Michigan Football: Coach’s Corner — Fitzgerald Toussaint — Running Back — Wolverine’s Spring Football — GBMWolverine Evaluations
Posted at 6:00am — 4/30/2012
Michigan Football: Coach’s Corner — Fitzgerald Toussaint — Running Back — Wolverine’s Spring Football — GBMWolverine Evaluations
GBMWolverine Football Spring Evaluations: Position-by-Position — Player Profile.
GBMWolverine readers: Here is a brief overview of Fitzgerald Toussaint and GBMWolverine’s analysis concerning his progress this spring in our opinion.
Note: We will not evaluate every player on the team and with this position group (Running Backs) we will not evaluate #99 Paul Gyarmati who plays fullback and linebacker. If you would like to chat about this player bring them up on the message board or send us an e-mail request.
Reminder: Also noted that we didn’t attend every practice and realize things happen during those fifteen practices, but our evaluations are based on what we seen first hand and in our opinion and not what we hear like just about every other site out there that relies on second, third hand information to make their evaluations of the players during the spring.
Losing from 2011 (Team #132) on scholarship:
Michael Shaw (Redskins Free Agent), Michael Cox (Graduated and transferred to UMass), and John McColgan (FB).
Coming in for 2012 (Team #133) on scholarship: Drake Johnson, Sione Houma (FB), and Dennis Norfleet.
Commit for 2013 (Team #134) on scholarship: DeVeon Smith and Wyatt Shallman (FB).
Fitzgerald Toussaint
Height: 5’10
Weight: 195
Number: 28
Position: Running Back
Year: Red-shirt Junior
City/State: Youngstown, Ohio
High School: Liberty
High School Coach: Jeff Whittaker
Fitzgerald Toussaint who broke out last season and started becoming the featured back during the Big Ten season.
With his past injury issues behind him (knock on wood), Fitz took another leap forward this spring and kept improving on from where he lead off last season.
He seems noticeably quicker and stronger, he was able to see and hit the cutback better which all these factors into being healthy, getting necessary amount of reps and also getting into the S&C and really believing in getting bigger and stronger.
Fitz was also breaking more tackles and running with greater confidence. Again this goes back to our seeing of practices, but we did not see him fumble a single time this spring. Did he? Not sure, but the times we have seen him this spring 6-7 times if you include the spring game as well we didn’t see him put the ball on the ground. Again knock on wood.
The coaching staff didn’t use him a lot during scrimmages throughout the spring for various reasons. What we believe is they know what he can do so they don’t want to overload him this spring with carries along with possible chance of getting an injury. We also believe they wanted to get a better look at other running backs with the first group offense and running behind the first team offensive line.
Still Fitz has areas that he could improve on like everybody, but our main areas are him catching the ball out of backfield. He has definitely shown improvement, but still something he needs to really work on and needs to be better. He really needs to improve the screen play and catching the ball and getting behind or waiting for his offensive linemen to create holes for him to get big plays.
Really think he will continue to improve and take the next step to being a featured back and being more of a complete running back at Michigan as well. Hopefully he will continue to improve so Denard Robinson doesn’t have to handle the running duties alone or feel like he has too.
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Written by GBMWolverine Staff
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