Academic Success
December 10, 2009 06:18 PM | General
(6:11 pm)
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| Bill Stewart |
Mountaineer football players are performing off the field just as well as they are performing on it. The AFCA released its Graduation Success Rate for 2009 and No. 18-rated West Virginia was one of 39 schools recognized for graduating more than 75 percent of its student-athletes.
The Mountaineers were one of just nine schools in this week's AP Top 25 to be honored by the AFCA for its academic excellence.
In all, five Big East schools were cited. The others were Connecticut, Rutgers, Syracuse and South Florida.
The GSR is based on a six-year graduation window for student-athletes. The GSR was developed by the NCAA as part of its academic reform initiative to more accurately assess the academic success of student-athletes.
The GSR holds institutions accountable for transfer students, unlike the federal graduation rate. The GSR also accounts for midyear enrollees.
Congratulations to the entire academic support staff at WVU for a job well done!
After listening to Coach Bob Huggins’ post-game remarks it was almost hard to believe that his sixth-rated Mountaineers defeated Duquesne by 29 points Wednesday night. Huggins was visibly upset with his team’s offensive performance in the second half.
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| Bob Huggins |
“I’m running out of patience with a few guys,” said Huggins. “They’ve got to get with us or they can sit over there and cheer like crazy and if they don’t sit over there and cheer like crazy, then they can stand outside and try and get a ticket to get in.”
The coach explained that it is a matter of a few players blowing up the plays.
“You can’t put guys into the game that just totally stop your offense,” he said. “Our offense just comes to a screeching halt when you put them into the game. You can’t do that - either that or I come up with an offense where I just stand them in a corner and keep them out of it.”
Huggins’ offensive concerns date back to last year when the Mountaineers had difficulty scoring at times.
“We didn’t lose a game when we scored over 70 a year ago,” Huggins pointed out. “We told them, ‘Let’s go back to guarding them the way we guarded last year.’ I thought we did. I thought we guarded pretty good. We just didn’t run offense.”
Huggins said his patience is wearing thin.
“I’ve been more patient than I’ve probably ever been. I’m tired of being patient,” he admitted. “It’s time to do right because we’re getting ready to get into the heart of our schedule.”
“We’re helping each other better. We didn’t help each other at first,” Huggins said. “We’ve got to continue to learn how to pressure the ball and push people out the way we do and help more. I told you that will come and it’s going to come. But our offense is going to come, too, because those guys that keep screwing it up, they’re not going to have a chance to screw it up.”
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| Kevin Jones |
“I believe the guys like Kevin Jones that do everything right just get better and better and better,” said Huggins. “Kevin is never late for anything. Kevin is always on time, he’s always prepared; he’s a joy. He’s a joy for us to coach. He’s a joy for instructors here at the University. He’s a joy in the community. He’s a wonderful guy. He’s going to continue to get better and better because he wants to.”
What makes Jones special, according to Huggins, is that he doesn’t try to do the things he can’t do well on the basketball court.
“Good players can do what they can do,” explained Huggins. “They do the things they are good at doing and they don’t do the things that they’re not real good at doing so you say, ‘He’s a really good player.’
“Bad players try to show you their whole repertoire of things they can’t do. You don’t see KJ dribbling the ball between his legs, trying to do a spin move and then falling down. He doesn’t do that ignorant stuff. He is a poster child for doing what is right,” said Huggins.
“When I wanted to learn I learned pretty well. When I didn’t want to and I wasn’t really sold on it I didn’t learn near as well,” Huggins said. “I could pick up a basketball magazine and I could read it from cover to cover and I really learned. If they asked me to pick up some magazine on family living or something like that, then I struggled. I wasn’t that interested. The point is if you want to play then let’s get interested in what we’re doing because it isn’t going to change.”
SI.com's Luke Winn has West Virginia No. 4 in his weekly power ratings. You have to go all the way back to the Jerry West-Rod Thorn days in the late 1950s and early 1960s to find this much national attention for Mountaineer basketball.
West Virginia is one of seven schools ranked in this week's AP Top 25 in both football and men's basketball. Here are the other six:
Folks in Jacksonville got an opportunity on Wednesday night to see what a class act West Virginia Coach Bill Stewart is. Stewart was gracious in his praise of retiring Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden, and you could tell that Bowden truly appreciated Stewart’s kind words during the cutaway shots on him when Stewart was speaking.
