Regaining Its Swagger
September 11, 2009 01:39 AM | General
September 11, 2009
MORGANTOWN, W.VA. – Liberty may be the first opponent listed on West Virginia’s 2009 football schedule, but the season really begins this Saturday with East Carolina.
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| Linebacker J.T. Thomas said East Carolina was more physical than West Virginia in last year's 24-3 loss to the Pirates.
Dale Sparks/All-Pro Photography photo |
“East Carolina is solid, they’re going to be tough, and it should be a hard-fought football game on Saturday,” says West Virginia coach Bill Stewart.
All during preseason camp while preparing for Liberty, in the back of the players’ minds were those East Carolina Pirates – the same East Carolina Pirates that took some of the swagger out of West Virginia football on Sept. 6, 2008. The players didn’t come right out and say it, but anyone with a healthy set of eyes and ears could sense it.
It was a year and five days ago when the No. 8-rated Mountaineers strolled into Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium. West Virginia was being talked about as a national title contender with quarterback Pat White returning along with a veteran offensive line and a running game that featured You Tube sensation Noel Devine.
Nobody really put much thought into West Virginia’s inexperienced defense, a coaching transition that hit hardest on offense, and the Mountaineers’ prior struggles against the Pirates, the 2007 game withstanding.
In 2006, West Virginia needed a fourth-quarter 60-yard touchdown reception by Darius Reynaud to pull out a 27-10 victory. A year before that in 2005, when West Virginia went on to win the Sugar Bowl, East Carolina actually had the football at the end of the game in a 20-15 Mountaineer victory at Milan Puskar Stadium.
West Virginia’s prior difficulties against East Carolina were either conveniently forgotten or ignored before the team arrived in North Carolina. So, too, have many of the details of West Virginia’s 2008 game at East Carolina, so here is a refresher:
Personnel wise, not much has changed for East Carolina this year. The Pirates are bringing back nine starters on offense and eight starters on defense. The two units have a combined 387 career starts among them.
Therefore, simple logic points to West Virginia needing to be much better than it was last year in order to beat East Carolina. The players realize that. Linebacker J.T. Thomas has kind of become the spokesperson for West Virginia’s disappointing performance last September in Greenville, telling everyone afterward that the Mountaineers “got whacked.”
Thomas said watching the film was actually worse than going through it.
“I knew there were so many things that we had to work on. I knew it was going to be rough watching the film the next day,” he said. “I knew I was going to see a lot of things that I didn’t like.
“One of the most disappointing things was that we had great practices leading up to the game,” Thomas added. “We were learning from the win against Villanova and going into East Carolina, I really expected us to have a better outing than what we had. That was more disappointing than anything, that we weren’t as good as maybe we thought we were.”
Thomas said it’s not a matter of redemption or revenge against East Carolina this weekend. Instead, it’s a simply a case of performing well against a high quality opponent and taking another step toward achieving the goals the team set out to accomplish at the beginning of the season.
“I don’t like the whole, redemption, revenge, let’s get ‘em back type thing,” he said. “We want to win every football game and we want to do what it takes to win the next game – not worry about what happened last year, just come out and play football, play our defense and get a win.”
Thomas knows West Virginia’s defense is going to have to play much better than it did last weekend in the opener against Liberty – and certainly much better than it did last year against East Carolina in Greenville, but he does believe the circumstances are also much different this time around.
“We’ve got a different group of guys on defense,” he explained. “We were all learning last year. It was the second game of the season and for a lot of the guys, that was really their first time getting a lot of action. This year we’ve got a lot more experience, and we’ve got (linebacker) Reed Williams back on the field, too.
“Experience gives you confidence to go out there and be the baddest person on the field. I think with a year under the whole defense’s belt, we will be a lot better team this weekend.”
If that is the case, then perhaps West Virginia can regain a little of the swagger that it lost last year at East Carolina.
