August 4th: Afternoon Practice - Special Teams

Like the title says, today's afternoon practice was focused on Special Teams, which in turn means it was a short practice (about an hour). Now these definitely aren't the most exciting practices, but hey, they give me my Vikings fix for the day. Heres what I saw:

• Like expected, Rice was present for the afternoon drills, although at first he just sat on the sidelines and played catch with Darren Sharper (very poorly might I add, they both kept throwing the ball short), but did see action a little later.
• Maurice Hicks and Aundrae Allison saw the bulk of the time out of the kick returners, with Jaymar Johnson and even Visanthe Shiancoe mixed in. Dugan and Tapeh were the short returnmen
• Ferguson, Allison, Rice, Dee McCann, Gordon, and Frampton all saw time practicing in the gunner slots
• Jaymar Johnson was pretty much exclusively the Punt Return man today
• No one dropped any balls in any of the Kickoff or Punt drills, at least that I saw
• The punting unit looked solid on directional/goal line punts while running drills to pin the ball inside the 10. One punt hit the 6 yard line, and bounced right out of bounds. Aundrae Allison had a great grab, yanking the ball out of the endzone, that Charles Gordon downed at the 5. Sidney Rice had a good grab at the 2 yard line, followed by rookie Nate Jones stopping it right by the goal line. The only bad play came up when Rice was making a play on the ball and Eric Frampton tried to do the same.. knocking it out of Rices hands in the process.