About that scrimmage...

Skyler Mornhinweg is the undisputed team leader


I thought the athletic department's official report on Saturday's scrimmage with Cornell was unusually detailed and excellent.

It was also adept at being diplomatic and intimating, but not saying, that Columbia was approaching this scrimmage appropriately as a practice. Thus, there weren't really any serious scoreboard results to pay much attention to.

That said, we did get more evidence that freshmen WR's Josh Wainwright and Chris Everett are pretty much the real deal. Wainwright also had a very nifty 40-yard punt return, even though it's not clear whether he'll get any kick returning duties in the regular season. On defense, we got even more evidence that freshman linebacker Jalen Williams is also the real deal.

The most important result of the scrimmage was that there were no injuries, (although we did learn that Scooter Hollis had a concussion that held him out of the scrimmage in the first place. We don't know if this will force him to miss the season opener). And I will remind everyone that last year, Columbia probably "lost" it's preseason scrimmage to Division-II Kean College and we all know how much that actually meant.

TEAM CAPTAINS

The players voted senior QB Skyler Mornhinweg, senior LB Christian Conway, and senior WR Scooter Hollis as team captains for 2016.

A couple of thoughts on this:

-It's a good sign that even though Mornhinweg and Conway are transfers, they're both liked and accepted enough in their second years to be named captains.

-With an exciting crop of new talent at WR coming in this year, it's nice to see Hollis get a captaincy. He will have a better platform now to lead the unit and guide the young players in the right direction.

-Mornhinweg is very soft spoken... usually. But let's just say he took very VOCAL charge during training camp when some of the freshmen needed a little more "guidance." He laid down the law. I've always believed the best teams are led by QB's who take charge on and off the field. The Lions have that now.

PRO INTEREST

Many of you have seen the coaches' tweets about pro team scouts coming to Lions practices. For the record, those scouts have been coming to see seniors Kendall Pace and Jared Katz, but hopefully a few other players will catch their eyes as well. Pace has been tearing it up in practice, winning the "Black Jersey" for outstanding player three total times and on back-to-back practices during training camp.