Vandals offensive coordinator Steve Axman would much rather talk about Idaho's offense than this health. But he did oblige when we asked about his time away from the program this spring when battling cancer in his jaw. You can read our story here. And check below for more from Axman.

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When I checked in with Axman a couple days, he had some interesting things to say about the Vandals' progression on offense - as well as his health. Here are a few highlights.

On how he feels nows:

"For the most part, pretty good. It was kind of maybe every other day or once in a period of two or three days, I’d feel good. And the other two days I wouldn’t. Then all the sudden, it got down to being once in every four days or five days. Now, I’m to the point where I’m feeling pretty good. I’ll get an exceptional day now where I feel very tired for a stretch of the day. "

On the team's overall progress:

"We’re getting better and better. We knew that losing eight starters we had a lot of work to do. And I think they have made jumps — solid, progressive jumps — in an effort to get better.
"This last Saturday, we had nine series. We had four touchdown drives of 79, 61, 80, and 80 yards.  That’s moving the ball fairly well. We had two more drives that ended up in only field goals, and that’s disappointing. But still, we had six long drives and scoring four touchdowns and two field goals, to me for this group is a step forward."

On what could have been done to help team win at CSU:

" … We look at it that our performance, if we don’t fumble the ball at the end of the half, if we score even one more touchdown than a field goal and if we get another first down at the end of the game, then we help our team win a game. So those are the things that we have to focus in.

"We’ve been able to see a lot of positives in our development and realistically we are not a veteran group. We have an offensive line and tight end group … there is no one who has ever really played together before."

 

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