You can watch video of both Stewart and Bowden here:
http://jacksonville.com/sports/college/florida_state_seminoles/2009-12-10/story/bowden%E2%80%99s_star_power_pushes_gator_bowl_attend
ESPN.com’s Mark Schlabach rates the Gator Bowl the sixth-best match-up of the bowl season. Wrote Schlabach: “It’s the Bobby Bowden Bowl, as Florida State coach Bobby Bowden will coach the Seminoles for the final time. It’s fitting that his final opponent is West Virginia, the school where he coached from 1970 to ’75 before leaving for Tallahassee. In his finale, Bowden, 80, will attempt to avoid FSU’s first losing season since 1976.
There is an excellent chance that this year’s West Virginia-Florida State game could break the Gator Bowl attendance record. Two days after the bowl announced a sellout for its Jan. 1 game, organizers have decided to add 6,000 temporary seats underneath both scoreboards.
This has been done in the past for the Florida-Georgia game.
The additional seats will increase the capacity to 83,500. The Gator Bowl record for attendance is 82,911 established in 1989 when Clemson defeated West Virginia.
With ticket sales going at such a brisk pace, Gator Bowl Association president Rick Catlett said he is concerned about counterfeit tickets flooding the market.
“Counterfeit tickets are going to be a very big problem for this game, and I would caution the public to be very careful buying tickets from non-verifiable sources,” Catlett told Jacksonville’s WOKV Wednesday evening.
Catlett said Ticketmaster and tickets.com are two reputable sources for purchasing tickets. Both schools have already sold their ticket allotments.
“This has been an amazing response by the fans of these two schools,” Catlett said.
Speaking of ticket sales, Cincinnati is doing its part for the Big East Conference as well. According to Thursday’s Cincinnati Enquirer, the Bearcats have already sold out is allotment of 17,500 Sugar Bowl tickets. Last year, UC sold approximately 13,500 out of its allotment of 17,500 tickets for its Orange Bowl game against Virginia Tech.
Charlotte Bowl sales are strong, too, according to the Charlotte Business Journal. Bowl organizer Raycom Sports said yesterday that fewer than 2,000 lower-level tickets remain and less than 30,000 seats left for the Dec. 26 game at Bank of America Stadium featuring North Carolina and Pitt.
Three of the first seven games in Charlotte were sellouts including West Virginia’s two appearances in 2002 and 2008.
Florida State coach in waiting Jimbo Fisher has decided to let go four Florida State assistants following the Gator Bowl.
Seminoles’ running backs coach Dexter Carter, defensive ends coach Jody Allen, former North Carolina State coach Chuck Amato and strength coach Todd Stroud will not be returning in 2010.
All four will participate in the bowl game on Jan. 1.
Also, the Charleston Daily Mail reported yesterday that offensive line coach Rick Trickett is a candidate for the Marshall job. Trickett served two stints at West Virginia before leaving for Florida State for the 2007 season.
This is reminiscent of what happened at West Virginia when Don Nehlen retired prior to the Music City Bowl. Many of Nehlen’s assistant coaches were informed prior to the bowl game that they would not be retained.
West Virginia went on to defeat Mississippi 49-38 in one of the best bowl performances in Nehlen’s 21 seasons at WVU.
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| Carolyn Blank |
Congratulations to Carolyn Bank for being named to the NSCAA All-America second team, announced earlier this week. Blank becomes West Virginia’s 15th All-America selection since 2000. Coach Nikki Izzo-Brown’s Mountaineer program has produced at least one All-American player in nine of the last 10 years.
She will be recognized as the annual All-America Luncheon in Philadelphia on Jan. 16, 2010 as part of the annual NSCAA Convention.
The 2010 Women's Professional Soccer draft will also take place during the convention. Blank will see if she can become the third Mountaineer to join the WPS.
And finally, how about the job Zach Spiker is doing at Army? Spiker has the Black Knights off to a 6-2 start - the school’s best since Tates Locke began his coaching career 10-2 in 1963.
Don’t forget, a couple of guys named Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski also got their starts at Army.
Among Spiker’s early season wins was a 56-53 decision against Harvard, which beat Boston College last night and lost by just six to Connecticut last Saturday.
Spiker, the son of WVU medical man John Spiker, worked on John Beilein’s staff at West Virginia before going to Cornell. Zach is also married to former West Virginia women’s soccer assistant coach Jennifer DePrez.
Have a great week!
