The Atlanta Braves returned three-time All-Star second baseman Ozzie Albies from his rehabilitation assignment and reinstated him from the injured list prior to Friday’s series opener against the host Miami Marlins.

Albies has been sidelined since fracturing his wrist during the Braves’ 6-2 loss to the visiting St. Louis Cardinals on July 21. He was trying to field a throw at second on a stolen-base attempt and bent his glove hand back when he collided with Cardinals outfielder Michael Siani.

He is batting .258 with eight homers and 46 RBIs in 90 games this season.

Albies, 27, has been a key player for the Braves since reaching the majors in 2017. He has smacked more than 20 homers on four occasions, including a career-best 33 last season. He has topped 100 RBIs twice and 100 runs three times.

Also on Friday, the Braves optioned infielder Cavan Biggio to Triple-A Gwinnett.

Biggio, 29, is 1-for-5 in four games with the Braves this season. He also has played for the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers this season.

The son of Hall of Famer Craig Biggio showed promise as a rookie with 16 homers, 48 RBIs and 14 steals in 100 games with the Blue Jays in 2019. He finished fifth in American League Rookie of the Year balloting.

But he has since failed to reach double digits in homers or even had as many as 70 hits in a season. Biggio has a .225 career average with 51 homers and 186 RBIs in 524 career games.

The Associated Press and Field Level Media contributed to this report.

JAMARCUS SHEPHARD COULDN’T be sure until he watched Ryan Williams burn past the Western Kentucky secondary in Week 1. But for Alabama‘s first-year wide receivers coach, there were signs in the summer of just how good the Crimson Tide’s 17-year-old, pass-catching wunderkind could be.

Days after arriving at Alabama, Williams told trainers that he wanted to be put on the same training plan as former Crimson Tide wide receiver DeVonta Smith. Soon, the five-star freshman was performing the flexibility and mobility regimen that powered Alabama’s 2020 Heisman Trophy winner.

And when Williams joined Alabama’s players-only training sessions weeks later, the reports of Williams’ playmaking that trickled back to Shephard were difficult to ignore.

“His teammates came off the field and they said, ‘Coach Shep, you should have seen that boy out there,'” Shephard told ESPN this week. “That was the veterans stamping him. That’s when you really started to think that he might have that magic.”

Like Williams, Ohio State freshman Jeremiah Smith‘s promise was clear upon his arrival in Columbus. Same for five-star Cam Coleman at Auburn. Breakout spring camp performances from Texas‘ Ryan Wingo, Clemson‘s Bryant Wesco Jr. and Michigan State‘s Nick Marsh proved early markers for what they would go on to contribute this fall.

Three weeks into the season, Williams and Smith lead their programs in catches, yards and touchdown receptions. At Texas, the top-ranked Longhorns are using Wingo early and often. Coleman and Wesco — leaders of respective youth movements within their programs — have each found the end zone in the early weeks. And Marsh, with 11 catches for 234 yards, has authored a more productive start to 2024 than all but four Big Ten pass catchers this season.

Together, they comprise a select group of first-year wide receivers making an immediate impact on college football in 2024. Among ESPN’s top-100 wide receivers in the 2024 class, just nine completed more than 10 routes across the first three weeks of the season. Within that same group, only 12 first-year pass catchers were targeted at least five times with just three eclipsing 10 total targets.

As first-year wide receivers at large are seeing limited opportunity, the elite of the elite are still breaking through at the highest level of the sport. In Williams, Smith, Coleman, Wingo, Wesco and Marsh, there are six of college football’s great outliers in 2024, standing within an exclusive group of talented freshmen pass catchers carving significant roles this fall.

“Wide receivers take time to develop, but you knew those guys would make an impact,” said one SEC general manager. “They were different at the high school level. Not just from an ability standpoint, but their bodies, too. They were all college-ready. We’re seeing that now.”

IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVE FRESHMAN wide receivers is a multifaceted challenge for college programs.

A prospect has to meet the physical demands to compete against high-level defenses. But modern offenses also require crisp technique, sharp route running and a firm grasp of the playbook. Not many freshman wide receivers check all three boxes.

However, there was little question about Smith, the Buckeyes’ 6-foot-3, 200-pound phenom.

