Wisconsin head coach Paul Chryst met with reporters on Thursday a little over two days away from Saturday’s match-up against Florida Atlantic.
Among the topics discussed were updates on two contributing Badgers with injuries. According to the final injury report released to the media on Thursday, redshirt sophomore Bradrick Shaw still remained questionable with a right leg injury.
“We’ll see. He did certainly some things, but was a little bit limited but did some stuff each day,” Chryst said. “So we got two more days or however many hours exactly, and we’ll kind of see how it goes.”
On Wednesday, redshirt senior defensive end Chikwe Obasih suffered a left knee injury. The injury report lists him out for Saturday’s game. Chryst hopes Obasih won’t be out long, but isn’t certain how much time he’ll miss.
Is it sesaon-ending? “No. Not at all, that I know of.”
Here are more highlights from Chryst’s media sesson:
On the process of determining whether true freshmen will play: “The first thing is are they ready for it? Really what it comes down to is, can they help us? If there’s an individual that’s not ready, then he won’t probably put [himself] in those positions to be able to help the team.”
On Adam Bay’s first game and if he did his job as long snapper: “He did do it, and it was good. His first snap was backed up, and like you said, I thought he did some good things. It was good for Adam to get that under his belt and move forward now.”
Why the greatest improvement from the first game to the second game isn’t the case: “Well I hope that you’re always improving is where that’s comes from, personally. Certainly, we need to take strides forward. You need to get better. I think that there is, for a number of kids who haven’t played, now they got a better of idea for what to expect. It can be a different feel. It can lead to improvement. I think even for older guys that played a lot, just getting back in to the season and playing, I think there’s a little bit of an adjustment going from practicing against each other to an opponent. But I would hope that we always are improving. I think that’s our job to help these kids improve all the time. I’d like to think that it just doesn’t end from game one to game two.”
Is junior nose tackle Olive Sagapolu more athletic that people think? “Yeah, I think he’s really athletic. It’s crazy, but there’s that picture from when they did that dance routine, which [I’m a] big fan of.
“We knew about that before, and I think he’s extremely athletic, period. You add the size to it, it’s amazing.”
With Hurricane Irma coming and Wisconsin trying to accommodate Florida Atlantic: “I know that there’s been a lot of conversations about that, and whatever we need to do to accommodate that. It’s been interesting just talking to our kids from Florida and kind of where their families are at with it all. Those are real things to the players and obviously to any of the teams down there. It’s pretty cool, I think, what the university and athletic department’s wanting to do whatever we can to help out, which has got to be a tough thing.”