Bowl Preparation
December 14, 2005 12:58 PM | General
December 14, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez says self-evaluation is always an important part of any team’s bowl preparation, regardless of whether it has been successful or not in past bowl games.
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| West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez says his bowl plans are no different than any other schools presently making bowl appearances.
Brent Kepner photo |
West Virginia, of course, is 0-3 in its bowl appearances under Rodriguez and had difficulty in bowl games during the latter half of Don Nehlen’s WVU coaching career. The Mountaineers lost an NCAA record-tying eight bowl games from 1987 to 1998 before Nehlen’s last team broke the streak in the 2000 Music City Bowl.
Rodriguez, 38-22 in five seasons at West Virginia, believes bowl game success hinges more on the opposition rather than on a particular team’s preparation.
“Someone says, well, they won their last bowl game. Well, who were they playing in it? That has something to do with it,” Rodriguez said.
Certain coaches have subscribed to the theory that sometimes a team can get hot and play over its head during the regular season, putting them in a position of being a big underdog in its bowl game.
Rodriguez explains: “A friend of mine who’s another coach said sometimes teams maybe during the season get on a roll and overachieves a little bit and then in the bowl game things settle back down and it’s harder for them to overachieve in the game. But I think it’s more of a question of who you’re playing. We’ve played some pretty good teams and Georgia is another one.”
According to Rodriguez, West Virginia follows the same bowl plan that most other schools utilize.
“The number of practices you have and the length of practices are really similar to a lot of coaches that are out there going to bowls,” he said. “We’ve got friends throughout the profession. I talked to Jeff Tedford out at Cal about his bowl preparations and all of our practices are really similar. I feel comfortable that we’re all doing the same thing.”
Even though West Virginia has about three weeks to get ready for its Jan. 2 meeting against Georgia in the Nokia Sugar Bowl, not all of that time is spent on game preparation.
“I think there is a misconception that you have three weeks to get ready and you really don’t. One, your players are in finals. Two, your coaches are on the road (recruiting) so you don’t really have as much game preparation time as you’d think,” Rodriguez said. “But you do have more (time) than you do during the regular season when you’ve got just a week to get ready.
“We’ve evaluated everything we’ve done, we’ve compared to other people and we’ll get back into the mode,” Rodriguez said. “We just hope we play well in the game. We can play well and not win, but we just want to play well and hope they make a few mistakes.”
With the little extra time, Rodriguez says coaches can sometimes over-think things and introduce foreign ideas and concepts their players are not accustomed to.
“You’ve got a little time to think but sometimes you can overanalyze things,” he said adding, “as much time as they have to get ready for you … you’ve got that much time to get ready for them.”
And overanalyzing, in Rodriguez’ estimation, would be a huge mistake.
“All of the sudden if you start adding a whole bunch of new plays and schemes then there is a sense of panic. You can’t do that,” he said. “It’s not like you’ve got time to reinvent the wheel. To me a lot of good things about the bowl are the chance to go back to fundamentals and teach some of the finer points of blocking, tackling, getting off blocks and making plays.”
Consequently, in Rodriguez’ opinion solid bowl preparation is not really a matter of changing things up but rather improving on what you already do well.
“I don’t know if you can (change things),” Rodriguez said. “There is no way you can practice now during finals week because you’ve got to make sure your guys are focused on that. You could have two-a-days at the bowl site but then you run the risk of having your guys’ legs being worn out before you play. The biggest key to winning the bowl game is playing well during the game.”
Past bowl performances – good or bad – are irrelevant and Rodriguez says he won’t even bring the subject up to his team.
“I don’t think it really has anything to do with the current bowl situation,” he said. “Every team is different. I don’t think last year’s game or losing a bowl game 10 years ago has anything to do with this bowl game.”
Briefly:
“The players are in finals all this week and will lift and work out twice in between finals. And then we’ll resume practice Friday evening after finals,” said Rodriguez, noting his team will practice all the way through Dec. 22 before being excused for Christmas break.
“He won’t play in the bowl game and right now he’s not on the team,” said the coach. “Until he makes a commitment to do the things both academically and on the field he won’t be on the team.
“He’s not done that yet.”
“We’ll take another one of those young quarterbacks and we have two signalers,” Rodriguez said. “The third quarterback is a good question and we haven’t quite figured that out yet. We’ve got a few bowl practices before we have to make that determination.”
“I was a rookie who just wanted to be on time for meetings and not screw up and David was a fifth-year senior,” Rodriguez. “We’ve known each other for a long time. He’s an outstanding football coach and an even better person. Dave Van Halanger, their strength coach, was our strength coach when I was a skinny, 180-pound freshman. I’ve known him for a long time as well.”
“Their talent level all the way across the board … you watch some teams and you say their talented at this position and maybe they’re not as talented here. Over here you have a match up you may like. You don’t find that against Georgia,” he said. “With the 11 positions on offense and the 11 positions on defense they’ve got players everywhere.
“You can tell from five minutes of watching film that their getting coached up too,” he continued. “Those guys know where to go, they play hard and they’ve got a great staff. If you’re the best team in the SEC – and they are the best team in the SEC – you’re going to have talent and you’re also going to have good coaching.”
Rodriguez believes the SEC has evolved into a defensive-orientated league.
“You talk to any of the coaches in the SEC and they’ll talk about what a defensive league it has become,” he said.
“Speed, strength, ability to make tackles in the open field … all of that is related to having good players. You find a lot of those in the SEC and a lot of those SEC guys have gone on to the NFL,” he said. “It goes back to recruiting and their location. The SEC schools are located in some of the best states in the country for high school talent. You look at Georgia and the state of Florida, Louisiana … you’re talking about a tremendous amount of talent that comes out of there every year.”