ESPN’s fourth-ranked prospect in 2024, Smith already possessed college-ready speed and measurables when he logged 88 catches for 1,376 yards and 19 touchdowns in his senior season at Florida’s Chaminade-Madonna Prep. One Power 4 talent evaluator who recruited Smith called him a “physical freak”.

During his early months at Ohio State, Smith showed the Buckeyes staff all the intangible elements they needed to see, too. In Week 1, he was one of only four freshman wide receiver starters across the country, and Smith hauled in six passes for 92 yards with two touchdowns in Ohio State’s Aug. 31 opener against Akron.

Smith has completed 45 routes, more than any other freshman pass catcher. Through two games, he leads Buckeyes receivers with 11 catches for 211 yards and three scores as the latest branch in Ohio State’s vast wide receiver tree.

“He’s built different,” Ryan Day said last month. “Just the way his approach is. You can see his size and speed and all that. But typically somebody with that type of talent doesn’t have the discipline, the focus that he does.”

With top-end physical talent and maturity beyond his years, Smith isn’t a typical freshman wide receiver. His fellow first-year pass-catching contemporaries are outliers, too.

Last fall, ESPN’s top-100 first-year wide receivers from the 2023 class averaged 13.1 total targets, 7.9 catches, 110.3 yards and 0.7 touchdowns in their debut seasons. A quarter of the way into 2024, Williams, Smith and Marsh have already reached 13-plus targets, and Coleman and Wingo — eight targets each — are more than 50% of the way there. Four members of the group have at least seven receptions through Week 3. All six newcomers have already eclipsed 110 yards.

Among the common advantages for these five freshmen: nearly all of them enrolled early.

“I think being able to come in in the spring gives them a leg up,” Auburn’s Hugh Freeze said during a recent SEC coaches teleconference.

OF THE NATION’S six breakout freshmen pass catchers, all but one was a midyear enrollee in January. Williams, who reclassified from 2025 into the 2024 class to land in college a year early, is the only one who waited until June to join his program.

Early enrollment is standard practice in 2024. But the spring semester is when Smith, Coleman, Wingo, Wesco and Marsh set themselves apart, laying the seeds for the respective fall breakouts.

When Coleman began spring practice, Auburn receivers coach Marcus Davis quickly noticed Coleman’s obsession with technique and his commitment to the small details.

Alabama WR Ryan Williams is 17 years old and the youngest player in the FBS and already has 4 touchdowns in 8+ quarters of play 😱 pic.twitter.com/4QMaAd4sbg

— Field Yates (@FieldYates) September 14, 2024

“From the first to second practice, I saw how he picked up on stuff,” Davis told ESPN. “You tell him something in the meeting room and then he’s going to apply it. I don’t even have dang TikTok, but he’s sending me clips of guys in the NFL playing with certain route techniques at 11 o’clock at night. Once you get a guy like that all you’re doing is sharpening that toolbox up.”

At Clemson, Wesco established himself as a slippery playmaker who surprised the Tigers’ staff with his refined route running. Marsh, who Michigan State wide receivers coach Courtney Hawkins recently described as “program-changer,” settled in fast in East Lansing and had three catches, including a 75-yard score, during the Spartans’ spring scrimmage.

For Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, Wingo’s involvement in the Longhorns’ offense in the early weeks of the season — seven catches for 197 yards, including a 75-yard touchdown connection with Arch Manning in Week 3 — is rooted in what Wingo proved in February, March and April, then reinforced in fall camp.

“How you know a guy can play early is, does he make plays when opportunities come his way?” Sarkisian said before Texas’ Week 3 meeting with UTSA. “That showed up in the spring game. That showed up in our scrimmages and fall camp. And he [hasn’t] disappointed.”

With each of the early enrollees, the spring offered signs of Year 1 promise. From there, the next step on each campus was how to prepare the first-year pass catchers for the fall.

At Auburn, Davis pulled Coleman in for extra time in the film, reinforcing the fundamentals they’d honed together in spring camp. In Columbus, the Buckeyes’ staff challenged Smith to compete with the veterans in an elite wide receivers room, elevating himself through the daily battles.

But perhaps the most instructive immersion came with the wide receiver who got to campus last. It took only a handful of big plays and a few fall practices for DeBoer to see what Williams could do for the Crimson Tide. When planning began for Alabama’s Week 1 visit from Western Kentucky, DeBoer and his staff sought to strike a balance for Williams.

