Mike Carmin of the J&C has a story up with the latest nuggets and notes from Boilermaker football practice. One of the current themes coming from Danny Hope is that the team needs to be better about penalties, which I think we can all agree is a welcome approach. Not that any team wants to take penalties, but Coach Hope is having officials at practice more frequently thus far in August to hopefully work towards that goal. Whether it will work or not is anyone's guess, but I like the attempt. Here was Coach Hope on the subject:

“There are no excuses for this football team. It’s a veteran football team,” he said. “They’ve played, they know better. I can’t be an enabler. We’re going to be a more disciplined football team.”

I just shared that because it's an example of one of my favorite nonsensical trends among anyone who works in or around football -- to overuse terms like "football team." You know, just in case you were distracted by NBC and thought he was talking about synchronized diving.

We also learn that Rob Henry was fielding punts yesterday. I'm not a doctor, but I wonder if among the best ways to utilize a QB who is recovering from a torn ACL tear is to put him in a position known to sustain blinding hits and require lots of sudden cutbacks.

Hope referred to both Henry volunteering to do this as well as QB Robert Gregory moving to RB as examples of guys "volunteering for active duty" and being "enlisted." I guess with a Big Ten opening schedule of Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio State, it might well feel like an infantry assignment.

Carmin wraps up his article with a sneaky Gary Nord quote under the heading "Clip and Save."

“With the experience at the quarterback spot, we’re going to go out and lay our ears back and do what we want to do when we want to do it instead of them dictating what we need to do.”

Carmin either means we should save that quote to see if Nord actually does open things up a bit this year....or maybe, like me, Mike noticed that Nord chose to go with the far lesser known "lay" our ears back rather than "pin" them back.

Yeah, I need football back soon, too, so I stop spending time on things like that.