Football Notebook
September 12, 2010 03:09 PM | General
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – These Marshall games are never easy, are they? Just ask John Beilein, who had the pleasure of watching two of his better basketball teams lose to the Thundering Herd on neutral floors in Charleston during his five-year stay at WVU.
Beilein’s first loss to Marshall came in 2005 right before the Mountaineers go hot and made it to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. And the next year his Sweet 16 team lost, 58-52, to Marshall just four days after knocking off UCLA at Pauley Pavilion.
Even Bob Huggins has had tougher-than-expected encounters with the Green and White, needing a defensive stop on the final play of the game to beat Marshall 66-64 during his first season on the Mountaineer bench in 2008. Even the last two years the games were battles, Huggins’ Final Four squad in 2010 needing to hit free throws down the stretch to pull out an eight-point victory over the Herd.
For that matter, the history books tell us that no WVU men’s basketball team has ever won in Huntington, losing all five times it has played there from 1982 to 1991 before the games got too volatile to continue on each other’s home floors.
The football team’s first excursion to Huntington in almost a century in 2007 was worse than a tooth extraction, the Mountaineers trailing 13-7 at halftime and the team being serenaded to a chorus of boos by upset West Virginia fans as they went into the locker room.
But WVU found its bearings in the second half and eventually ran away with a 48-23 victory.
“Sometimes you run into buzz saws,” said West Virginia coach Bill Stewart. “Why do upsets occur? Maybe that other team wanted it more than you. There were three major upsets this weekend that I saw and two of them were by I-AA teams over pretty good football teams, one from the Big Ten (Minnesota) and one from the ACC (Virginia Tech).”
Similar circumstances surrounded Friday night’s game with a couple of twists – four of Marshall’s football coaches had intimate knowledge of West Virginia’s system while a fifth was a former coach and player for WVU.
If you don’t think that was a factor on Friday then simply ignore what junior offensive guard Josh Jenkins had to say after the game.
“Yeah, I felt like they knew what we were doing,” he said. “They were calling out our plays when we were getting down in our stances.”
The West Virginia coaches were so concerned about what Marshall knew – and how little they knew about Marshall – that the decision was made to use a card system to signal in plays. But by halftime, Stewart was so fed up with it that he told his offensive coaches to toss those cards in the garbage can.
“We had a couple of delay of game penalties and I said, ‘That’s it, cards are out! I don’t care if they go in our huddle, but let’s just call our game and do what we do best,’” Stewart explained.
The offense finally found success when it went into hurry-up mode with eight minutes remaining, trailing by 15 points and needing to thread the needle just to tie the game and send it into overtime.
And somehow West Virginia did that, accounting for nearly 200 of its 469 yards on its final two drives of the night. Because the Mountaineers were not huddling and giving Marshall time to switch personnel and bring out additional pass rushers, that enabled a beleaguered offensive line the opportunity to finally get its feet under them.
Jenkins credits the quicker tempo as being the biggest difference in the way the offense performed late in the game.
“It helped drives because it made everything quick for us and that’s how we play,” he explained. “That’s how we play in practice. We knew they were going to know things and we had to do a little huddling and stuff. Us getting up to the line just cut all of that out because they couldn’t do any of that – they couldn’t blitz us, they couldn’t call out our stuff and that just helped us.”
Stewart said that may have been partly true while also pointing out that quarterback Geno Smith was also picture perfect with his passing, enabling the clock to continue to run and not allowing Marshall’s defense the opportunity to regroup.
“It’s awful hard to blitz when people are running all over the place offensively – you don’t know what the formations are to run blitzes,” said Stewart.
The guy really in the eye of the storm was Smith, who withstood constant pressure throughout the game before leading West Virginia to its best back to back scoring drives in years. Smith beat Marshall with his arm – 32-of-45 passing for 316 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions – and his legs, scrambling for 17 yards on third and 11 on one play and later running for 20 yards to midfield on the Mountaineers’ game-tying drive.
“I thought he did a great job,” Stewart said Sunday. “He carried the football team. He spread the wealth and I was really pleased with the way Geno distributed the ball to five different people during the last two drives.”
Stewart was also happy with the way Smith methodically led the team down the field, taking what the defense gave him instead of trying to impatiently force throws down the field where Marshall’s secondary was positioned.
