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We learned late last week that four-star recruit K.J. Williams and three-star recruit Treevon Prater would not be joining the Syracuse Orange football team this season after all. It's a tough pill to swallow but swallow it OC George McDonald shall. What other choice is there?
"I really try not to talk about guys who aren't here with us," offensive coordinator George McDonald said Tuesday in the wake of the news Williams is ineligible for the 2014 season, "but obviously we're disappointed that he didn't make it and hopefully in the future he can get back on track."
"Adding the guys that we have, I think (competition) will continue to grow," McDonald said. "It's just like when a guy goes down with a season-ending injury. You gotta continue to move on."
Something Something Sharks Moving Forward Something.
Speaking of McDonald, he's hard at work continuing to install a no-huddle, hurry-up offense with the Orange and that's causing strength and conditioning coach Will Hicks to adjust the way he prepares the players:
"We normally do 45 seconds to a minute and a half (of rest), depending on the (length of the) runs," Hicks said. "We've tried to cut that back to 20 seconds in between. They want to run a play every 17 seconds or something like that. We've adjusted toward that. All the hurry-up offenses around the country do that. You can't run them unless you're trained to run them. That's what you hope happens, that you play a defense that isn't trained to play against it."
"We switched up a little bit two years ago the amount of rest periods in between what we were doing because we knew we going to the hurry-up offense Nassib's last year," Hicks said. "Last year was going to be a little faster than it was the year before, and then coming out of the spring, hopefully the offense is a little faster than it was last year. Our conditioning has to adjust to that. We're not going to have the rest period that we did in the huddle. We're running and lifting to be sports-oriented."
Hicks points to SU's three fourth quarter comebacks wins last season as proof we're on the right conditioning track. Next step...being awesomely conditioned and NOT NEEDING any fourth quarter comebacks.
