Carroll Angeles

After disappointing rookie year, DE Hughes ready for fresh start
After rough rookie season, defensive end driven by 2nd chance and that elusive 1st sack
Phillip B. Wilson, Indy Star
August 10, 2011
(two pages)
ANDERSON, Ind. – Jerry Hughes always has had a burst. His NFL rookie year, though, couldn't end fast
enough.
Hughes managed just six tackles in a dozen games. The Indianapolis Colts made the 2010 first-round pick a
healthy scratch for four games. And his best chance at a sack, with two hands on Cincinnati's Carson
Palmer, ended with the passer somehow wriggling free.
Fans grumbled about a high draft pick failing to contribute immediately. Hughes said all the right things,
about how he had so much to learn and that the NFL was a process. But, eventually, the situation ate at the
defensive end.
"That kind of caught up to me," Hughes said after a recent training-camp practice at Anderson University.
"You can't really think about where I was picked. You can't let people tell you what you're supposed to do.
You know what you need to do and you know how to get there."
Colts coach Jim Caldwell has alluded to how Saturday night's preseason opener at St. Louis will be an
opportunity for younger players to get some serious playing time. That definitely includes Hughes.
Not that a few camp practices and drills are anything more than modestly encouraging, but Hughes has
looked faster so far. He had Curtis Painter for a sack in the first night practice -- it likely would have been if
defenders were allowed to tackle. Hughes has won his share of one-on-one battles in the pass-rush/passblock
drill.
Question is, can he combine enough moves with the physicality needed to withstand a blocker's shoves?
One moment in a drill, Hughes is speeding around the end to get to where the passer would be. The next, he
is gobbled up on an attempted bull rush.
Saturday should offer a barometer on where Hughes is.
"Jerry Hughes is really coming along," Caldwell said. "He's been performing extremely well thus far. He's
more comfortable with what we do, and his effort's been great."
The old adage is a player progresses the most from his first season to the second.
"They get a lot more familiar with the system, so therefore they don't have to think about it as much,"
Caldwell said. "They can let themselves go. They don't have to worry about necessarily every little step that
they take."
Caldwell then snapped his fingers and said, "It just clicks."
The Colts' Pro Bowl pass-rushing tandem of Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis has worked with Hughes
from the beginning. They have been on him about learning the spin move.
"This is life in the NFL. You'll have your ups and downs," Freeney said. "For some guys, maybe it's a
week. Some guys, it's a month."
For Hughes, he hopes it was but a year.