The Day After
January 02, 2004 03:55 PM | General
January 2, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia will have to carry the sting of another disappointing bowl performance into the off season.
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| Chris Henry caught four passes for 46 yards to become just the second player in WVU history to have more than 1,000 receiving yards in a season. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
Last year, the Mountaineers were humbled by Virginia in the Continental Tire Bowl, 48-22 and this year, West Virginia dropped a 41-7 verdict to Maryland.
“It’s not fun,” said West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez. “Obviously it puts a little damper on the season. Win or lose I think it’s overrated what the bowl result will do for you. I know a lot of times last year the team won their bowl game and it was supposed to give them all of this momentum and they had disappointing seasons and some teams lost their bowl game and came out and did okay this year.”
Still Rodriguez knows his coaching staff has a lot of hard work in the coming months trying to come up with the right answers to help West Virginia become more competitive in post season play.
“We’re going to have to address a lot of things,” said the dejected coach. “We’ve got to get a better pass rush and some of that will happen when you get some experience and with some personnel moves you can do that.
“And we’ve got issues to address on offense,” he added. “We’ll work hard over the next several months to see what we can do to correct it. Some of it is going to be done through recruiting and some of it we’ll evaluate our schemes very closely.”
Most of the coaching staff remained in Florida to attend the annual AFCA meetings in Orlando next week. Rodriguez says off season workouts start Jan. 11 when the second semester begins.
“We’ll go through every single play numerous times from now until spring practice to see what we can do better because we’ve got to play better than that,” he said. “I’m not going to panic because there are some good things that happened this year. We’ve got a lot of work to do -- a whole lot -- and it starts on January 11 when we meet again to start the off season.”
A couple of underclassmen voiced their thoughts on what the team needs to do during the off season.
Said sophomore safety Mike Lorello: “You just get your mind ready to start off season workouts. You’re going to think about this one for a while … you can’t help it. But as soon as you get into the weight room and you starting banging those weights all of the frustration comes out then.”
Fellow sophomore Pac-Man Jones plans to use the embarrassment of this performance as a learning experience.
“Everything that happens you learn something from it,” he said. “I just tell our guys to work harder: that’s the only thing we can do. Work harder, study more film and be together as a team.
“Every day from January 11 until next season we’ll be talking about this game,” Jones added. “We do not want to have the feeling that we had after the bowl game. That’s the main thing.”
Junior quarterback Rasheed Marshall said a specific area that needs to be addressed is the team’s size and strength, “I think we could get a little bit stronger. Maryland has some big guys and I think if some of our guys got stronger we could do some things,” he said. “I’m not taking anything away from our players right now, we’ve got some strong guys on the team, but it will never hurt to be as strong as you can get.”
Bowl Tidbits ...
Like last year’s bowl preparation, Rodriguez said his team paid attention to minor details and did everything it was asked of them.
“Everybody was early for every meeting. They were on time for curfew and their intensity in practice was good,” he said. “We just didn’t play well and didn’t make plays. We dropped the ball early in the game, dropped a few passes; they beat us … they’re better than us.”
“They were beating us but it probably didn’t help,” he admitted. “If you look at stats 90 percent of the time when you give up a punt return or a blocked punt for a touchdown you’re going to lose. We were not supposed to kick to him and we kicked to him all day … at least a couple of times we did.”
“Can I last that long? If I can last that long at West Virginia that could be a nice problem to have,” he said. “I don’t think there is a mental psyche or anything: I just think they’re better than us. They’re a little more experienced than us but they’re better than us. Now do I think can we catch them? Sure, I’m confident we can catch them and I hope it’s sooner rather than later. We’ve got to play better against the Terrapins because we’re going to play them every year.”
“A lot of their big plays were passing plays and size doesn’t have a whole lot to do with that,” he said. “I felt like we contained the run decently well but they just made big plays.”
“He’s going to be a player because he did it every day in practice. It’s pretty amazing what he can do,” said Lorello, who defended Jackson while he was playing on the scout team.
