BATON ROUGE — LSU returned to full pads on Wednesday as the Tigers held their 10th practice of the spring with a two-hour workout here at the Charles McClendon Practice Facility.
The Tigers will take Thursday off before returning to practice on Friday. LSU will hold
its second scrimmage of the spring on Saturday at 1 p.m. in Tiger Stadium. LSU wraps up its spring drills on Friday, April 11 at 5 p.m. in Tiger Stadium with the annual spring game.
“We’ve had two good practices this week,” LSU coach Nick Saban said following Wednesday’s workout. “We have been more physical and more aggressive and that’s what I’m looking for. We had more players competing on the field today. It’s okay to make a mistake as long as you’re playing hard.”
Saban continued to praise the offensive line and first-year coach Stacy Searels for their work during the spring.
“I’m very pleased with the job Stacy (Searels) is doing with the players,” Saban said. “It seems like the players have responded very well to him. I think our offensive line is playing very well. They have a lot of experience and we have some pretty good football players there. Everybody seems to be really adjusted to the new situation.”
Saban also said that after watching Saturday’s scrimmage, he saw a few areas that the Tigers needed to improve on.
“I was a little disappointed crispness of the scrimmage,” Saban said. “I don’t think we tackled very well on defense and I thought we ran the ball fairly effectively. We didn’t throw the ball as effectively and efficiently as we would have liked. We had a few too many drops, as well as some miss reads.
“I think that it was fairly evident that our first units are much further along than our second units on both sides of the ball. I think it’s very important that we continue to develop more players in the two-deep that can play winning football for us so that we go into the season with more depth. We need to get these guys some knowledge and experience the rest of the spring.”
Saban said the Tigers spent a portion of Monday’s practice correcting mistakes from the first scrimmage. Saban also noted that freshman running back Justin Vincent continues to see action in the defensive secondary.
“We’re continuing to work with Justin on defense. He makes a lot of plays on the defensive side of the football. We’re not disappointed at all with Justin as a running back. We’re going to continue with this experiment for a couple more days.”