Getting Ready
December 27, 2002 12:59 PM | General
December 27, 2002
CHARLOTTE – With just a day left before his team takes on Virginia in the 2002 Continental Tire Bowl, West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez says preparations are almost complete.
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| West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez talks to the Charlotte media Friday morning. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
“Our guys are getting pretty focused,” he said during Friday morning’s pregame press conference at The Graduate restaurant in downtown Charlotte. “We’ve got to have one more day of getting focused on mentally getting ready for what we have to do and then take it from there.”
The Mountaineers will have one final walkthrough at Ericsson Stadium Friday afternoon before the game on Saturday.
Rodriguez sees tomorrow’s game as a match up between two teams on a high.
“I think we’re both playing our best football at the end of the year,” Rodriguez said. “They’re a little younger than we are but they’ve done a good job of getting better and getting their young guys some experience.”
Although Virginia starts five freshmen and sophomores along the offensive line, Cavalier coach Al Groh isn’t concerned about his team’s inexperience.
“Those kind of players don’t do you any good standing on the sidelines,” he said. “So our plan was to try and go after that level of talent and to get them into the game early.
“I can’t overlook the fact that from tight end to left tackle there is nothing but freshmen and sophomores out there,” he added. “I’m the coach and I’m well aware of that. But I don’t really look at them or think of them that way. I just say ‘he’s our right tackle and that’s the way it is.’”
UVa’s tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson is one of those talented freshmen Groh has inserted into the lineup early.
“I think Ferguson has only missed 12 plays this year, so he’s gotten significant exposure,” Groh said.
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| Virginia coach Al Groh says Saturday's Continental Tire Bowl will be a "compelling" matchup. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
Ferguson’s unit is in charge of protecting quarterback Matt Schaub – the ACC player of the year. Schaub is the guy who makes Virginia’s offense go, averaging 214.9 yards per game in Groh’s “West Coast” passing system.
“The thing about him is that he doesn’t force anything,” said Rodriguez. “He’s very good at taking care of the football, he drops it off when he needs to drop it off, and he’s a very intelligent quarterback. He’s going to get his yards -- we’ve just got to limit the big plays. We can’t let him get big plays up and down the field and get easy touchdowns.”
Schaub’s favorite target is 6-foot-4, 208-pound senior Billy McMullen, who leads the Cavs with 68 catches for 886 yards and three touchdowns.
By comparison, West Virginia’s top receiver Miquelle Henderson shows 38 catches for 421 yards and two touchdowns.
“They’re receivers are big and productive,” said Mountaineer senior defensive tackle David Upchurch. “We’ve got to be physical with them and try to bring them down to our size.”
West Virginia’s rushing attack ranks second in the country and goes up against a UVa defense that is ranked 105th against the run. Rodriguez says in this instance that stats are meaningless.
“That’s probably a little misleading. They’ve forced teams to turn the ball over and I look at how many points they’ve given up and lately they haven’t given up very many points against some very good football teams,” he said. “We kind of throw out the stats and look at personnel and they’ve got some pretty good players on defense.”
Senior offensive tackle Lance Nimmo agrees: “Last year our rush defense was supposed to be real bad and we went up to Syracuse and totally shut them down. Anybody can shut anybody down if they don’t come to play. Football’s not played on a stat sheet – it’s played on the field.”
Nimmo says Virginia’s odd defensive front is a little different than West Virginia’s “3-3 stack defense” and they’ve had to take some time to become accustomed to blocking it.
“They play a three-defensive-linemen front and the d-line’s job is to keep linemen off their linebackers,” said Nimmo. “They play pretty much what the Pittsburgh Steelers do. If they want to get extra pass rush they just take one of their outside linebackers and bring him off the edge. They play smart defense, they play technique and they don’t do anything to try and confuse you – they just play their base defense and they play it well.
“The team that out-hits the other team is the one that’s going to win,” he added.
Kickoff for Saturday’s game is 11 a.m. and the contest can be seen on ESPN2.
Continental Tire Bowl Bits:
* The Big East is off to a good start in bowl games with both Pittsburgh and Boston College registering impressive victories. West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez isn’t surprised by the results: “I said all along I thought the Big East for the past few years has been one of the best if not the best conferences in the country. The Big East may be the strongest league in the country top to bottom, we’re just not as big."
* Saturday’s West Virginia-Virginia game will feature starting running backs from the same high school. West Virginia’s Avon Cobourne and Virginia’s Wali Lundy both hail from Holy Cross High School in Medford, N.J.
“It is ironic,” said Rodriguez. “The head coach at Holy Cross High School Tom Maderia is a good friend of ours and he used to coach at West Virginia. He has great players every year and he also does a great job of preparing them for college. It’s no secret why they have success when they get to college because they have such a great high school program.”
* One item Rodriguez is concerned about is Virginia trick plays. The Cavaliers have had success throughout the year running them.
“We can’t go on every play and worry about every trick play they could run,” he said. “But at the same time in the secondary we have to be cognizant of that because they could do it at any time. And not only do they do it, but they execute it too. They’ll probably have one or two new ones for us tomorrow.”
* Before Rodriguez was hired to coach at West Virginia University, he had a few preliminary discussions with former Virginia athletic director Terry Holland about the football job. Friday Rodriguez explained their relationship: “We talked a little bit at the end of my second year at Clemson about the possibility of them maybe having an opening there. It was all really premature and nothing really came to fruition. I went to West Virginia before the Virginia job ever came open. A lot of the talks were just about Division I-A football, what schools are making the commitments? It never got to the point where I visited the campus because there was never an opening.
“I think he wanted to get to know me a little bit and I appreciated the opportunity to get to know him,” Rodriguez added. “We’ve talked since then a couple of times on an informal basis.”
* West Virginia senior tackle Lance Nimmo says the last team to utilize a defensive front similar to Virginia’s was East Carolina. Prior to that it was Notre Dame last year. “It’s not like blocking our defense because we play an odd stack and they play the odd with the overhang.”
* Virginia coach Al Groh thinks Saturday’s game will be a compelling contest, “That’s what bowl games are supposed to be about: pairing two teams with significant seasons that have kind of earned their way into it. We’ve got two second-place teams and in my mentality gives it a feeling as if you were almost in the playoffs.”
* Groh said Friday that Virginia has faced three teams with a no-huddle offense. “How much no-huddle did we face?” he asked. “South Carolina was a no-huddle team, Wake Forest was a no-huddle team, Clemson was a no-huddle team and we got a little bit of that from Akron.”
* Mountaineer fans be sure to watch Mountaineer Magazine’s Continental Tire Bowl Special airing on normal MSN stations tonight. Coach Rich Rodriguez will stop by to give his thoughts on tomorrow’s game. The show will air from 7 to 8 p.m.
* West Virginia sports publications director Joe Swan was presented with a son on Thursday, Dec. 26. Wil Kelley Swan weighed six pounds, eight ounces. Congratulations to Joe and Kassy Swan!
