Getting the Nod
October 16, 2005 08:56 PM | General
October 16, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia University football coach Rich Rodriguez indicated Sunday that he was leaning toward starting freshman quarterback Pat White against South Florida this Saturday in a Big East game to be televised on ESPNU.
 |
||
| Pat White stretches for first-down yardage in the fourth quarter of Saturday's game against Louisville at Milan Puskar Stadium.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
Starter Adam Bednarik suffered a sprained foot in the fourth quarter of Saturday’s triple-overtime win over Louisville and Rodriguez isn’t sure if Bednarik will be able to practice much this week.
“I have to see what he looks like tomorrow in practice but it looks like Pat White is going to start,” Rodriguez said.
White, a Daphne, Ala., resident, was the catalyst in West Virginia’s comeback win over the Cardinals Saturday, entering the game with eight minutes to go and the Mountaineers trailing 24-7. White led West Virginia to six consecutive scores and finished the evening running 11 times for 69 yards and completing five of 11 passes for 49 yards. White was able to run for first downs on a pair of critical fourth-down plays, including a fourth and 10 when he was able to scramble for 17 yards.
In seven games coming off the bench, White has completed 31 of 52 passes for 372 yards and three touchdowns. He’s also run 53 times for 304 yards. His 48-yard touchdown against Wofford is the longest TD run by a WVUY ball carrier this year.
White’s ability to make plays with his feet was one of the factors in West Virginia ability to move the ball so effectively in the fourth quarter against a pretty good Louisville defense.
“He’s pretty fast; he gives you another weapon,” Rodriguez said.
The coach wanted to try and test Louisville’s defense late in the game, but he wasn’t sure that was going to happen when the Cardinals got up by 17 points at halftime.
“In the other games Louisville was so far ahead that their backups were usually in there in the fourth quarter,” he said. “What we were hoping to do was have kind of a game where it went back forth and see which team could pull it out. For a while it looked like we weren’t going to be able to test them. Finally toward the end of the game in overtime we were able to see them get tested a little bit.”
Despite being down by such a large margin, Rodriguez was pleased that his young team didn’t panic or lose its poise.
“We’ve got a bunch of guys that are hard working and have a lot of character. You don’t expect to come back from 17 points down with eight minutes left in the game especially being dominated in the first half the way we were,” said the coach, now 21-4 in his last 25 regular season games. “But I think our guys will keep hanging in there and keep battling. We’ve been down in a couple of games this year and at no point did you see guys bickering or panicking or kind of losing focus.”
This week West Virginia got a big boost in the rankings, moving from 25th to 20th in the USA Today Coaches Poll and from receiving votes to 20th in the AP poll. Rodriguez says the ranking he’s most interested in comes in January.
“I guess that’s nice but I’m not really worried about it,” he said. “The goal is to be up there somewhere at the end of the season. We have a lot of football left. Our number goal is to compete for the Big East championship and the more you win the more that is at stake for the next game.
“The approach we take this week will be the same as the last seven,” he said.
Briefly:
“Hopefully by the middle of the week he should be able to do more,” Rodriguez said of Bailey.
“It would have probably been a mistake to panic at that point to come out in the second half and try and do something that we can’t execute,” he said. “After watching the film, we were close to making some things happen. We had a couple of holding penalties in the open field which were really foolish and we were hurting ourselves a lot.”
“We wanted to take a couple of shots deep. On the first play we had it open and didn’t connect. And then we want to get some first downs and give them a few different looks like we always do in every ballgame,” he said.
“Steve Slaton played 80-some plays and didn’t have a single loaf. Owen Schmitt had about 45 and 15 on special teams and they were running pretty good. We had a couple of drives in the fourth quarter and it started to wear on them some,” Rodriguez said. “They may have gotten a little tired and when you’re tired defensively it’s harder to tackle and it’s harder to get off blocks. I think that was the case in overtime.”
“People have to remember that these are still kids: 17, 18, 19 and 20-year-old kids, too,” he said. “You’d like for them all to play at the same high level every week but inevitably they sometimes don’t and they make mistakes.”
