January 22nd 2015,
Spring practice for Baylor starts February 23rd and the Spring Game will be March 20th and held at McLane Stadium on a Friday night. This will be the first spring game at the new Stadium and there are rumours that it will be televised.
It means there will be essentially 2 months between the end of spring practice and the end of semester which is a fairly long time. It will also be Blake’s 5th and last spring semester.
January 14th 2015,
Baylor has finished surprisingly high in the end of year AP poll and also in preseason Polls for 2015.
Baylor finished #7 in the AP poll for 2014, the previous best for the program was in 1951 when they were #9, so that goes to show just how landmark the times are for Baylor football.
Adding to that, Baylor is ranked #3 by ESPN, #5 CBS Sports, #5 SB Nation and in Vegas they have odds of 15-1 for the National Championship!!!!
TCU are ranked as high as #1 and 15-2 in Vegas to win the National Championship. Baylor plays TCU November 27th in Fort Worth.
School has started again for the boys, they both have medium level number of credits. It should be much easier for Blake this semester in particular; he had to take 15 credits in the Fall, this semester it will be just 12, so a little easier on his time.
January 12th 2015,
The boys have taken in a whistle stop tour of home then turned around and headed straight back to school. Its one of the bitter-sweet scenarios of going to a big bowl game; you dont get much time off to head home, but you’re involved in something that lasts a life time in memories.
Obviously the Cotton Bowl didn’t go as planned but 2015 bodes very well for the Bears and when preseason rankings come out, they should be ranked in the top 15, needing only to replace a handful of starters, albeit one of those is QB Bryce Petty.
This link is to Waco-Tribune‘s John Werner’s assessment of 2014 and look ahead to 2015.
Blake and Sean have a short list of personal goals, certainly to be in the best shape of their careers for 2015. Both are injury free and will be able to participate fully in Spring ball and Winter training. Sean really wants to get back above 290lb as he was when he returned to Baylor in July ’14. Blake wants to get back above 315lb as he was then as well. The amount of conditioning work and style of training they do makes it hard. They can still take pride in being the only OL at Baylor who can do pull ups, in fact both of them are very good at weighted pull ups.
The time at home was useful to get in some swimming, spend time with family, get some sleep in and for Blake finally recover properly from the virus that effected him at the bowl game. There’s always lots of mail to go through, paperwork to do, things to sign and places to go for things that can’t be done online or by mail. Next time back in Australia hopefully will be the 3rd week of May for a decent off season.