Notre Dame squared off against St. Thomas More Thursday in their annual skills and drills scrimmage heading into jamboree action this week.
The teams matched up for inside blocking drills, passing skels and defensive rush drills. The scrimmage concluded with a team on team scrimmage.
“We’ve been doing this for about 15 years now,” explained Pios coach Lewis Cook. “We feel this format reduces the risk of injury while at the same time giving us the chance to evaluate blocking and other techniques that helps in our development as a team.”
The Pios offense will have a slightly different look this season. With junior Ben Broussard taking over under center and the return of Noah Bourgeois in the backfield, teams may see an uncharacteristic Pios attack.
“The technical term for that is eye candy”, laughed Coach Cook. “That’s what the big timers are doing. We ran a guy in motion and we may fake it to him or give it to him. We can do some play action out of that also.”
Notre Dame scored twice on 12 play drives in the team scrimmage. Bourgeois and C.J. Thibodeaux had a couple of big runs and Broussard completed passes to Kaizer Lamm, Jack Faulk and Thomas Bellard.
“Our ones got to run 36 plays and all our kids got in some work,” continued Cook. “C.J. Broke a big run on an inside zone and in the second series we converted two third downs. Ben (Broussard) rolled to his left on one play and turned and set his feet to hit Lamm for a big completion.”
St. Thomas More came back to tie the scrimmage on their final drive with a 20-yard TD pass. The Cougars earlier scored on a 46-yard pass.
“The second time around, they threw it 21 of 24 plays,” added Cook. “They couldn’t run on our defense. I told coach Mac to get ready for the air attack and they launched it. We rushed just four men on every play, we never blitzed, and they blocked six. We were tagging off on the QB so he knew he wasn’t going to get hit. What I liked about our secondary was several times a ball was going into their hands and it got yanked out. So, we were close enough to make plays.”
Notre Dame will face Carencro in the second game of Thursday nights action at the Kiwanis Jamboree played a Cajun Field. Cook will approach the half game as he always does, evaluating players.
“At STM we threw two screens on the first two plays. We got them on film, saw what we needed to see and moved on to other areas. We want to keep moving forward and getting ready for the season.”