PHOTO By Paul Konyndyk
Donnie Corley was nice and good at WR on Saturday. Maybe not necessarily drop-dead dominant, but he was good.
I love Corley as a fall season, in-pads player. He's good in camp settings, but I'm not sure his complete value shows its self as well in a camp setting as it does in a game.
Anyway, what you might not know is that Corley repped with the defensive backs for about 20 minutes at camp on Saturday. I didn't see him do the super-duper agility drill that MSU uses to test defensive backs. I'm not sure if he went through that one or not. But he did do some other drills. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to focus in on him in the DB drills because he had changed from a No. 19 jersey to a No. 1 jersey. He trotted over to the DB field wearing a No. 19. Then I turned my head for a minute and No. 19 was gone - but there was a guy who kind of looked like Corley who was wearing a No. 1 jersey. The guy wearing No. 1 was the only guy in a green jersey repping with the white-jerseyed defensive backs. It turned out that it was indeed Corley, but I blew about 10 minutes of important rep time in the dark as to who that guy was. No. 19 had become No. 1. I missed the memo on that, and it cost me some evaluation time.
So if you're asking me how he did as a DB, I can't honestly say that I was able to focus in on him.
I did see him do a couple of the DB drills once I figured out it was him, but they weren't the most challenging drills, drills during which he could show some smoothness and hands (which we already know he has), but not drills that would really test him and give him a chance to sink or stand out. He didn't get a chance to cover anybody. So I come out of that part of it with no particular opinion. (I'm not going to make up some knee-jerk opinion out of nowhere. I'm not going to tell you "he's the oh-my-gawd truth at defensive back!" unless I actually believe it to be true.)
Anyway, long story short, Donnie played some DB on Saturday. And MSU is recruiting him seriously with the idea of possibly giving him opportunities on both sides of the ball.
