Wanting to play on both sides of the football and being able to play on both sides of the football are two very different things.
Tennessee sophomore Boo Carter continues to take productive steps to that rare college accomplishment.
The 6-foot-1, 200-pounder, who starred at Chattanooga Christian as a sophomore and junior and at Bradley Central as a senior, made an impressive splash last season with the Volunteers. He started each of the last six games at the “star” position in the secondary and also took over as his team’s primary punt returner.
In late December, however, after Tennessee had been eliminated by eventual national champion Ohio State in the first round of the inaugural 12-team playoff, Carter went to Vols coach Josh Heupel with the desire to play on offense as well moving forward. Carter was spotted at slot receiver on the second day of spring workouts, and he is continuing to manage this sizable balancing act as the Vols prepare for Saturday afternoon’s Orange & White spring game inside Neyland Stadium.
“When you do this, there is a whole other workload that you’ve got to take on,” Heupel said Monday in a news conference. “Because you’ve got to understand what’s going on with both sides of the football. He’s done a really good job, and he’s spent a lot of time in here learning what we’re doing offensively and being able to handle the structure of the offense.
“We’re intentional in terms of what positions we’re putting him in through the course of practice and today during the scrimmage and trying to manage that side of it.”
Monday’s closed scrimmage was the second of the spring for the Vols, who will practice again Wednesday and Friday before their annual April showcase. The Orange & White contest is scheduled to start at 2, with the capacity being limited to 45,000 due to construction in Neyland.
Carter racked up 38 tackles, three tackles for loss and a sack last season, and he returned his one interception for 9 yards in the 33-14 win over Mississippi State. He also had 12 punt returns for 198 yards, a 16.5-yard average which would have ranked among the top five nationally had he reached the minimum number of returns to qualify.
Champ Bailey, who played at Georgia from 1996-98, is widely regarded as the Southeastern Conference’s most versatile player of the modern era. In the 1998 season alone, Bailey had 47 receptions for 744 yards (15.8 yards per catch) and five touchdowns, 16 rushes for 84 yards (5.3), 12 kickoff returns for 261 yards (21.8), four punt returns for 49 yards (12.3) and three interceptions.
In that 11-game regular season, Bailey played 607 defensive snaps, 343 offensive snaps and 120 snaps on special teams for a total of 1,070 snaps. He surpassed 100 snaps in seven games, topped by 119 during a win at Auburn.
Bailey finished seventh in the balloting for the 1998 Heisman Trophy, was the seventh overall pick of the 1999 NFL draft and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2019, his first year of eligibility.
“You’ve got to have a guy who has the durability and the training to keep his body in shape to play that many snaps, especially if you’re going to use him for more than 10 or 15 snaps on offense,” Jim Donnan, Georgia’s coach from 1996-2000, said of two-way players. “You’ve got to have the intelligence to understand the offense. You can’t just have a couple of plays for him, because everybody else will figure it out pretty quickly. I got the idea when I was at Marshall and had Troy Brown, who played 15 years with the Patriots and played some both ways there.
“The biggest thing is that you’ve got to have the athletic ability and the football intel, but it’s kudos to Coach Heupel, because you want to get your best players on the field and give you the chance to win.”
What may be best aiding Carter in this difficult quest isn’t the fact he earned a spot on the SEC all-freshman team but also on the SEC’s academic honor roll for the fall semester.
“He has worked hard,” Heupel said. “You can look at him as a punt returner as far as seeing his skill set when he has the ball in his hands that he’s got a chance to be a dynamic playmaker.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.