Florida holds campus-wide tryout to try to find kicking help

Florida’s kicking situation is taking “open competition” to another level.

The 13th-ranked Gators held a campus-wide tryout Wednesday afternoon in hopes of finding some help before next week’s game against Southeastern Conference rival Georgia in Jacksonville, Fla., a huge matchup that will go a long way in determining who wins the league’s Eastern Division.

Coach Jim McElwain said 216 students applied for the tryout, which was set up after Florida (6-1, 4-1 SEC) lost backup kicker Jorge Powell to a season-ending knee injury during a game at Louisiana State on Saturday. Starter Austin Hardin also is dealing with a hamstring injury that has kept him out of three games this season.

So McElwain called on the student body to fill the void. High school kickers, soccer players, armchair athletes, McElwain welcomed anyone eligible to give it a try.

Of the 216 applicants, Florida officials said 77 advanced to the actual tryout Wednesday. Of those 77, two were women. The Gators did not say how anyone performed or when they would announce whether anyone made the roster.

“Well, as long as they can flip it up there through the uprights, I’m good with it,” McElwain said Wednesday. “We’re still working through it right now. There’s obviously a lot of things NCAA-wise. You’ve got to make sure things are set that way before we make any decisions, but by the end of the week, we hope to have some candidates that could come out and help us.

“This is something that other places have done in the past. We were successful with it at Colorado State and ended up getting a heck of a kicker out of it.”

McElwain found Jared Roberts during an open competition at Colorado State in the spring of 2012. Roberts made 12 of 20 field-goal attempts and 57 of 58 extra points as a senior in 2014.

Players reinstated

North Carolina Coach Larry Fedora lifted the indefinite suspension for one cornerback and will reinstate a second this weekend after the two were charged with misdemeanor assault tied to an altercation near campus this month.

Fedora said he reinstated Mike Hughes and the freshman will play against Virginia on Saturday. Fedora said he would reinstate starting sophomore cornerback M.J. Stewart on Sunday.

Both players were indefinitely suspended last week from team-related activities for a violation of team rules, sidelining them from last weekend’s win against Wake Forest. Stewart will end up missing two games during the suspension.

“Based on everything that I know at this time, it’s the appropriate action,” Fedora said, though he wouldn’t elaborate further.

The altercation took place early Oct. 4 — less than a day after North Carolina had won at Georgia Tech in Atlanta for the first time since 1997 — at the address of a fraternity house, according to a police incident report. That report listed two victims who resided there, though arrest warrants filed last week for each player listed only one victim.

Pure pain for Michigan State hero

Michigan State’s newest celebrity sat in a wheelchair in front of reporters, describing a play that was part euphoria, part agony.

“I looked up at the clock to see how much time we had left. At that point I knew I couldn’t be tackled or didn’t have time to kick a field goal or whatnot, and I started running,” said Jalen Watts-Jackson, whose fumble return on the final play beat Michigan last weekend.

“I was actually going to dive into the end zone before I got tackled because I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not and who was behind me. After that it was pretty much pure pain.”

What was already a surreal finish Saturday took an even more bizarre turn afterward, when Watts-Jackson was taken to the hospital with an injured hip. He had surgery Sunday, so a few days elapsed before one of the play’s main protagonists could even talk about it publicly.

On Wednesday, Watts-Jackson spoke to the media in East Lansing, Mich., saying he could tell his hip was hurt when he hit the ground — before his celebrating teammates piled on top of him.

“It felt like I was under there for an hour,” Watts-Jackson said. “After watching, I guess I wasn’t under there that long, there were just a lot of people on top of me. Definitely being under the pile of all those people, being about 190 pounds, it’s not that fun of an experience.”

Watts-Jackson, a redshirt freshman, can appreciate the significance of this moment. His touchdown gave the seventh-ranked Spartans a 27-23 victory, their seventh in the last eight meetings with Michigan. It also kept Michigan State’s unbeaten season alive.

With 10 seconds left, the Wolverines were set to punt, but punter Blake O’Neill fumbled the snap, and the ball ended up bouncing to Watts-Jackson. Replays showed the clock expiring right as he reached the end zone, so he could have gone down earlier to set up a field goal that could have won the game. Instead, he cut back to the inside around the 10 and made it across the goal line, etching his name into this rivalry’s history.

“My teammates have been making jokes and stuff saying, ‘Bro, you’re about to get a statue made of you. You’re going to get your name put up in the stadium,’ ” he said.

As for social media: “My phone would freeze if I even tried to open the apps.”

Watts-Jackson was treated at the University of Michigan’s hospital — another twist in this wacky weekend. He made a point of thanking the people there as he wrapped up his news conference.

“Everyone was congratulating me and just making sure I was OK. That takes a lot, because I know how big of a rivalry it is, especially after seeing the way people react in the stands,” he said.