Cliff Kirkpatrick

Kevin Unga, Geoff Garner and Devin Unga came off their missions and played as true freshmen.

Oregon State football coaches have been surprised by how quick the Unga brothers got into football shape after two-year Mormon missions. Even offensive lineman Geoff Garner made a quick adjustment from his mission.

However, he had the winter and spring terms at OSU to help him get in shape with the strength and conditioning staff, dropping more than 20 pounds. The Ungas joined the team in the summer.

All three are true freshmen. Both the Ungas played some at LB and were special teams players in last weekend’s season opener. Garner got some time as a backup OT late in the game.

The last time the Ungas and Garner played in a game was fall 2005. Seniors TE Howard Croom and LB Keaton Kristick were in their recruiting class.

“We just wanted to play,” Kevin Unga said. “We’ve been dreaming about this for a long time, so we took the mentality of just going after it as hard as we could.”

Kevin Unga went on his mission in Chile and Devin went to Guatemala. They have strict schedules to follow and only have 6:30-7 a.m. to workout. They took advantage of it with simple workouts such as pushups and sit-ups, but mostly played soccer.

“They call soccer, football in Spanish, so that’s what we did,” Kevin Unga said. “The people down there wanted to know about our football, so we taught them about the game.”

Garner had a similar situation in Panama. He did sit-ups and brought a dumbbell bar to work on his arms. He played soccer on his off day for three-four hours each Monday.

What helped him was walking up to 10 miles a day because there were no means of transportation. Garner said it was hard not to just sleep that extra 30 minutes because he was so tired, and sometimes he did.

“It was great to be able to play, but I had that goal of losing weight,” Garner said. “That made a big difference. If it wasn’t for all that walking I would have been pretty far behind.”

UNLV-OSU story

Here’s a link to my Friday story in the GT. It about the relationship OSU coach Mike Riley has with UNLV coach Mike Sanford. They are tight going back to USC and and Chargers.

I joked with Sanford that he has to get into the Pac-10 with all his buddies, and he laughed saying he’s got work to do at UNLV.

He worked with Riley and defensive coordinator Mark Banker at the Chargers. RB coach Reggie Davis worked under him at UNLV and he coached him at the Chargers. Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh was the QB at the Chargers when Sanford coached with Riley. And Davis was a tight end on the team.

Road trip

Since the game is so late I’ll be traveling day of the game to Las Vegas, and not Friday as usual. I hate sitting around all day, and I don’t have extra money to blow there so I’m being good.

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/cliffgt to see what I go through to cover football games for the readers. I tried that last week, but that was kind of boring being at home.

Be ready for the tweets around 6 p.m. and they will be going after midnight. That’s not bad start time, sometimes I’m up at 4 a.m. to make a flight somewhere.

The blog will be up and going early, too. Please check back frequently and feel free to comment.

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