In the third quarter against Auburn, there was one of those notable moments for Arkansas quarterback Ty Storey.
Tigers’ defensive lineman Marlon Davidson just reached his big paw inside Storey’s facemask had a go at his eyes. There’s not really any way to describe it, but none of the officials seemed particularly interested.
“He definitely got a finger in my eye,” Storey said earlier this week. “It actually popped my contact out.”
The SEC Network cameras caught it in living color, as they used to say when black-and-white TV sets were the norm.
Arkansas called timeout to discuss the upcoming fourth-and-2 situation and Storey discussed it with the officials to no avail. Cole Kelley came in and got the first down while Storey was getting a new contact lens on the sideline.
“Our training staff is always well prepared,” Storey said. “They popped a new one in, and we were ready to go.”
He more or less shrugged over the whole deal, but he wasn’t happy about it during the game.
“We were pretty heated about that,” Storey said.
Before practice Wednesday, Morris was asked about the eye-poke and if he’d sent the video to the league office in Birmingham.
“That’s pretty customary for everybody across the country,” Morris said. “There’s different things that come up in the course of a game and you want to get a response back from the officiating crew.”
But what about the eye-poke, Chad?
“I’m not going to go into all that,” he said. “We send in a bunch of plays and there were several of them, just asking for interpretations.
How Storey responded, though, was likely what Morris and offensive coordinator Joe Craddock were looking for in a quarterback.
He didn’t let it bother him. By Tuesday, he was just kinda shrugging about the whole thing.
“I guess that’s part of the game,” he said. “I thought it was kind of dirty. But it’s whatever. It’s part of the game.”
Storey pretty much has taken it all in stride, which has more or less been the way he’s handled everything since being in Fayetteville all the way back to 2015.
That whole incident, as much as anything, may offer a clue why he never seemed to make much progress under the previous coaching staff.
Kelley did, apparently leapfrogging Storey in the pecking order of things.
Did the previous staff value that raw emotion that sometimes just pours out of Kelley more than a calm, almost laid-back approach that Storey has?
Just one of those questions that come up now and then.
