Perfecting the Playbook
October 12, 2004 02:30 PM | General
October 12, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – With 10 days to prepare for Wednesday night’s game against Connecticut, one might think West Virginia Coach Rich Rodriguez will unleash a barrage of new plays against the Huskies.
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| WVU coach Rich Rodriguez says coaches sometimes tend to do too much during an open week.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Not so, according to Rodriguez.
“If you have too much time you have a tendency to try and do too much,” Rodriguez said Monday morning.
Instead of adding more plays to the playbook, Rodriguez and his coaching staff have used the extra time to perfect the ones they’re using right now. “There are a lot of plays and after a day or two you see another play that you want to add,” Rodriguez said. “I think for us the last couple of games we haven’t executed well offensively so we’ve tried to get that corrected first.”
The coach says the Mountaineers used the first part of last week self scouting all three phases, working on mistakes and improving techniques. From there they added the things they think they will need for the remainder of the season.
Rodriguez admits there is a lot that goes into adding a new play to the playbook.
“You add a play and then after you rep it for a couple of days and it doesn’t work then you have got to throw it out,” he says. “If your guys can’t execute it then there’s no use putting it in … I don’t care how it looks on the chalkboard.”
Therefore, the key is always realizing which things work best for your team.
“A lot of things look good on paper and look good on film but if the players can’t execute it after a couple of days then you wind up throwing it out. Inevitably that’s why your playbook doesn’t grow too large.”
Essentially, the bulk of the plays used for the year is determined during spring and summer and is based primarily on the team’s personnel. “You have your list of plays out of every formation and then you go through by formation based on what we do and based on how they defend it,” Rodriguez said. “For us, in the passing game more so than in the running game, you might have one receiver do this on this route package. So you make a little bit of an adjustment when you’re doing that.”
The most difficult aspect in determining a game plan is having all of your players healthy enough during game week to execute it in practice.
“When you have guys that are not taking reps it’s hard to make any adjustments because you want to physically have them rep it,” Rodriguez said. “Talking to guys I know in the NFL they say it’s the same thing. There are a lot of times that they’re running plays during the game that they’ve haven’t practiced during the week simply because their guys are hurt.”
Rodriguez estimates he has about 120 plays to choose from for any given game.
“But out of those 120 plays there may be 25 of them that have a certain adjustment that you change one guy on: a route package or something. It seems like a lot but you have a lot of carryover,” he said. “You may run the same play out of different formations and I count that as a different play.”
In a perfect world, Coach Rod prefers not digging too deep into the playbook. That means the plays he’s calling are working.
“It would be nice if you only have to run five of them,” he said. “It would be a lot easier calling the game. There have been times in games where we’ve run the same play 30 times.
“I don’t think that is going to happen now.”
Briefly:
“He has been the first look a couple of times,” said Rodriguez. “He’s got good ball skills and obviously the taller ones (Colson and Kay-Jay Harris) are easier to find than Bryan (Wright). With Bryan you’ve got to be pretty accurate. We’ve probably thrown to the backs more this year than at anytime during my entire coaching career.”
“I didn’t think in the last game we were at times as physical and playing as much downhill and getting off blocks as we were capable of doing,” he said. “We fit wrong on some blitzes; a guy was supposed to be in the ‘B’ gap and he was in the ‘C’ gap. Up until then, I thought assignment wise and playing downhill wise we were pretty good.”
At the same time, the coach does believe his team needs to spread the ball around to different wide receivers. Chris Henry is the team’s leading pass catcher with 28. The next closest receiver is Miquelle Henderson with six catches.
“The guys we’re trying to spread it around to have not practiced a whole lot because they’ve been hurt,” he said. “That’s part of the problem. If Miquelle Henderson and Eddie Jackson can get healthy and we can get to the point where the quarterback can trust them to be in the right spot at the right time then their receptions will probably go up.”
“The bad part about playing a midweek game is there’s nothing on TV but soap operas,” he said. “We’ll get up, eat breakfast, and myself personally I’ll get a nice workout in and watch some tape. We’ll bring all of our computers and we’ll watch some film during the day, have meetings, and sit around until 5 o’clock when we leave for the stadium. It will be boring until we get ready to go to the game.”