“You’re trying to not put too much on his plate but also make sure we give him opportunities to make plays” DeBoer said on the SEC coaches teleconference.

“It wasn’t like holding anything back for the most part when he was out there in Week 1. He’s comfortable pretty much in any spot. There’s packages to get him in certain positions, but really we’re just moving forward like he’s a second, third, fourth-year guy.”

Williams caught two passes against Western Kentucky in Week 1. The first: an 84-yard touchdown before halftime. The second: a 55-yard score after splitting a pair of Hilltoppers defenders.

“The more and more that he made plays, even within the first game, you just had him out there more and more comfortable,” DeBoer said.

THE FIRST SNAP of Wesco’s college career didn’t go well. Jammed straight into the turf at Atlanta Mercedes-Benz Stadium by a Georgia defender, the moment was reflective of everything about the 34-3 beatdown.

“His first college play was not good,” Dabo Swinney said. “They let him know this was big-boy football. But then he settled down.”

Wesco played another 11 snaps against Georgia. A week later against App State, Wesco made his first career reception on the Tigers’ third play and housed it for a 76-yard touchdown.

“He’s special,” Swinney said.

Resilience is part of what comes next for this class of ultra-talented freshman pass catchers. Each has now navigated an early, nonconference slate with much more difficult conference games ahead. Hence why durability is another point that comes up in projecting what’s next for this group.

Coleman missed Auburn’s Week 3 game with a shoulder injury and is questionable headed into this weekend’s visit from Arkansas. Shephard harps on the importance of rest and nutrition, a balance each freshman wide receiver needs to find as they prepare for first runs through a slate of SEC, Big Ten and ACC defenses.

“You’re going to see faster, stronger, more physical people,” Shephard said. “You’re going to take some extra hits. That’s where sleep and recovery and nutrition week-to-week is so important.”

Right on the 💰🤘@ArchManning @_Ryanwingo1 pic.twitter.com/RJYX9ku3At

— Texas Football (@TexasFootball) September 15, 2024

At No. 4 in the latest AP Top 25, Alabama could be staring down another College Football Playoff run, potentially deep into December and January. Williams, who is up to 10 catches for 285 yards and four touchdowns through three games, will be an important part of that success.

No different from their early-season gameplanning, the Crimson Tide aren’t shielding Williams from much of anything. Prior to Alabama’s Week 3 trip to Wisconsin, the Crimson Tide made sure Williams understood the sort of physicality he’d encounter in Madison.

“Our scout defenders got more handsy,” Shephard said. “They yanked Ryan to the ground at one point and Ryan still made the catch. Those are the things that give you the confidence that he’s going to be able to do it in the games.”

“The Do The Flop Guy liked to dance all the time
But he couldn’t do it right no matter how hard he tried
He had two left feet from an accident at birth
And every time he danced, he always flops face first
Then one day as he jumped in the air
Everybody turned and looked and they pointed and they stared
He had a bright idea, right before he hit the floor
He shouted: “Everybody do the flop!”
A new dance craze was born!

Do, do, do the flop!
Do, do, do the flop!
Everybody do the flop!”

“Everybody do the Flop” — LilDeuceDeuce

Alonza Barnett III wasn’t trying to break the internet over Labor Day weekend. The James Madison quarterback was trying to convince everyone that he had broken something — Arm? Sternum? Spirit? Who cares? — in the Dukes’ season opener against Charlotte. Whatever kind of break it might take to draw an unsportsmanlike penalty against the 49ers defender who’d just given him a two-handed shove in the chest.

Yes, there was a flag on the play. And yes, the first, thrown by the center judge who saw Barnett fall the ground, was tossed in the direction of Niners defensive lineman Dre Butler, the pusher. Then there were two flags on the play, as another yellow was shown to the pushee: JMU’s No. 14 and new No. 1 thespian. Why?

“I think maybe one roll and one little thing would be good,” JMU head coach Bob Chesney said of his signal-caller’s fall.

Yeah, Barnett did way more than that.

