Garrett Sparks on Paul Warford

In October of 2007, Paul "Lieutenant Commander" Warford and Trevard Lindley gave Cat fans an opportunity to savor the consistency of the sophomore cornerbacks anchoring their secondary. Warford harrassed then #1 LSU with a career-high 5 solo tackles and 2 assists in the 43-37 triple OT victory. By all rights, the cornerback positions would be locked up through 2009. Warford picked the Cats over the Cards before that was the obvious thing to do, and Madison Central's star running back had managed to start 14 of his first 24 games at cornerback, including his entire sophomore year, during which he managed 41 tackles and 2 interceptions. Not bad for the first Klingon in all of Starfleet. Fast-forward through the commercials to 2009, we find that the secondary remains the most dependable unit on the team, but Warford's role seems anything but certain. He vanished in 2008 after managing to get himself kicked off the team briefly for an unspecified violation of team rules in February (rumor has it he violated the Neutral Zone on the way to Varsity Blue). Adding insult, he found himself academically ineligible in August for the fall season. Warford skipped the fall semester entirely before returning for the spring, but just to make sure that football didn't get in the way of pulling up his grades, he broke his foot and missed spring practice. On the Enterprise, the red-shirted security officers always die a meaningless death. The same typically isn't true of redshirted college junior cornerbacks, but Warford has stiff competition from sophomore Randall Burden, who certainly didn't blow his opportunity in spring practice, and redshirt-freshmen Cartier Rice, who similarly impressed beyond all previous expectations. Expect Warford to bounce back and play with the right kind of chip on his shoulder (how much character building can a guy take, anyhow?), and expect to see the starting cornerbacks change more than once throughout the season as these guys push themselves beyond natural human limits in practice. And don't expect Paul to let his 350 pound offensive guard baby cousin Larry down, either. Mosley's Take: Pretty nice offering, Garrett. This was the most, of the four, straightforward and actually was a solid write-up of Paul Warford and his time at Kentucky. Only drawback is that I don't know if the Star Trek references are funny or not, so I will defer to Fake Gimel with regard to those. Fake may determine that he owns the sci-fi space on this blog and send a photon torpedo your way. Also, the last sentence seems to be too obviously a tack-on. I would have liked it better without, but I do want to reiterate that I found this to be an actual article that provided solid information in a light-hearted fashion.