The Cardinal Countdown: 86 Days Until Kickoff

***You waited two weeks to get it, but here is your first double dip of the 2020 season. One day, two players. Let’s get it rolling.***

#86 Chris Nuckols

Class: Sophomore

Ht/Wt: 5-10/160

Position: Wide Receiver

Hometown: Louisville, KY (Product of Shawnee High School)

Twitter: @cnuckols

Thoughts: Many of the comments I said about Tyler Harrell yesterday apply directly to Chris Nuckols as well, a smaller wideout who is going to face an uphill battle looking for significant PT in 2020. One nice thing about Chris is that he is now one of ten players on the roster from the city of Louisville. While I’m a fan of all ten, with the talent boom in the city the last five years it’s a bit crazy that only ten players on the entire roster are local guys, and speaking bluntly only 3-4 of those guys will see significant minutes this year. Petrino crop-dusted the hell out of the relationships with local high schools but it appears the new staff is building those back up and players like Aidan Robbins, Jordan Watkins, and Josh Minkins are hopefully a sign of the future.

Since Chris was one of the late freshman roster additions we didn’t get to see his film last year on the countdown so take a few minutes and enjoy a little razzle dazzle from the Shawnee grad who played both sides of the ball back in 2018.

Sweet Tweet:

As of last night Mr. Nuckols twitter account was suspended, probably because he was handing out a bunch of free money and finding homes for lost puppies, but just a guess on my part really. So, instead lets ‘suspend’ our concept of efficiency and do the most Louisville thing we can possibly do...watch a three minute clip of a man trying to get a basketball through a hoop. Rube Goldberg was a noob.

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#86 Corey Reed

Class: Junior

Ht/Wt: 6-3/210

Position: Wide Receiver

Hometown: Fulton, GA

Twitter: @_coreyjr

Thoughts: When the unfortunate news broke a few weeks back about the passing of Corey’s father due to COVID-19 the focus, rightfully so, was on Corey and his family as they went through that difficult situation. My first thought was obviously about Corey and hoping he’s alright…but shortly after I thought…Corey’s back?

For those of you like myself who where maybe out of the loop or who have the memory equivalency of your favorite lap dog Corey returned to the Louisville squad back in the Spring and actually participated in the limited spring practices. I’ll be damned. Now if you have an extremely poor memory or maybe don’t let the inter-working's of college football roster management control your lives (poor soul) maybe you didn’t even know Corey was gone. In fact, Mr. Reed played for Iowa Western in 2019 after transferring out following the 2018 season and 2019 spring where he took some reps at safety as well as wideout and decided a new location may work out better. But now, as we have already established, he is back. Now that we’re all caught up, lets talk about 2020 shall we?

Corey was a nice get for the Cards way back in 2017 and actually finished his freshman year with 8 grabs for 145 yards but saw limited time the next season. Sliding back into the fold this year I think Reed is a legit backup to Dez on the outside. He has the bigger frame to make plays downfield and we saw a glimpse of what he can in open space a couple years ago. While the possibility of him still playing on the other side of the football is not out of the question I think they keep him on offense and let him eat some in situational formations. With the playbook opening up a little more I think we see 4-5 guys pushing that 500 receiving yards marker, and Reed may be in the mix.

Sweet Tweet:

Corey just retweets a lot of stuff and this was one of them that hit me right in my feels…(I know it aint gonna happen but a kid can dream).