Published August 08, 2006 11:23 pm -
All about timing
John Shinn
The Norman Transcript
• OU’s young receivers find second year much easier
Timing is everything for an offense. A quarterback knows he only has so much time before he has to throw the football. The precision of pass routes must be ingrained into receivers like soldiers learning to march.
When the timing is in perfect unison, football looks like a simple game. When it isn’t, it just looks like 11 guys running around.
Oklahoma wide receiver Juaquin Iglesias remembers what it was like last August when everything seemed to be speeding by at 200 miles per hour.
“Last year we were all young and didn’t really feel like we understood everything,” he said.
He had a good reason to feel out of place.
At this point last August, Iglesias, Malcolm Kelly and Manuel Johnson were wide-eyed freshmen who’d never experienced the speed of Big 12 football. Plus there was a vast playbook that had to be memorized.
To them it was like getting everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them in a couple of days. Even knowing where to stand in the huddle took a few seconds of deliberation.
But a lot has changed over the course of a year.
“Now we’re all on the same page,” Iglesias said.
It’s a page the three young receivers, who will all be sophomores this season, have memorized.
That’s a good thing for the Sooners.
With Paul Thompson making the move back to quarterback after spending the last six months as a receiver, the one thing he needs is precision.
It was hard to achieve when he was going through the quarterback competition with Rhett Bomar a year ago. Just because he knew where the ball was supposed to go didn’t necessarily mean the receivers were thinking the same thing.