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Clemson isn't the only football program suffering some attrition. The recent news hasn't been good at Florida State, either.
Our friends at Warchant reported a couple days ago that Matthew Thomas is ineligible this season.
Being declared ineligible is the latest downturn in a tumultuous career for the highly touted South Florida prospect. Thomas was suspended for the first half of the 2014 season and then saw several ups and downs when he finally hit the field as a redshirt freshman. The 6-foot-3, 225-pounder finished last year with 26 tackles, including 2.5 for loss. He was ejected during the Nov. 22 game against Boston College for targeting, and suspended for the first half of the Nov. 29 game versus Florida.
Thomas, who was ranked as the nation's No. 2 outside linebacker for the 2013 recruiting class, was expected to miss a significant portion of the upcoming season while recovering from shoulder surgery.
A Florida State source indicated that the staff is still hopeful that the redshirt sophomore will be able to return to the team next spring. If that happens, the Miami native will have two years of eligibility remaining starting next fall.
And now the defensive end position takes a hit with the revelation that Lorenzo Featherston and Chris Casher will undergo scope surgery.
Already lacking depth at linebacker, Florida State’s defensive end position took a big hit when Jimbo Fisher announced that Lorenzo Featherston and Chris Casher will have arthroscopic knee surgery.
Featherston, a sophomore, should miss about a week and a half, according to Fisher, which would put his return about 10 days before the Sept. 5 opener against Texas State.
The condition of Casher, a fourth-year junior, appears more serious. Casher also has an MCL sprain and Fisher did not indicate a timetable for his return.
In positive news for the Seminoles, stud DE Josh Sweat makes a "freaky" recovery from a devastating knee injury.
"I didn't think he'd be doing what he's doing right now," FSU coach Jimbo Fisher said on Sunday after FSU's open practice at Doak Campbell Stadium. "Everybody's different in the way they heal. And he's one of those freaky guys." Sweat, who still sports a lightweight brace on his surgically repaired knee, already is participating in contact drills.
The Seminoles will conduct their first practice in full pads on Monday, and while it's not clear when Sweat will take part in full tackling drills, he has been clashing with offensive linemen for several days. Fisher said Sweat hasn't experienced any setbacks as of yet, but the Seminoles still are taking every precaution. And they still don't have a definitive date on when he'll play in his first game.
"We're just going to see how the wear and tear feels on him," Fisher said. "Is there any swelling? Is there a lot of soreness? We just have to play it that way and trust our doctor." Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Sweat's recovery is that he doesn't appear to be hesitant about trusting his knee.
Fisher said he watched eagerly the other day as Sweat took part in his first "board drill" - an exercise that feature two players squaring off with the goal of knocking each other off a board - and he was pleasantly surprised.
After getting beat the first time around, Sweat dominated an offensive tackle on the next collision, driving him backward and then punctuating the exchange with a little trash-talk.
"That caught me off-guard," Fisher said with a laugh. "You saw the power. That guy is so strong. He's 237 pounds, 238 pounds right now, and doesn't look it. He looks like he's about 220. But he's so powerful."
A few Thursday links:
-- At ESPN, stat crunchers supplement the College Football Playoff committee.
The playoff's selection committee has an abundance of statistics available to help determine the top four teams in the country, and while the majority opted to crunch numbers on their own, some of the sitting athletic directors like Wisconsin's Alvarez found it beneficial to get some help. All of them agreed, though, that the statistics were only a part of the equation -- data used to either confirm or negate what they were watching on Saturdays.
"We would spend some time trying to figure out if what he was seeing on tape was bearing out on the statistical and analytical side as well, so that when he would go into the room, he would be armed with more than just, 'Well, here's what I'm seeing, these are my opinions,'" said Herb, Wisconsin's sports information director for men's basketball.
"We found that the statistical and analytic side of the stats that we were charting supported what he was seeing, that yep, [Mississippi State] is a really productive team and a team that's going to win a lot of games and beat good teams," he said. "It was very validating for him to come up with his opinion of a team early on and then have the statistical and empirical data match that or validate that."