JMU QB Alonza Barnett III with the early flop of the season 😅 pic.twitter.com/SoRTkCBWHH

— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 1, 2024

The clip has more than 10 million views on the ESPN College Football X account alone. Barnett said his phone went wild and stayed that way for days, as friends and strangers alike kept tagging him on their reposts and kept texting him about it, as if he hadn’t seen it. As he settled down into midweek presentational speech class, the professor threw the clip up on the classroom video screen as an example of unnecessarily overdramatizing one’s presentation.

Barnett told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that was when he realized: “Oh man. This is going to stick for a while.”

So, it would seem, is flopping. Every weekend of this still-young 2024 college football season has produced at least one social media sensation of a flop, whether to draw flags against their opponents or to slow those same opponents down during this age of hammer-down offenses.

play

‘That’s bad acting’: UNLV player appears to fake injury before 3rd-down play

Antonio Doyle Jr. appears to fake an injury and gets right back up before a third-down play vs. Kansas.

The latter is still relatively new; it was just one year ago that the NCAA implemented review and appeal rules designed to curb choreographed collapses by perfectly healthy, young athletes seeking nothing more than to stop the clock and disrupt the rhythm of a quick-moving march toward the end zone.

“That is an integrity issue,” Steve Shaw, the NCAA national coordinator of officials, said. He said the review regulations have certainly decreased the bog-them-down fabricated falls, but they’re still far from being eliminated. “It’s not really the kind of teaching lesson we want from this sport we all love. Even if it looks funny, the motivation behind it, certainly in those cases, is not. The process is new and it can be difficult to enforce, but the effort is happening now. It has to.”

Everyone hates that stuff. Everyone. Even those who have had players do it. See: Kiffin, Lane.

“There has to be some sort of consequence,” said the Ole Miss coach, who has made a career out of engineering high-powered offenses.

Even as he clamors for discipline, Kiffin has admitted to having a few players take a dive in the same manner that has frustrated him over the years.

“We have the opportunity to review film now and file an appeal for review from the conference,” Kiffin said. “If coaches are really willing to go through with that and it is really enforced and ruled to be an obvious faking of an injury, and then there’s a real penalty or fine, I can guarantee you it will go away just like it showed up.”

The former — the OG plop, the timeless self-toss, the conscious collapse in search of acting one’s way into a favorable flag — has been around as long as leather oblong spheres have been carried up and down football fields. Or soccer balls have been kicked down the pitch. Or as long as LeBron James has been playing hoops.

Flopping, as a verb, officially means “to fall or plump down suddenly, especially with noise; drop or turn with a sudden bump or thud (The puppy flopped down on the couch.)” But a deep dive into the bottom half of Dictionary.com’s “flop” page reveals the sports meaning, found as the fifth iteration of the noun: “An exaggerated or dramatic fall intended to persuade officials to penalize the opposing team for a foul. (His comically oversold flop didn’t fool the referees at all.)”

Even the dictionary isn’t falling for the faux falling? So, why keep doing it?

He hit the griddy after the flag 😂

FSU’s TJ Ferguson received an unnecessary roughness penalty on this play. pic.twitter.com/bSjK90TwfR

— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 3, 2024

“Why wouldn’t you?” replied Roman Harper, the former Alabama All-SEC safety-turned-Super Bowl champ-turned SEC Network analyst. Standing in the Gainesville, Florida, airport and watching the Barnett flop for the first time, he can’t stop laughing. Then he can’t stop critiquing.

“People are going to focus on the flop, and they should. But the issue is that the defensive lineman let himself get suckered into that shove,” Harper said. “That’s the true talent, to get that guy to do that. It’s probably the second hit of the altercation and it happens just as the ref is looking. The QB did his job. That was done. Then he did too much after. Way too much.”

How much of too much? Let’s take it to the experts not on the field, but in the fields of related expertise.

Ricky Morton, WWE Hall of Famer as one half of the legendary Rock ‘n’ Roll Express tag team, was so great at selling pain to audiences that it became known through the industry as “playing Ricky Morton.” His text: “That flop is a 10/10.”

Well, maybe for Starrcade or the Great American Bash. But what about football? Let’s take it to someone who knows both: Brock Anderson, former coveted high school linebacker, East Carolina Pirate, Major League Wrestling star and son of another WWE Hall of Famer in Arn Anderson. “That was gratuitous even by pro wrestling standards. If he would have just snapped off a bump right off the shove, he would’ve gotten the 15-yard penalty and maybe even [gotten] the guy ejected, which would have been diabolical,” he said.

