler for us. There was a lot coming into this camp that we had questions about. We felt good about who we had, but we just had to see them compete.”

Speaking of Demetrius Jones, I talked to him the other day for a feature I’m writing on him for the Chicago Tribune, his hometown newspaper. I asked him about his initial reaction to the coaching staff’s suggestion for him to move from quarterback to linebacker, and I told him there were rumblings that he hadn’t exactly been happy with the position change.

“The initial reaction was that I was OK with it,” he said. “It wasn’t like coach Kelly walked up to me and said, ‘Demetrius, you’re going to linebacker.’ He came to me as a gentleman. He recognized my talent and knew I could get on the field as something else. Tony Pike had locked up the quarterback position from the previous year, and it was evident – due to my throwing mechanics and the (shoulder) surgery – that I was a little bit behind. It was a tough pill to swallow, but it wasn’t like he was like, ‘Demetrius, get your behind out there at linebacker’ and that was it. We had a business-like conversation about it.

“As far as my development at linebacker, for the first few weeks being on the opposite side of the ball and when I first switched I was only about 205 pounds, so there was some hesitation with the shoulder. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it. I just had to learn the structure of the defense before I could start moving around fast.”

Said BK: “He’s 6-4, 215-220 pounds, and he wanted to play. He had a burning desire to want to play the game. We were set at wide receiver, and I didn’t feel like he fit the tight end profile we were looking for. It just made sense. Here’s a guy who wants to play. We just had to see if he was tough enough. He showed in the spring that he was certainly tough enough.”