Evans seems to be getting more First Team Reps: Notes from the 4/5/16 Practice

Again, our looks at practice are limited to Snapchat. The Hokies had an evening practice indoors.

There appeared to be a change in the first team offensive line. During team work, there were some first group repetitions with Yosh Nijman at left tackle and Jon McLaughlin at right tackle. Parker Osterloh appeared to be working with the second group left guard.

Yes, I am an offensive line mark, because I lead with that. The bigger story is that Jerod Evans was taking most first team repetitions in team work and all the snapchats with 1s vs 1s. Brendan Motley was working with the two group with the exception of a few snaps. Motley through a touchdown with the twos late in the film.

2 OL now appears to be Moore-Osterloh-Smith-Mitchell-Plantin.

Samuel Denmark had two really nice routes, a fake out and in against Duwayne Johnson and a beautiful stick/curl route against Shawn Payne. Deablo had a nice block earlier in drill work on the edge. He slipped a bit on the one route where you could make him out (against experienced walk on Curtis Williams) but was able to regain his footing and still make the catch.

It was hard to make much rhyme or reason defensively. It certainly looks like the Hokies are explosive on the edge, and Woody Baron made one of the young guards look bad with a great leverage move in drills. I really like how Gaines and Hill get off the football and their edge speed. I need to see that second move and their ability to fit or set the edge properly to get a better read. Given the depth at defensive tackle and bigger guys like Mihota, Ekanem, and Baron that could play a five technique if needed, I could certainly see both Hill and Gaines playing important situational downs as edge players in a Bear front. Both look quicker off the ball than Edmunds and have similar bodies types. They could cause some problems being aligned wide like that.