In the press conference KWhitt expressed optimism about Redding. Apparently he had come out ahead of Strauch, but had a minor injury that wasn’t resolved until a couple days before the TDS game. Plan now is Strauch handles kickoffs and Redding will do PATs and FGs. Not expecting numbers like our last few kickers but hopefully no more PATs or short FGs missed. Redding made two 50 yarders in HS games; he’s just a freshman but can do it.
They’re confident in Redding. Apparently he was the front-runner until he got hurt in camp. The coaches are confident in him, but they were in Strauch, too. I watched Strauch kick all of pregame, and he was nailing 50 yarders like they were nothing.
So we’ll just have to see what happens. Thousands of kickers have the physical part down, it’s the mental aspect that separates the Matt Gay-types from the rest.
One of the KO returns (where we started on the 5) was rather bad. Ball took a weird bounce after it looked it may go out of bounds then stayed in and the return man picked it up and promptly got smothered. While it was an unlucky bounce, you have to wonder where all the blockers were on that play as he had no chance at all.
I doubt the blockers were to blame. That ball never should have hit the ground. The blockers can only hold the blocks for so long, the returner should have been 10 yards ahead by the time he finally picked up the bad bounce.