Troy football to open spring practice Tuesday

Published 8:46 pm Monday, March 23, 2015

Since his induction into the Troy football family in December, new head football coach Neal Brown has spent months tirelessly working to assemble the pieces necessary to “Rebuild the Wall.”

Tuesday, the machine will finally be set into motion when Troy University opens up its spring practice schedule at 5 p.m.

Tuesday’s inaugural day will be free and open to the public, as will all spring practices.

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“There is going to be a lot of excitement from our staff and from our players,” Brown said. “We had a really productive offseason, and I can’t say enough about the job (strength & conditioning coach) Rafael Horton and his staff did in regards to strength and conditioning and nutrition for our players.”

Tuesday’s practice will be the first of 13 practices leading up to Troy’s spring game, the annual T-Day event on April 25.

The Trojans will return a hefty amount of starters this spring, 16 in all, and 55 letter winners to the squad for the 2015 season.

But with new coaches at the helm and new schemes in place, the slate will be essentially wiped clean from the Larry Blakeney era, allowing every player to make his best impression and best case for a starting position going into the summer.

“Everybody has an opportunity and everybody is starting fresh,” Brown said. “We’ve been doing some strength and conditioning drills with the coaches involved. Our full-time coaches are really involved with our offseason program as far as being at workouts, so our coaches have an decent idea what the guys can do it shorts, but you never know until they put pads on. We don’t really have a depth chart, but hopefully by the end of spring we will – it’s going to be really fluid early on.”

Troy football will be lead into the spring by record-breaking sophomore quarterback Brandon Silvers.

Last season, Silvers led the nation in completion percentage and broke the all-time freshman completion percentage record previously held by Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford with a 70.5 mark in his first year leading the Troy offense.

This offseason, Silvers said he was looking forward to picking up where he left off and felt Brown’s air raid style of offense would suit him well going forward.

“He’s all about the players and trying to make us better and trying to get us back on top,” Silvers said. back in December. “It’s awesome for the program.”

That same excitement has now carried over into the spring.

After months of planning and strategizing, Brown and the Trojans are ready to step out onto the practice field and get some tangible results for all of the offseason work.

“Now it’s about getting on the field and going about our business,” Brown said. “We want to practice with the mindset of getting better every day. We want to spend some time teaching our players how to prepare and how to practice – how we want them to practice. We have to create competition. With the schedule we play, we are going to have to compete in everything we do. Finally we have to identify our personnel. We have to identify what schemes are going to fit that personnel and where is our personnel best fit position wise.”