There are certain accomplishments which speak for themselves. The NFL is one of those. When one inquires of another about a third-party’s ability to play football and the person responds with “He played in the league for a number of years…” one never responds with, “But was he any good at football.”
Bad players don’t play in the league. Bad players don’t play on Saturday either, at any level, at a school’s expense. Knowledge someone has playing experience in college or the NFL tells the inquirer the person is pretty good at the game of football or else the person wouldn’t have played on either Saturday or Sunday, but particularly not on Sunday.
There is a similar litmus test for middle school players too. KPGFootball has staff who have coached middle school All-American games and we have still seen middle school All-Americans who may not have been first string on their middle school team back home.
We don’t care the All-American game, one can buy his or her son a place on almost all of them. We have never seen a Kentucky Future Star who wasn’t a bone fide star. We don’t believe it possible to pay your way on one of Coach Ricco Hughes’ team. We don’t believe you can influence your way on the roster either. If you’re on there; Hughes thinks you’re a star. We haven’t known him to miss much either.
When we went to write this article about Louisville’s Cole Wickliffe we could have stopped (in our opinion) at the fact this is his second year on Team Kentucky’s Future Stars team. It is the middle school equivalent, at least in Kentucky and Tennessee, to “he played in the league.” We thought you might enjoy our delving a bit deeper so we did.
From the magazine’s talking with Hughes, we learned that Cole Wickliffe is 5-11 and weighs in the neighborhood of 190-pounds. He’s between 4.9 and 5.0-seconds in the 40 and runs disciplined routes with terrific hands. Coach Hughes made sure we included Wickliffe is devastating at the point of attack in the run-game.
Coach Hughes called him “the total package” at the TE position. Anything one would call on a TE to do, Wickliffe is among the best at doing that for his age anywhere in the commonwealth of Kentucky. Like many men described as being multi-faceted, and as the photograph attached to the front of this feature would indicate, he apparently is pretty darn good at fishing too.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
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