A little mud and rain did not stop the Memphis Tigers football team from completing their first scrimmage of the spring over the weekend.
It was the team’s sixth practice of the season, and the scrimmage was 100 plays.
"I think they continue to get better and continue to acknowledge that we've got work to do," coach Justin Fuente said to gotigersgo.com after the scrimmage. "I like the way they've approached it, I'm hopeful that we'll approach it the same way on Tuesday. We have a lot of things we have to correct and a lot of work to do and see if we can continue to move forward."
While some of the experienced players 0have played well so far, that the team as a whole need to improve in situational football.
"We need to continue working on third downs, so we've got plenty of situational stuff to continue to work on that we haven't really touched on so far," Fuente said.
Sophomore quarterback Paxton Lynch had a good performance in the scrimmage as he threw two touchdowns. The first one being a 36-yard completion to redshirt junior wide receiver Frank Wims. He would then throw a 35-yard pass to redshirt senior wide out Tevin Jones.
Memphis’ run game was not to be left out as they also were responsible for two touchdowns during the scrimmage. The two touchdowns were from three and five yards out, and sophomore running back Jarvis Cooper scored one of them.
It was not all offense, however, the defense which lost eight starters and three backups from the 10-3 team last year showed promise in the scrimmage. The Tigers defense forced a pair of fumbles and registered three sacks.
"They're (the defense) continuing to find themselves too," Fuente said. "We basically run the exact same scheme with the same calls the last couple of years because we had the same players every year and now it's a whole cast of new guys, so you've got to continue to tweak the system and find out guys' skill sets and try to play the best towards that. So as coaches, we've got to look at that and try to tweak it to fit those guys. We'll go through some growing pains in that part of it, but at times, they flashed pretty well for us."
Memphis will return to practice on Tuesday for the first of three practices this week.
