40 Acres Sports

Two minutes of highlights from the Texas Longhorns’ spring scrimmage. Jordan Shipley, Jermichael Finley, and Roddrick Muckelroy were probably the most impressive performers from Saturday evening. Both of the young quarterbacks had good plays and bad, but certainly showed promise and glimpses of what they could be able to do with five more months of work. Check out the video below:

The game will be replayed at least once this week Wednesday at 1:30 pm on Fox Sports Southwest so be sure to set your DVR’s if you missed it this weekend.

Tom Hicks and the Texas Rangers honored the 2005 National Champion Texas Longhorn football team today at the season opener in Arlington. Coach [tag]Mack Brown[/tag] threw out the first pitch and Longhorn coaching legend [tag]Darrell Royal[/tag] was also recognized. Royal and Hicks were influential in bringing Brown to Texas from North Carolina almost nine years ago. Always coaching, Mack didn’t let next season or our quarterback situation slip his mind for even a minute:

“If I put one in the dirt, which I’m not planning on, it will not change my life any, except (the media) will have more fun with it,” Brown joked before the toss. “If one of our young quarterbacks puts one in the dirt, it changes my life. I’m a lot more focused on the throws next fall than the throw today.”

I can handle a few in the dirt Mack, it’s the ones that hit the defenders that worry me.

Roger Clemens was also at the game, which threw the national media and Rangers fans into a frenzy thinking he was interested in joining the Rangers if he decides to pitch this season. I’m still fairly certain that if Clemens pitches this year it’ll be for the Houston Astros.

Former Longhorn and current Oakland A’s closer Huston Street is on the cover of this week’s ESPN the Magazine Baseball Preview edition. The article focuses on the A’s and how thanks to Street, Rich Harden, and Bobby Crosby this year the team has the makeup to make a longer run into the playoffs. They pick them to win the AL West and trump the St. Louis Cardinals in five to win the World Series.

Thanks to tougher sterioid testing/penalties and no (less?) juiced up players, it should be an interesting year in Major League Baseball.

Great shot of Myron Hardy’s diving catch and more.

Impossible to really pick a favorite with the limited amount we’ve seen McCoy and Snead play. (That won’t stop some fans.)

Some quick and random notes on yesterday’s spring game. I’ll have some general thoughts on the game and on the two young quaterbacks’ performances soon.

• Jermichael Finley is a hoss. He dwarfs Jordan Shipley in the huddle.
• Odd seeing a linebacker wearing #1. Former WR Tyrell Gatewood looks pretty good over there on defense but needs to layoff the QB.
• Speaking of laying off the QB, Colt McCoy doesn’t seem to be too fond of contact. Even though they weren’t really full contact yesterday, he looked shook up after every hit.
• Shipley needs a black jersey, I wince everytime he’s hit. He went down for a bit late in the scrimmage, the entire crowd held their breath for a minute or two while he was down.
• Jevan Snead may not look as smooth running the ball as Vince was, but he’s no slouch. Aaron Lewis (#95) completely bit on a zone read and let Snead run untouched to the end zone.
• Good to see Rod Wright and Jon Scott and some of the other guys hanging around the sidelines.
• Reverses suck. Scrimmage situation probably not best for the misdirection stuff. Limas Sweed probably isn’t the person to be running them either.
• Colt needs to fix his shoulder pads.
• Billy Pittman tore his ACL in the Rose Bowl, I seriously doubt he’d be playing even if this was a real game.
• Nate Jones looking good. He disappeared for most of last year.
• Tarell Brown giving tips to Jamaal Charles.
• Neale Tweedie has good hands, I think we’ll see a decent amount of two tight end sets and sets with Finley in the slot.
• Great kickoffs from Greg Johnson.
• Snead needs to work on his footwork and get his feet under him before he throws. Also needs to make sure he doesn’t try to force it into his favorite receiver (Finley).
• Henry Melton wore an orange jersey over his white one, actually looked pretty cool with the white sleeves showing underneath. Now we need to try orange pants!
• How long has Matt Melton been on this team? Seems like he’s in his 7th of 8th year.
• The I-formation with H. Melton behind Chris Ogbonnaya looks so backwards. Melton is like twice his size. Ogbonnaya got blown up by Chris Brown pretty bad.
• John Rhadigan is a bit of a moron. Does he not know football at all? What’s Craig Way doing tonight? Baseball?
• The second team offense looked to be picking on the walk-ons that were out there for the second team D a little. Several passes in a row in front of the walk-on corner.
• Ryan Palmer has the wheels to be a kick off returner, but he made a really bad decision to pick up a bouncing football and kicked it and was lucky to recover it.
• Speaking of kick returns, Aaron Ross returned a punt for the game’s mandatory kick return TD. There’s at least one every year.

He dropped a class and it put him below the mininum number of hours.

A little credit for Longhorns’s title definitely goes to Howard “Red” Hickey.

Perfect game for all of us Internet coaches. Can’t wait for this to be integrated into NCAA and Madden.

Still going to use the shotgun and the one-back, 3 WR sets. I hope to see more play-action.