Hanson Arrested… and at the Worst Possible Time

On the first day of practice, Cal Poly’s football team should have been answering questions about so many other things.

In their first year in the Big Sky, can Cal Poly’s program prove it belongs?

How will the Mustangs’ new players fare this season?

How is head coach Tim Walsh feeling about his team’s first practice day of the Fall?

But, in the wake of defensive backs coach Randy Hanson’s arrest Sunday morning and subsequent suspension, the storyline from the from the first day was how the Mustangs plan to deal with the loss of Hanson. J.D. Scroggin (as usual) has the team well-covered and wrote this article in The Tribune describing Hanson’s arrest and suspension.

Remember, Hanson was the guy who was allegedly beaten up by former Raiders coach Tom Cable. Here are some details of Hanson’s arrest, also from The Tribune.

Hanson’s arrest could not have possibly come at a worse time. By getting in trouble when he did he gave his head coach, Tim Walsh, less than 48 hours to come up with a back-up plan. That back-up plan, according to the Tribune article, is to have Walsh coach the defensive backs for now. I don’t know what Walsh had planned to do during most of Monday’s first practice, but I would imagine it probably wasn’t spending the whole time with the DB’s.

On the Fansmanship Podcast last week, Scroggin talked about the defensive backfield as being a potential area of strength for this year’s Mustangs. It will be interesting to see how the defensive secondary, which will have four new starters, develops over the course of the season.

The Big Sky Conference was already going to make Cal Poly’s schedule more challenging than in past years. With one swing of a bottle, things just got even tougher.