For the second consecutive year the New Orleans Saints are holding training camp practices in Irvine, California, but the circumstances are somewhat different.
A year ago it was a full, 4-week camp kicking off out west ahead of Dennis Allen's ill-fated final season. This time around it's a 10-day jaunt that cuts in some reasonable weather into a long training camp haul.
"Any time as a player and even for the coaches it breaks it up a little bit and so now to be able to come out to a different scene … and, guess what," Deuce McAllister said after Thursday's practice, "you play a game in a couple days."
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The Saints are holding a pair of practices this week on the campus of UC Irvine before their preseason opener with the Chargers. Friday's session will be a scrimmage, though not as intense as the one last week in Metairie.
“You normally don’t have a scrimmage that close to a game, and so you know, when you say scrimmage it’ll be unscripted but it’s not tackling to the ground. It’s kind of thud up, get in position," Deuce said. "I want you to see blitzes, ... you don’t know what’s coming from a personnel standpoint, we’re going to go down and distance, we’re going to go situational football, but for the most part it will be a scrimmage from that standpoint and hopefully they get some good work out of it.”
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It's likely that some players, such as veteran RB Alvin Kamara, will get signifiant run on Friday but not be active for the preseason game.
On Thursday's practice
"I thought that there was really good energy today. If you’re going to be upset about something it’s probably the pre-snap penalties, the false starts and some of that stuff, they probably had too much of that, but I thought it was some pretty good energy from a lot of guys, offense and defense flying around pretty well. I know Olave kind of rolled his ankle but he came back right in when the 1s came in, so pretty good first day. I mean, you go back to when we were here last year for this first day and you made the comment to me, Kendre Miller, he never even made it through stretch or through this part of it, and they didn’t have anything like that today, so pretty good first day.”
On punter battle/Hayball cut
“I thought [Matt] Hayball did a really nice job of pinning you inside the 20, but how specialized today’s game is, you’ve got to be inside the 10. If you’re not putting guys inside the 10 and you have that hangtime where they can get down there and cover it and then flipping the field," Deuce said. "At times I need a 50-yarder … consistently and at times i need some hangtime and so that’s one of the things that they’re searching for and looking for and just like every position.”