Whittingham trying to avoid '07 injury nightmare

After losing such top players as Brian Johnson, Matt Asiata and Brent Casteel to injury last season, the latter two for the season, Utah coach Kyle Whittingham is being extra cautious this spring, trying to keep all of his top players healthy.
He’s keeping most of the first-team players out of “live” drills, allowing them to participate in “thud” status, where they can be wrapped up, but not tackled. The last thing he wants is a star player going down in spring drills.
“We went through that nightmare at the beginning of last season,” Whittingham said. “We don’t want to be paranoid, but we’ve got to be smart. We’ve got too many guys on the mend from this and that so we don’t want to put them in harm’s way.”
I don’t disagree with what Whittingham is doing in protecting his top players. However, the fact is most of the major Ute injuries last year come during early games, not practices. Both Asiata and Johnson were hurt early in Utah’s first game last year, while Casteel went down in the second game.
Sometimes bad things happen for no good reason and the Utes had some unfortunate injuries to key players in 2007. After last year’s rash of injuries, the Utes are due for some better luck this year. And Whittingham is doing his best to increase Utah’s luck by keeping his stars out of harm’s way as much as possible.