“Geno just took what they gave him. He hit underneath routes, he hit outside routes and he hit hole routes,” said Stewart. “He spread the field and he made Marshall defend 52 plus yards (sideline to sideline) and I thought that was excellent.”
Considering the circumstances, it was also an excellent early season victory for a West Virginia team searching for an identity. Perhaps it found one in the fourth quarter in Huntington under extremely difficult circumstances.
Briefly:
Friday’s game against Marshall was big for West Virginia, but no bigger than the other 11 games the Mountaineers will play this season, according Stewart.
“Had we lost the game it wouldn’t have been the end of the world,” he explained. “We play every game to win but I think if you coach emotionally like that and you put all of your eggs into one basket for a game and you lose that game, what do you tell your team then?
“I’m not going to be one of these guys that says this is our Super Bowl and this is a chance to make history and we’ve got to do this and do that … you start doing that stuff and you’re in trouble. It was game two and this week is game three.”
Stewart said he was unhappy with the way his team failed to finish drives through the first three quarters of Friday’s game.
“We had that ball a long time and got down there and didn’t get any points,” he said. “We got a field goal blocked and I was very frustrated about that. I’m frustrated with the way we played early on both sides of the ball and you say, well, why is that? That’s the stuff we have to figure out.”
One final item on the Marshall game … what will be remembered most about West Virginia’s comeback performance was the way Smith stood tall in the pocket and led the Mountaineers to 15 straight points in a span of eight minutes, but the catalyst to the comeback was Jorge Wright’s strip of Tron Martinez with 8 ½ minutes left in the game when the Thundering Herd were getting into position to end the game. Without that forced fumble, Smith’s heroics would not have been possible.
“Our guys never quit and once we got that fumble and they saw that offense move we got a spark,” said Stewart. “Our biggest problem on our last two drives was our defensive kids in the huddle because our kids were so fired up.”
Stewart thinks Maryland this weekend is going to follow a formula similar to what Marshall last Friday did by blitzing and trying to create havoc for West Virginia’s offense.
“I just hope we can hit some big plays this weekend,” Stewart said.
West Virginia’s six touchdowns this year have covered distances of 4, 17, 1, 4, 4, and 5 yards, making sustained drives a necessity to get into the end zone so far this season. A couple of long scoring plays would certainly take some of the pressure off the offense.
West Virginia’s three biggest concerns injury wise are safety Robert Sands, linebacker Pat Lazear and tight end Tyler Urban but Stewart said he is encouraged with all three. “I’m not too alarmed right now on Sunday with our injury list,” he said.
Urban and Lazear did not play against Marshall on Friday and Sands was in and out of the game.
Beilein’s first loss to Marshall came in 2005 right before the Mountaineers go hot and made it to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. And the next year his Sweet 16 team lost, 58-52, to Marshall just four days after knocking off UCLA at Pauley Pavilion.
Even Bob Huggins has had tougher-than-expected encounters with the Green and White, needing a defensive stop on the final play of the game to beat Marshall 66-64 during his first season on the Mountaineer bench in 2008. Even the last two years the games were battles, Huggins’ Final Four squad in 2010 needing to hit free throws down the stretch to pull out an eight-point victory over the Herd.
For that matter, the history books tell us that no WVU men’s basketball team has ever won in Huntington, losing all five times it has played there from 1982 to 1991 before the games got too volatile to continue on each other’s home floors.
The football team’s first excursion to Huntington in almost a century in 2007 was worse than a tooth extraction, the Mountaineers trailing 13-7 at halftime and the team being serenaded to a chorus of boos by upset West Virginia fans as they went into the locker room.
But WVU found its bearings in the second half and eventually ran away with a 48-23 victory.
“Sometimes you run into buzz saws,” said West Virginia coach Bill Stewart. “Why do upsets occur? Maybe that other team wanted it more than you. There were three major upsets this weekend that I saw and two of them were by I-AA teams over pretty good football teams, one from the Big Ten (Minnesota) and one from the ACC (Virginia Tech).”
Similar circumstances surrounded Friday night’s game with a couple of twists – four of Marshall’s football coaches had intimate knowledge of West Virginia’s system while a fifth was a former coach and player for WVU.
