Monday night’s intrasquad scrimmage represents a major milestone in the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff’s fall camp, Head Coach Alonzo Hampton said after practice Saturday night.
“That’s the scrimmage that’s going to separate the men from the boys,” Hampton said. “We need to figure out who we can count on and the ones that we can’t.”
This scrimmage will be UAPB’s second of the fall and comes 10 days before the Golden Lions open the season against Arkansas at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.
College football is the only level of football without preseason games, so Hampton said these two intrasquad scrimmages are serving that role for UAPB. He said he wants to see his players show a sense of urgency Monday night, because the Golden Lions want to be able to snap the ball quickly.
Hampton also said it is time for players to step up and prove they can contribute.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“We been in practice about 15 days of practice now,” Hampton said. “You gotta show us what you can do, because at this point, we’ve installed it. We went over it multiple times. Now, you need to show us that you understand and we can count on you.”
Through two weeks of practice, Hampton said the coaches have mixed and matched who is getting first team, second team or scout team reps to create competition for starting roles, especially with how many newcomers the roster includes this year.
At quarterback, junior college transfer DJ Stevenson has been spending a lot of time with the starting offense, while incumbent Mekhi Hagens has been with the second-string.
That didn’t stop Hagens from showing out in the first scrimmage. His numbers came against the second-string defense that day, but he led a touchdown drive against the starting defense in an overtime simulation near the end of Saturday’s practice. Stevenson’s drive against the second-string defense ended in a missed field goal attempt.
Hampton said this scrimmage should answer the starting quarterback question.
“We’ll know after Tuesday,” Hampton said. “We’ll watch the film on Monday night and Tuesday, and then I’ll probably meet with those guys on Wednesday and let them know who the starting quarterback is.”
The starting defense played 10 possessions in the first scrimmage. It gave up two touchdowns and a field goal, all on drives which began on its own end of the field. That group also forced a fumble and two fourth down stops.
In addition to defensive linemen Anas Luqman and Elijah Jenkins, Hampton named tackle AJ Johnson and edge rusher Khalil Arnold as players he expects big things from. In the secondary, defensive coordinator David Calloway named Tavon Hardwick and Shawn Wilson as a pair of standouts alongside freshmen such as Amyrion Mingo from Louisiana.
Wilson is a returning starter, but Calloway said he had trouble adjusting last season after transferring from junior college and getting injured in the fall. Now, he’s better adjusted and playing well in practice.
“Now that he’s here a whole year, he’s one of the guys that’s holding the guys that just got here to a standard,” Calloway said. “Letting them know, ‘Hey, I just went through the same struggle. It’s going to be alright.'”
Calloway said the main things he wants from Monday’s scrimmage, other than keeping everyone healthy, is communication and eliminating mistakes. He said he is less concerned with identifying a starting group of 11 players than he is with getting his defensive players to come together and form bonds before classes start.
Like the offense, the defense is a mixture of returning players and newcomers. Calloway said the returning players are teaching the newcomers how UAPB does things, and one of the main topics is teaching them to just do their job and not play “hero ball.”
“You get a lot of guys on defense trying to make tackles, and it’s not all about making tackles,” Calloway said. “Sometimes, a guy gotta be in the right gap, which we call making a play, for another guy to make a tackle. … They just gotta understand how to fit into the puzzle, and older guys are getting those guys to understand that.”