You might have seen Tennessee defensive back Boo Carter celebrating on live social media after the game in the locker room on Saturday to head coach Josh Heupel’s displeasure. Being playful? Being immature? I’ll let you decide. However, there’s no denying that he doesn’t play around on the field.
In his first college game while playing a new position, the Star, which is a hybrid linebacker/defensive back role, Carter had two tackles but played a bit better than his stat line might suggest as he was often around the ball in limited action. Defensive back Willie Martinez wants more.
“You want to make the biggest improvement from game one to game two,” Martinez said on Tuesday. “There’s no preseason games obviously in college. To be able to play the amount of guys we played in the first ball game and get the experience, the ones that didn’t have it.
“We just want to see the alignments, maybe a little bit better. The communication has to be a lot better. That’s where we’ve got to improve on and that’s player to player. It’s not so much someone like Boo or whoever it is, you know what I mean? It’s got to be between the whole back end. And we want to see the improvement of communication getting lined up at a faster pace and getting thier eyes where they belong.”
In other words, Martinez isn’t overly concerned about this, which is quite frankly comical.
Many thought Carter didn’t belong at Tennessee, who flirted with Colorado during his recruitment – for good reason. Buffs coach Deion Sanders was a former cornerback and was hot – for a little bit – before his coaching got in the way of his self promotion. The Chattanooga native visited Boulder, but Off The Hook Sports was told repeatedly that he was steadfastly committed to Tennessee and wasn’t truly interested in Colorado, with or without Deion.
Carter’s recruitment makes me not worry about maturity issues that were a prevalent talk in recruiting and high school circles when he was a high school football player. Given where Tennessee is currently and where Colorado looks to be headed, I’d say Carter made a very mature decision.
Here’s another example of Carter being more mature than the young man you saw hamming it up for the camera above. Off The Hook Sports was told he was studying before arriving on campus and would likely start at strong safety leading up to preseason camp. Then, things changed.
Jourdan Thomas was slated to be the Vols’ starter at Star before he suffered a season-ending leg injury early in preseason camp. That forced Carter to change positions, which he did so deftly that a little shimmy on social media doesn’t make me worry about his maturity one itty bitty bit.
