Defense Grades Well
September 15, 2003 10:49 AM | General
September 15, 2003
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – After watching the film of Saturday’s disappointing, 15-13 loss to Cincinnati West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez’ opinion hasn’t changed much from Saturday afternoon.
“Obviously it was very disappointing, especially the way we executed offensively,” he said. “It was a nightmare seeing a player here, a player there, or a situation where we just continually shot ourselves in the foot.”
Coming into the game, Rodriguez had no inkling his team would play the way they did.
“It was a surprisingly poor performance and I say surprising because I felt we had our best week of practice offensively. They were sharp and they gave us what we thought we were going to see, but they just didn’t make it happen and it cost us the ballgame,” he said.
The coach reaffirmed his belief that Cincinnati has a talented defense, but he believes his team may have given the Bearcats too much respect.
“They are talented -- I don’t want to take anything away from Cincinnati. Their defensive line is quick, their linebackers all run well and they’re very athletic on defense,” said Rodriguez. “But I think we almost put fear in ourselves because of their quickness. We were overstepping because we were afraid we were going to make a guy miss and we were overcompensating a little bit instead of just playing low and hard and getting after it.
“We played kind of tentative.”
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| Safety Mike Lorello leads the Mountaineer defense with eight tackles for losses. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
Rodriguez noted on Sunday that if he had it to do over again he might have called more audibles.
“We had some checks that were there,” he said. “We sometimes hesitated to make some checks and change some plays because we don’t want to slow our tempo down. Our tempo was slowed anyway because of the weather. We should have checked down on some plays after we got certain looks and we didn’t make the number of checks that we usually make.”
Rodriguez says those checks can be made by either the coaches upstairs in the press box or by quarterback Rasheed Marshall on the field.
"There are some that (Rasheed) can do that’s built in from a play,” said Rodriguez. “But a lot of them come in from us on the sidelines from what we see upstairs. We don’t check that many but there were a few instances where we had some opportunities.”
According to the coach, a bright spot was the play of West Virginia’s defense, which was continually put into difficult situations by the offense and still only allowed Cincinnati to score 15 points.
“They created some turnovers. Cincinnati did a nice job of trying to keep us off balance with some of their runs. They did a nice job of mixing it up but I thought our defense kept battling and I thought they were in the game pretty well and created some turnovers at key times,” said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez was also generally pleased with West Virginia’s special teams play.
“Other than the one fumble, I thought the special teams did a pretty nice job creating some hidden yardage,” he said. “We missed a few kicks that I think we would normally make and there were some things that were surprising to me that we didn’t execute and that wound up costing us against a pretty good football team.”
This weekend West Virginia will try to avoid a 1-3 start when it faces Maryland (1-2) in College Park. After suffering back-to-back losses to open the season, the Terps defeated The Citadel, 61-0 last Saturday.
“They’re all critical but this one is important for us because we haven’t played well the last couple of years against them,” said Rodriguez. “We let one get away this past weekend; we’ve got to put all three phases in there and put a good performance together and try to play a good solid all-around football game.
“If we can do that it might not be enough, I don’t know because Maryland is awful talented, but at least we’ve got to do our part to make them win the game and not give it to them,” Rodriguez added.
The coach says it takes a little more time getting his team refocused after a tough loss, “After a loss I think it is more work trying to get the guys refocused again. What we’ll do Monday is that it will be a normal Monday for us. We make corrections and tell them what’s good, bad and ugly from the last game, correct the things we need to correct. That’s mostly what Monday’s practice is with a little bit of introduction to Maryland. When Tuesday gets here the past game is gone and our focus is on the next opponent.”
