Rhein Fire cornerback Therrian Fontenot writes a diary for Packers.com, logging his NFL Europe venture. His team is 4-0, the only undefeated in the league. This week, the Fire travel to play the Amsterdam Admirals and his Green Bay teammate and close friend, Chad Lucas. Lucas set a NFLE record last week with four touchdown catches in a single game. This week, Therrian writes about playing against his best friend, his personal progress and the success of his hard-working team.
It's exciting to go up against Chad. He was my boy in Green Bay. We hung out everyday. It will be cool to go against him and his team. They've got a good group of receivers there. When I first heard about someone catching four touchdowns (this past weekend), I had to find out who it was. When I found out it was Chad, I smiled real big. I'm happy for him.
All week I've been thinking about how I'm going to approach playing against Chad. It's basically bragging rights, but I'm going to treat him just like any other receiver, and we're still going to be best friends when the game's over.
We are now 4-0, and I don't think we feel a lot of pressure being the only undefeated in the league. Everybody is going to come out and try and play us hard every week. All we can do is go out and continue to play the way we've been playing.
There's a lot of talk about our defense, but the offense has done a great job, too. We've got a great offensive scheme. We have a good mix of passing and running. We have really hard practices and each side (offense and defense) makes the other one better. So, by the time we get to the game, we're just going full-steam ahead.
I'm progressing the way I expected to. I'm getting in and out of breaks, I'm back-pedaling and I'm making the right reads. Even though I'm in Europe, I really haven't gone out much. Between games, practices and meetings, there just isn't much time for anything else except to hang out and maybe watch a little TV.
We don't have a whole lot of ways to keep up with the NFL over here. We have NFL Network. So, basically any news we get, we get from that channel. We've seen that a lot of teams are starting mini-camps, which - although I'm focused on the task at hand - makes me excited to come back. I think the Packers made the right decision to send me over here. I think I've improved and I'm looking forward to applying what I learned to Packers' camp. I have just been out here challenging myself everyday. I go into the game every week always ready.