But then, as any wrestler will tell you, the supporting cast can either raise you up or sink you. “After his lineman hit ’em with the CPR, should’ve been offsetting penalties.”

And it was.

For those of you who have never spent time in a unitard atop a pulled square of canvas or glued to a Sunday night pay-per-view, a snap bump is the chef’s kiss of rasslin’, a quick fall straight back into the shoulders with just enough bent legs into the air to convince the viewer that one clearly has just been unwittingly chopped down like a sequoia.

“That’s the key, right there. Landing on the meat of the upper back, between the shoulder blades, and then having their butt hit the ground… “

This explanation/addition/coaching is coming not from a football player or wrestler. No, she’s a hell of lot tougher than that. This is Jane Austin, co-founder of Hollywood Stunt Works, a stunt coordinator and performer with a list of credits that spans more than four decades, from 1980s TV staples “Airwolf” and “China Beach” to “Thor: Love and Thunder” and the “Avatar” sequels.

Remember “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker,” aka the greatest football-themed TV ad campaign of all time? Remember the woman who had her clock cleaned as she stood in the office hallway holding a stack of files? That was Austin, and she suffered a concussion. So, yeah, she knows how to sell the taking of a staged football hit.

After receiving the Barnett JMU video, Austin spent an entire 24 hours examining the moment. Once she was done laughing, she did a nuanced breakdown his artificial affliction.

“My coaching advice would be, just go down hard,” Austin said. “Go down as hard as you can, and just don’t do any dramatics. Lay there. Then give it a beat. Or, if you have to move, roll to your side. Stay down, no matter what, if you really want to take advantage and try to get a flag out of it. You have to give your audience, in this case the referee, a moment to think, ‘Oh man, that was horrible.’ So, all this other stuff, the jump up, the second roll, the lineman giving CPR, in my business I’d compare this to a stair fall, where you have a landing on the stairs. You do all this action and when you get to the landing, your momentum ends, but you’ve got to make yourself go down the rest of the stairs, right? Turn the corner and go down. Keep it going. Force yourself to do, like, exactly what this guy just did, don’t stop at the landing. Just keep it on the ground, man.”

When Austin is asked about the finer points of taking fake punches, sometimes a swing from a fellow actor that never comes closer than 4 or 5 inches to the face, she refers to “John Wick”, “Indiana Jones” and watching fake fight film the same way that football players watch game film. She says it’s about body reaction more than facial expression, which is helpful advice when you’re wearing helmet. And it’s about exaggerated body movement, but not overly quick movements. Instead, she explains, great stunt performers actually move a tiny bit slower than they would in a real-life fight. And one should always know where the camera is. Or, in this case, the people dressed in black-and-white stripes with whistles around their necks and yellow flags on their belts.

Honestly, it sounds like a lot. It seems very difficult to master. So, Austin — who just spent her summer perilously hanging from aircraft somewhere high above Pandora — how in the wide, wide world of flops is a non-classically trained college football player supposed to pull off penalty-pulling pratfalls with the greatest of ease?

The same way anyone makes it to Carnegie Hall. Or the College Football Playoff.

“Practice, practice, practice,” she said chuckling, but also sort of serious. “Film yourself, just like football practice, or look in the mirror. Get some crash pads or a mattress, some pillows from the couch, and have somebody shove you over and over. Land on your side, land on that meat of your back. Find what looks best. And study the pros. Watch the NFL guys flop. Watch good football movies. Imitate that. “The Longest Yard.” “Varsity Blues.” Those are professional stunts or stunt falls that look very real in a football setting.”

In other words, watch Austin’s people. Watch Morton’s people. Watch Anderson’s people. With some proper training, perhaps we might see Barnett walking from the Armed Forces Bowl red carpet to the Emmys, Oscars or Golden Globes to accept an acting award. Hey, football people have been teaching Hollywood folks how to properly throw and catch passes since Harold Lloyd starred in “The Freshman” in 1925. Is it time to flip — and flop — the script?

“Who knows?” Austin said. “Maybe if I get tired of crashing into stuff for a living, there’s a future in this for me as a football flop coach. They need it.”