Unfortunately, it looks like the Andre Smith fiasco is having quite an impact on the team. Several articles from today talk about that.

Antoine Caldwell chimes in about it in this piece from Rivals/Yahoo:

“He kind of showed remorse and apologized,” said senior center Antoine Caldwell. “It’s just one of those things. It happened. It’s adversity we’ve got to deal with.”

Words about the situation from Terrence Cody were infinitely more shocking and really has me freaking out a bit

'Practice was not real great yesterday,' junior nose guard Terrence Cody said. 'I think it was kind of different because he wasn't out there. The tempo was different; we didn't have much tempo yesterday. That's what we have to do, we have to buckle down and get over our loss (of Smith).'

Hopefully that was just a temporary setback and the guys are firing on ally cylinders today. Reading Rolando McClain's thoughts from the same article about it makes me incredibly frustrated with Smith (emphasis mine):

'I'm not in that situation and I pray to God that I'll get to be in that situation one day, but we have great compliance guys. They've told us over and over what you need to do and what you should do when agents contact you, so I can just do the smart thing and stay away from them. By next year, if I need an agent for some reason, then I'll wait until the appropriate time to have one.'

Getting back to this game and the stuff we can control, TideSports.com has an article up about Utah center Zane Taylor who has the task of handling The Legend on Friday. Taylor acknowledges that Cody will have to be double teamed, but they seem rather confident in their ability to stop him:

'On film it looks like a lot of other guys have hard a hard time with him, but I have all the confidence in the world with myself and the rest of the O-line.'

Nice article from the Salt Lake Tribune discussing our obsessiveness as a fanbase. My personal favorite quote from the story is from Jim McElwain:

"The passion .?.?. almost to a religious standpoint" for Alabama football is what strikes Jim McElwain, who spent the bulk of his coaching career at Eastern Washington and Montana State of the Big Sky Conference.

"You can't prepare yourself, until you're living in it," added McElwain, the Tide's first-year offensive coordinator.

Here's a transcript from a recent Utah press conference. And the transcript from ours. I have to say that I'm not too terribly fond of the fact that the curfews have been as late as 2am, but that's obviously been cut out by this point.