Greetings, again, from the Auburn athletic complex.

It’s “Moving In” weekend here at AU, lots of people around. I mean, lots.

Other than scholarship donors and a few selected guests, the public and media were not allowed to watch Auburn’s scrimmage today at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

So, we had to take Tommy Tuberville’s word for it ...
Here’s some of what he had to say in his post-scrimmage press conference, which lasted 120 plays ... the scrimmage, not the press conference:

*How long the scrimmage was:
Scrimmaged about 90 plays, that’s not counting the 30 plays in the kicking game.
Awful sluggish coming out of two-a-days, but we could expect that. Looked like we were running in mud at times.

* On the scrimmage:
Mainly this scrimmage was for the younger guys who needed to play, needed to get tired, needed to get hit – find out what it’s going to be like.
Most of the guys did play at some point.

*On young defensive backs:
(Redshirt freshman safety) Mike Slade made a couple of plays.
We tried to throw the ball on the safeties a lot more.
Mike (Slade) really improved. He’s going to see a lot of playing time.
Last week, and this week, we went after the corners. But that’s what this offense does. It’s going to put a lot of pressure on them.

* More scrimmage observations:
We started fast on offense. I thought the defense came around the last three-quarters of practice. We had some good runs, we had some good blocking up front. We were a little bit more physical today, we needed that.
A lot of contact.
A few more mistakes than we made last week.
Probably seven or eight penalties. This was an SEC group that worked. I told them to be very picky, very tough in terms of alignments and guys doing the right things.
We ran two-minute drills at the end that were live. One group did good on offense. The other one didn’t do very well.
We ended up with a good field goal at the end with Wesley (Byrum) and (Morgan) Hull making their field goals on the two-minute drill in the last group to finish off solid.

We’ve got a lot of mistakes. We got to start finding out who’s going to play. We’ll start from our freshmen up and who we want to put on special teams.
We’ve got to get their legs back. They’re pretty much gone in terms of any quickness or speed.

* On true freshman wide receiver Philip Pierre-Louis:
One guy who did show some elusiveness and made some big plays was Philip Pierre-Louis. That’s one guy I’ll tell you who did well.
He’s not a big target, but the quarterbacks have a lot of confidence in him and a lot of confidence he can make plays afterward.
There were other guys who made plays, but just standing out there and watching the guy who just made consistent plays was him.
He just caught short passes. Made 10 or 15 yard runs after. No long plays. Just consistently when the ball was thrown his way, he caught it.
I counted the first half, we probably had four drops, total. And he wasn’t in any of it.

*More on PPL:
Tackling was better. But when you’re trying to tackle Frenchy, it’s pretty tough.
He’s going to be exciting to watch. He’ll make you look bad on one-on-one. I think it’s good we see somebody like that in the open field. I’m talking about not just the young guys. Everyone was trying to take a dead bead on him. He’s going to make a lot of people do tackling drills the next week if he can stay healthy.

* On the quarterbacks:
Thought our quarterbacks did a pretty decent job throwing the ball. Not anything spectacular. The biggest thing is making the right decision in these scrimmages, when you’ve got two guys vying for the starting position. And I thought both of them did about the same.
Both of them scored points. We mixed them up, in and out, trying to find the right combination.
I couldn’t tell (if a QB made a move). There were probably a few more bigger plays last week. It was more of a grind today. The offense did have a little bit more consistency. That’s what I like. They were more consistent.

* On the backup quarterbacks:
Both of them played a lot. I think Neil (Caudle) has really improved. The thing that he’s got to do is make a little bit quicker decisions. Every once in a while, last spring, he’d throw it to the wrong color jersey. And that’s what we’re trying to get him out of. And he’s done a better job at that.
I think he’s much improved in that area – making better decisions. This offense, he’s pretty familiar with.

Barrett (Trotter), he’s got a lot of velocity on the ball. He’s one that we’ll have to make a decision on what we want to do with.

* On when a depth chart will be released:
We’ll have one probably Tuesday or Wednesday of game week. We’re going to look at different guys. We’ll have to make some decisions.
We want to make sure any of the younger guys we play is going to be worth it. There are some battles at a lot of positions.
We’ll have to grade this film first to see if anybody made any movement.