A Good One Gets Away Memphis loses a tight end just weeks before the season opener. by Dennis Freeland eid Hedgepeth was quite a catch for Rip Scherer back in 1996. A strong, good-looking tight end from Christian Brothers High School, Hedgepeth seemed to have it all, including the right bloodlines – his father, Steve, had played on some great Arkansas teams for the legendary Frank Broyles. When Hedgepeth decided to play at Memphis the same year as fellow Memphis stars Damien Dodson, Kenton Evans, Teofilo Riley, and Austin O’Dell, it looked as if Scherer was building a foundation for the kind of local recruiting success unseen at the University of Memphis since Rex Dockery was in charge. Reid Hedgepeth as a Tiger freshman in 1996 Last weekend Hedgepeth quit the team. He won’t be coming back. After last season, Tiger coaches moved Chris Powers, the starting tight end, to center, opening up the tight-end spot for Hedgepeth and fellow redshirt sophomore Billy Kendall. Coaches expected the two players to split time at the position this year. Kendall runs a little better than Hedgepeth, who brought more physical toughness to the position. Now Scherer has to get a second tight end ready. Quick. “It’s frustrating,” Scherer said Monday. “We put a lot of work in with Reid and he put a lot of work in individually. But my responsibility is to the ones who are here. That’s where my focus has got to be. Billy Kendall has got to step up. We’ve got to get [redshirt sophomore] Patrick Willis ready in a hurry. One of those young tight ends – Jeff Cameron or Mowbray Rowand – may have to play. But we’ll be fine. It just creates a little bit of an unsettled feeling for a while.” Unsettled is exactly how Hedgepeth felt in the days leading up to his decision, according to his father, Steve. “It was a very tough decision for him,” the elder Hedgepeth says. “He agonized over it quite a bit, went through several sleepless nights.” Kendall started ahead of Hedgepeth in the team’s first scrimmage last weekend, but according to Steve, it was not a matter of playing time that caused Reid to leave the Tigers. It was philosophy. Or more precisely, blocking. “Reid has always blocked a certain way – an aggressive style, just go after the guy,” Steve explains. “Last year the coaches tried to change it but [former tight-end coach] Maurice Knight stood up for him. He said as long as Reid was blocking effectively, he wasn’t going to change him.” Knight confirmed Hedgepeth’s account and said he was surprised to hear that Reid had quit the team. “Reid and I had a special relationship,” Knight says. “He is a great kid who did everything I asked of him and more. Reid is a good ballplayer and sometimes I’d put technique out the window. That was the kind of coach I was.” But Knight resigned earlier this summer and was replaced by former graduate assistant Pat Meyer, who was named interim tight-end coach shortly before pre-season camp opened. According to Steve Hedgepeth, Meyer tried to change Reid’s blocking style. “The coaches said you’re going to do it this way, period,” Steve recounts. Not being able to play the way he always had was distracting to Reid, according to his dad. “It’s such a physical, violent game, you can get hurt if you’re not totally committed to the offensive scheme,” Steve says. “You are either the hunter or the hunted in football. Reid is the hunter. He’s going to hunt you down.” In fact, Scherer liked Hedgepeth’s aggressive play. After Hedgepeth signed with Memphis, Scherer said that he liked the fact that Reid would often get in an extra lick or two at the bottom of a pile. And one day on the practice field last year, the big tight end laid a monster block on a Tiger defender. Scherer, who has often worried about the toughness of his offense, applauded Hedgepeth. Just two weeks ago, Reid Hedgepeth sounded like a happy camper. In fact, he seemed excited about the prospects for the coming season as we talked during Fan Day at the South Campus. “We had a great summer,” he said then. “We had 40 to 45 guys here every day. It was incredible. We’re all ready to go.” And as recently as last Thursday during a passing drill, Scherer yelled down from his spot on his new tower to tell the assistant coaches not to wear out the tight ends. “There’s only two of them, you know,” Scherer said. Hedgepeth looked up, a grin obvious even through his face mask, “Thanks, coach,” he said. But by the weekend, Hedgepeth had decided to leave the program. The timing is no better for Hedgepeth than it is for the team, which travels to Oxford next weekend to open the season against longtime nemesis Ole Miss. Having already used his redshirt season, Hedgepeth will have two years of eligibility remaining after he sits out a season under the NCAA transfer rules. And that is what Reid plans to do. His father says they will go out of town and relax for a few days, and afterward Reid will return to school at the U of M. Then, as the semester progresses, he will visit “three or four schools where he likes the coaches,” according to his father. For his part, Scherer professes no hard feelings toward his former tight end. “It left us in a little bit of a lurch, but I wish Reid well,” the Tiger head coach says. “I have a lot of respect for Reid and his family. He is a great young man, a really good person. He made a decision for himself that he felt was the right one. I hate to see him leave.” TALK-RADIO FOOLISHNESS The trouble with talk radio is the talk. There’s just too much of it. So much gets said by so many people that after a while the listener tends to forget who said what. Was it a credible host? Or was it a caller with an ax to grind? I was reminded of this earlier this week when a rumor started that Rip Scherer had “guaranteed” a victory over Ole Miss. It first came up on Sports Time with George Lapides, the Channel 3 Sunday-evening program which had Ole Miss coach Tommy Tuberville and Scherer as guests. A caller asked Scherer about the guarantee. He denied it. The next day, callers to different talk radio shows picked up the theme. I was surprised when a caller to the WHBQ program hosted by Lex Ward and Pete Cordelli attributed the quote to The Memphis Flyer. Talk about taking a quote out of context! Several weeks before pre-season practice began, the University of Memphis announced that several Tiger football players were being disciplined for their roles in a long-distance phone scandal at the school’s athletic department. As part of his punishment, Mike McKenzie, the Tigers’ talented cornerback, would have to miss the opener at Oxford. In an interview with Scherer, I talked to the coach about the punishment and how it would affect his team. This is what he said: “We’ll beat Ole Miss without Mike.” Now he was not bragging, he was not making a prediction, he was certainly not guaranteeing a victory. He was simply doing what all coaches do in similar situations – putting the best spin possible on a negative story. What else would you expect him to say? “Without Mike we don’t have a chance”? It is simply ludicrous for anyone to try to turn that innocent comment into bulletin-board fodder for Ole Miss. If the Rebel players and coaches don’t know that Rip Scherer expects to win on September 5th, they’re not living in the real world. PUTTING ON THE POUNDS Chris Powers and his buddy, senior tackle Ron Sells, spent the summer working out and eating. Powers was trying to gain weight for his new position – center. “We hit a few buffets this summer, there’s no question about that,” says Sells, the willing accomplice. “But Chris has one of these bodies that girls like, so he didn’t want to lose the figure.” Powers says he gained 10 pounds and now weighs close to 270. “Any more than that and I would have been pretty fat,” he laughs. Powers says he ran quickness drills all summer, trying to maintain the one edge he thinks he will have this season as he goes up against nose tackles who may outweigh him by as much as 30 or 40 pounds. He thinks working against the Memphis defensive front has helped him get ready for the challenges that await him. “We’re not going to face many defensive lines better than ours. T.J. [Frier] is a load and Marquis [Bowling] is really quick,” he says. “I’ve got to be really good at technique,” says the man who will always be remembered for catching the touchdown pass that beat UT. “Obviously I don’t have the size. I just have to use quickness and technique to make up for that.”