Badger Bits: The Last Week of Spring Football

Morning, y'all. I'll be covering Wednesday Badger Bits for the short term while Nathan takes on some recruiting duties to give you guys better coverage in that area. He'll have a good post on the latest in UW recruiting coming up later today.

The Badgers will hold their last practice later this afternoon before Saturday's spring game, and you have to imagine their focus will be on cleaning up the generally sloppy play that marred Monday's scrimmage. Gary Andersen's already said all the quarterbacks (and most players, really) will get reps in the spring game, so it's not like these individual practices man a whole lot at this stage of the preseason. Curt Phillips and Joel Stave continue to be 1A and 1B, in one order or the other, and they'll likely stay that way until Tanner McEvoy arrives in June.

In fact, the central offensive storyline for this last week of spring ball figures to be the health of the linemen. Other players, such as running Melvin Gordon, have sat out large parts of the spring, but it's been the line that's struggled to field a full second unit at times. Andersen's said he hopes to have 10 healthy linemen for Saturday, though the Badgers have been as low as seven or eight healthy guys up front this spring. Here's hoping we can make it through Saturday all right and then leave the depth chart scrutiny to the fall.

Defensively, it's naturally all about continuing to settle into Dave Aranda's new 3-4. We've heard about the inevitable difficulties that have come with such a transition, as the coaches initially piled on a ton at first before scaling back. After spring break, it's ramped up, and it's safe to say Andersen, Aranda and co. will want to end spring ball on a positive note. For Wednesday and especially Saturday, I think I'll be most interested to see how much pressure the defense is able to get on Phillips, Stave and that bunch.

LINKS:

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