Football Notebook
October 29, 2006 09:33 AM | General
October 29, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Rich Rodriguez’s encounters with the Petrino football family span far beyond last year’s triple-overtime epic in Morgantown. From his NAIA days at Glenville State, Rodriguez recalls going up against Bob Petrino, Sr. when he coached at Carroll College in Montana.
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| West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez has had several encounters with the Petrino football family.
AP photo |
“My quarterback on the ’93 Glenville team Jed Drenning was here the other day giving me all the details about that game,” Rodriguez said. “I had forgotten it all. We played them at Vigilante Stadium.
“The next year we went to the playoffs and played Western Montana and the name of the stadium was Vigilante Stadium. We played in two different Vigilante Stadiums in two different towns in Montana in two different years,” Rodriguez chuckled.
The coach remembered it being a big deal for Glenville to play out in Montana.
“We chartered a flight out of Charleston,” he recalled. “It was the first time most of our kids had ever flown anywhere. We sold empty seats to the boosters to pay the bills.
“We went out there and took all of our cold-weather gear thinking it was going to be really cold and it wound up being about 55 degrees and sunny.
“The next year we went out there expecting it to be about 55 degrees and it was 5 below and the field was frozen solid,” Rodriguez laughed.
A few years later in 1998 as Tommy Bowden’s offensive coordinator at Tulane, Rodriguez first matched wits against Bobby Petrino, Jr., who was then coordinating John L. Smith’s Louisville offense.
“It was 20-something to 21 and they had the ball on the two yard line at the end of the game,” Rodriguez said. “Wee had to make a play at the end to win it. That was the undefeated season and it went down to the last play.”
Just like last year’s West Virginia-Louisville game.
Briefly:
“There are more guys on defense … some of the redshirt freshmen this is their first big game,” said Rodriguez, adding, “but once you get the first couple of plays out of the way it’s just football. It’s 11 on 11 and all the hype and everybody dressed in black – all of that is tuned out.”
Most important to his team, Rodriguez admits, is getting off to a good start.
“When you’re playing a road game in a tough environment you want to try and make a few plays so their crowd can’t get into it,” he said. “You let them make all of the good plays then obviously their crowd becomes tougher and tougher to deal with.”
“Being with (wife) Rita the fact that she’s watched that game – particularly the fourth quarter and the overtime about 300 times, I’ve been forced to sneak a peak at a little bit of it,” he said. “She could probably tell you every detail.
“It was obviously an exciting game and an improbable situation to come from that far behind (to win the game). I don’t know if it was the defining moment of our season but it certainly was a point where it jump-started us to finish strong like we did.”
“That’s the X factor,” Rodriguez said. “I would be less likely to blitz a real fast quarterback being afraid if that guy missed him then you might be in trouble whereas if you’ve got a guy back there that is not as mobile you’d probably go after him a little bit more.”
White has run for more than 100 yards in a game six times for his career that spans only 19 games.
“I think it’s been made bigger by the fact that we both got here undefeated,” Rodriguez said. “There were a lot of people talking about this game back in August and the summer. I said back then when people asked me about it that if we get there 7-0 we’ll all be happy. I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing.”
Rodriguez cautions that the Louisville game isn’t the only big game left on West Virginia’s schedule.
“Rutgers is having a great season; Pitt is having a good season, Cincinnati is playing well and South Florida has got a nice record,” he said. “All of the Big East has done their part getting to this point in the season with national respect.”
More importantly, West Virginia is facing the meat of its schedule with all five remaining teams sporting winning records. The combined record of those five opponents as of Sunday morning is 30-9.
Some of those one-loss SEC teams chasing West Virginia in the BCS standings aren’t going to get a whole lot of help coming down the stretch. Florida has games remaining against Vanderbilt, South Carolina, Western Carolina and Florida State -- the four having combined to produce an anemic 15-18 record.
Tennessee has a pair of rough SEC games coming up against LSU and Arkansas before the load gets considerably lighter against 4-5 Vanderbilt and 4-4 Kentucky.
Auburn has battles remaining against Georgia and Alabama after playing a tune up against Arkansas State -- which plays in the Sun Belt Conference for those of you wondering. And Arkansas still has a game left against Mississippi State sandwiched between key SEC games against South Carolina, Tennessee and LSU.
West Virginia’s biggest challenge won’t be the BCS computers, but instead the five outstanding Big East teams left on its schedule.
I seem to recall Rich Rodriguez at different times this year telling everyone to wait until the end of the season to let everything all play out.
And that is exactly what is going to happen.
