Red Raider Gridiron | Bielema Using Death of Player for HUNH; Tackle Competition to Arrive in Summer

Just a few links this morning and I get angry.

Bielema Wants to Use Death of a Player to Push 10 Second Rule Through: I am a bit upset about this.  This is ridiculous and has me bordering on calling Arkansas head coach Bret Bielema a handful of names (via SBNation).  Yesterday, Bielema references the death of a Cal player, Ted Agu, who died during workouts last week as the player was originally reported as having a sickle-cell trait which may have caused his death.  Bielema is attempting to use this death to argue in favor of the proposed 10 second defensive substitution rule. Bielema's argument to use a death to force a rule through the process is disgusting.  The Cal folks are ridiculously upset, as they should be. And as I pointed out earlier this week, as does SI's Andy Staples, which is that Bielema thinks that the clock would never stop even if a player is hurt, which is the most illogical argument ever, especially when players stay down all of the time when they are hurt and the team is not charged with a timeout.

But we need to get to the empirical evidence, here we go (via CFB Matrix and hat-tip to FootballScoop).  It's all there, in fact, the SEC has the slowest pace of play and the Big 12 that has the fastest pace of play and the Big 12 has the lowest rate of starts lost to injury per play.  And if you don't like the data or think it proves anything, that's fine.  At least it's something, whereas Bielema is using the death of a player in a completely inappropriate manner rather than data to back up the proposed rule change

Tackle Competition to Arrive in Summer: With the position previews continuing, it appears that the tackle competition isn't going to arrive until this summer in JUCO players Dominique Robertson and Shaquille Davis (via LAJ). Rashad Fortenberry's status is apparently still in flux and that Trey Keenan can't add weight and is only at 265 or 270 and Le'Raven Clark may move to guard, which I am still scratching my head over, but I'll just let that play out during the summer and that's a long ways away.

Amaro at the NFL Combine: TE Jace Amaro was at the NFL combine yesterday and held court and talked about what he can do as a player and how he hopes to fit (via FWST).

#LongRead: Really terrific piece from BON about a football player trying to get a shot at Division I football.  The problem is that he plays in Okinawa, Japan (via Burnt Orange Nation).