Show 'n' tell

If you're enough of a diehard to search out and find a Fresno State blog, then hopefully this will be a fairly entertaining and unique post for you.

This is one of those can't-find-anywhere-else blog posts that I thought ahead of time would be fun to share. It happened rather quickly and spontaneously, but the end of it resulted in the video below. This past Thursday I had lunch with a friend of mine, Derek Carr, a freshman quarterback for Fresno State. The one sentence version is that I told him I wanted to play some catch, so he got on the horn and rounded up some guys for an afternoon workout.

Guys like Rashad Evans, Vince Pascoe and Desia Dunn (for those that don't know, it's pronounced Deezs-uh) came out. All the video I took was of their play, so I won't go into detail about them (unless you want my opinion on something I might have seen, in which case just leave a comment). I will say that Evans is really quick and AJ Johnson (Fr. Wr) is fast.

Instead, I want to share my experience of catching a ball from Derek. First things first, it's pretty dang cool to play catch with an official game ball with the FS logo burned on the ball. The Bulldog Shop would make some serious money selling those things. Second, he throws really hard. He says Dave has him beat by a hair right now, but by the end of his career, that might change. But luckily for me, I grew up playing baseball, mostly as a catcher, so I have good hands and have caught baseballs coming really fast at me.

The most deceiving thing was how hard the ball came with such little effort. Derek is 6'3" with decent sized hands, and the footballs are surprisingly light, so it comes at you quickly. You have to have strong but soft hands at the same time. Not that you care, but I'm happy to report that he was pretty dang impressed with the stickiness of my hands.

The other thing I have a new perspective on is catches made by receivers that are not on the money. This ball comes at you with some oomph on it and feels almost like one of the lighter medicine balls hitting you in the hands. It takes real focus to pull one of those things in. So the shoe-string catches you see on TV, or the ones where they have to turn back the other way they are running to grab it, those are really good catches.

As you can imagine, it was fun as heck to go out there and feel like part of the team.

Next time I go out there with Derek and play I'm going to try and get a first-person video of the ball coming at me. Hopefully that will put some pictures to my words.

For the time being, the video below is most of what went on at the workout. I uploaded it to youtube through imovie hd, and I'm not really a tech guy, so if you have any suggestions on how to clean up some of the frame rate stuff, I'm all ears.

Be sure to click on the HD button though: