The Colonel football team will have “an army of tight ends” when they take the field this season.
Tight ends coach, Brandon Nowlin, from Baton Rouge, La., is beginning his first season as a coach at Nicholls after spending three seasons as head football coach and athletic director at Morgan City High School and with him comes an added emphasis on the tight end position for the Colonels.
“When I interviewed with Coach Stubbs in the spring before taking the job, he said he wanted to make [tight ends] a little more of a focus,” Nowlin said. “We signed two kids out of the high school ranks to come in as freshmen and then kind of acquired a few through borrowing, stealing and trading amongst the other positions.”
Redshirt sophomore, Hayden Cardiff, a native of Richmond Hill, Ga., is one of the players making the move to tight end this fall. Cardiff took snaps at quarterback last season as a redshirt freshman.
“The transition’s been really good. As a quarterback, you know the offense. Especially in the passing game, it’s gone really well,” Cardiff said.
Cardiff has a good role model to learn the position from, redshirt junior Nick Scelfo. Scelfo, from Baton Rouge, La., was selected second team All-Southland Conference and first team All-Louisiana last season, but the new competition at the position doesn’t bother him.
“[The competition] is definitely a good thing. Coach Stubbs always says competition breeds success. The more guys we have out here, the more competition, the more it pushes us to get better as players all over, so I think the competition brings out the best in all of us,” Scelfo said.
Nowlin referenced the power running scheme used by teams such as the New England Patriots, Alabama Crimson Tide and the Stanford Cardinal as what tight ends can bring to an offense.
“I’ve always thought tight ends bring versatility to an offense. When you start changing things on the edges, you can run a lot of the same type of stuff, but [it] just makes one or two things look different about how you line up a tight end or motion a guy,” Nowlin said. “Interior-wise it’s really the same stuff, but it just looks a little different to the defense. Some people like to call it smoke and mirrors and things like that.”
According to Nowlin, defenses have problems with defending versatile tight ends whether it is because of their physicality or because of their athleticism.
Nowlin also believes that adding more tight ends to the fold will elevate the play of the entire group.
“You know, every time we move a guy in, it makes it very, very hard for guys to say, ‘Well, I’m losing reps here. How am I going to get those back?’ Because there’s only so many to go around at a given practice and those guys realize that,” Nowlin said.
The Colonels open their season on Aug. 31 against the nationally third-ranked Oregon Ducks in Eugune, Ore.