Alvarez, USC athletic director Pat Haden and Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich all met with either staff members or students on fall Sundays before flying to Dallas with their top 30 teams in hand -- fluid lists that could change on the plane ride and often would change during the official voting on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Haden said he had a few students come to his office from 1-4 p.m. on Sundays, and Radakovich worked with former Georgia Tech defensive lineman Darryl Richard, who was hired as Clemson's assistant director of business operation last summer but has since left the school.
Radakovich said he plans to continue to have research help this fall. A student or staff member will come into the office on Sunday nights and together they will look for any interesting trends, or teams that have made a big move statistically.
"I'm probably a little different from a data perspective than Pat and Barry because of coming up as a CFO within my career path," Radakovich said. "We do a little more of that than maybe the attorney and the coach, but no doubt it's important to have some type of assistance in gathering data because we're watching games, we're talking to conferences and other places getting ready for those Monday meetings, and any type of information that you're able to get pulled together and placed in front of you really helps speed through your understanding of the total picture."
-- At Grantland, they write on UCLA freshman Josh Rosen and Deshaun Watson's name comes up.
Superficially, the member of this group who bears the most obvious resemblance to Rosen is Barkley, who was also a polished, five-star pocket passer from a SoCal Catholic school, and who also got a jump on winning the starting job as a freshman by enrolling early for spring practice. And given the rest of Barkley’s career — he left USC with Pac-12 records for passing yards and touchdowns, the latter of which he still holds — there are certainly worse role models for Rosen to emulate. But Barkley’s Trojans managed just nine wins during his freshman campaign, so if any evidence exists that a true freshman is capable of elevating his team into the national title conversation — or at least keeping it there — it’s nowhere to be found in L.A. Instead, the Bruins should look across the continent, to Clemson, where Deshaun Watson was as close to unbeatablein 2014 as any first-year phenom in recent memory. Over five starts, Watson turned in the best pass efficiency rating in the nation among passers with at least 100 attempts, and his value stood out most in his absence: Clemson’s three losses on the season came in games in which Watson barely played (at Georgia), came off the bench (at Florida State),8 or was knocked out in the first half (at Georgia Tech). Had he received the keys from the start, and remained healthy opposite the nation’s best overall defense, who knows? The Tigers had the basic ingredients at their disposal to play their way into the playoff committee’s Final Four.
But Watson wasn’t handed the keys from the start and didn’t remain healthy once he had them, and the majority of the starters on that defense are currently vying for roster spots in NFL training camps. Even after flashing brilliance, his potential remains largely hypothetical, and his team’s potential in 2015 is at least temporarily on the wane. Where UCLA’s immediate fate is concerned, almost all of the pieces are in place for a legitimate run, but the bottom line is that there’s very little recent precedent for winning big with a true freshman at the controls — and for winning really big (big enough for a playoff bid), there’s no relevant precedent at all. Rosen may be as good as advertised; he may be better. If the 2015 Bruins have any chance of reaching their full potential, though, he’ll have to be better — and better faster — than any of the touted blue-chips who have preceded him, and also luckier.
-- Also at Grantland: If you like the iconic rap group NWA, you'll love this feature on their former manager.
He says he worked with members of the Eagles when they were known as Longbranch Pennywhistle and Creedence Clearwater Revival when they were the Golliwogs. He claims he took Otis Redding to Monterey, and he personally talked heavily armed Black Panthers out of potentially killing Ike Turner.
One time, Heller boasts, he brought Van Morrison to New York — where he had been booed, and sworn off playing — guessing that Morrison, lost in a haze of tour dates and general self-interest, wouldn’t actually be able to tell the difference between one East Coast city and the next. He guessed right.
For one reason or another, Heller never stuck with any one act for too long. By his own telling, his professional relationship with Marvin Gaye fizzled when he refused to lend Gaye his sunglasses. By the mid-’70s, he’d effectively washed out of the upper echelon of the industry.
Then, in 1987, in his mid-forties, he met Eric “Eazy-E” Wright. Heller was, at the time, sleeping on his parents’ couch and sniffing around for a hook back into the game. Wright was a local hotshot looking to get into that same game with his friends, Andre “Dr. Dre” Young and O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson, and their group, N----- With Attitude. And that’s when Heller’s life really began.
-- Finally, Ice Cube and the cast for Straight Outta Compton talk about the film, among other things:
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