If you don’t think that was a factor on Friday then simply ignore what junior offensive guard Josh Jenkins had to say after the game.
“Yeah, I felt like they knew what we were doing,” he said. “They were calling out our plays when we were getting down in our stances.”
The West Virginia coaches were so concerned about what Marshall knew – and how little they knew about Marshall – that the decision was made to use a card system to signal in plays. But by halftime, Stewart was so fed up with it that he told his offensive coaches to toss those cards in the garbage can.
“We had a couple of delay of game penalties and I said, ‘That’s it, cards are out! I don’t care if they go in our huddle, but let’s just call our game and do what we do best,’” Stewart explained.
The offense finally found success when it went into hurry-up mode with eight minutes remaining, trailing by 15 points and needing to thread the needle just to tie the game and send it into overtime.
And somehow West Virginia did that, accounting for nearly 200 of its 469 yards on its final two drives of the night. Because the Mountaineers were not huddling and giving Marshall time to switch personnel and bring out additional pass rushers, that enabled a beleaguered offensive line the opportunity to finally get its feet under them.
Jenkins credits the quicker tempo as being the biggest difference in the way the offense performed late in the game.
“It helped drives because it made everything quick for us and that’s how we play,” he explained. “That’s how we play in practice. We knew they were going to know things and we had to do a little huddling and stuff. Us getting up to the line just cut all of that out because they couldn’t do any of that – they couldn’t blitz us, they couldn’t call out our stuff and that just helped us.”
Stewart said that may have been partly true while also pointing out that quarterback Geno Smith was also picture perfect with his passing, enabling the clock to continue to run and not allowing Marshall’s defense the opportunity to regroup.
“It’s awful hard to blitz when people are running all over the place offensively – you don’t know what the formations are to run blitzes,” said Stewart.
The guy really in the eye of the storm was Smith, who withstood constant pressure throughout the game before leading West Virginia to its best back to back scoring drives in years. Smith beat Marshall with his arm – 32-of-45 passing for 316 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions – and his legs, scrambling for 17 yards on third and 11 on one play and later running for 20 yards to midfield on the Mountaineers’ game-tying drive.
“I thought he did a great job,” Stewart said Sunday. “He carried the football team. He spread the wealth and I was really pleased with the way Geno distributed the ball to five different people during the last two drives.”
Stewart was also happy with the way Smith methodically led the team down the field, taking what the defense gave him instead of trying to impatiently force throws down the field where Marshall’s secondary was positioned.
“Geno just took what they gave him. He hit underneath routes, he hit outside routes and he hit hole routes,” said Stewart. “He spread the field and he made Marshall defend 52 plus yards (sideline to sideline) and I thought that was excellent.”
Considering the circumstances, it was also an excellent early season victory for a West Virginia team searching for an identity. Perhaps it found one in the fourth quarter in Huntington under extremely difficult circumstances.
Briefly:
“Had we lost the game it wouldn’t have been the end of the world,” he explained. “We play every game to win but I think if you coach emotionally like that and you put all of your eggs into one basket for a game and you lose that game, what do you tell your team then?
“I’m not going to be one of these guys that says this is our Super Bowl and this is a chance to make history and we’ve got to do this and do that … you start doing that stuff and you’re in trouble. It was game two and this week is game three.”
“We had that ball a long time and got down there and didn’t get any points,” he said. “We got a field goal blocked and I was very frustrated about that. I’m frustrated with the way we played early on both sides of the ball and you say, well, why is that? That’s the stuff we have to figure out.”
“Our guys never quit and once we got that fumble and they saw that offense move we got a spark,” said Stewart. “Our biggest problem on our last two drives was our defensive kids in the huddle because our kids were so fired up.”
“I just hope we can hit some big plays this weekend,” Stewart said.
West Virginia’s six touchdowns this year have covered distances of 4, 17, 1, 4, 4, and 5 yards, making sustained drives a necessity to get into the end zone so far this season. A couple of long scoring plays would certainly take some of the pressure off the offense.
Urban and Lazear did not play against Marshall on Friday and Sands was in and out of the game.
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Wednesday, May 13
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Tuesday, May 12
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Tuesday, May 12
