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Football Notebook: Bowl Prep Continues
December 22, 2015 10:59 AM | Football
West Virginia University coach Dana Holgorsen had his pre-bowl news conference Monday morning in the Milan Puskar Center team meeting room.
West Virginia faces Arizona State in the 2016 Motel 6 Cactus Bowl at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday, January 2. The game will be played at 10:15 p.m. ET and is the last college football bowl game before the national championship game played on Monday, January 11.
“It’s on national TV and it’s the last game being played,” Holgorsen said. “I would imagine that you would get pretty fired up to play regardless of where it is at.”
Holgorsen and his coaching staff have been studying the Sun Devils and are impressed with what they’ve seen on tape.
“Arizona State is a very dangerous team,” Holgorsen noted. “They were picked by a lot of people on the preseason to be in the college football playoffs. They had a lot of people coming back and they have a quality coaching staff.
“All three phases of the ball are going to be coached up well and they have great players – their recruiting base is as good as anywhere.”
Offensive coordinator Mike Norvell has since departed to take over the head coaching duties at Memphis, but Holgorsen doesn’t anticipate dramatic changes when the two teams meet.
The Sun Devils run an up-tempo, efficient offense, according to Holgorsen.
“They are right down the middle as far as the run-pass aspect of it,” he said. “They are going to try and establish the run, they have a dual-threat quarterback (Mike Bercovici) – he can sling it around a little bit and he’s gritty and he can do some things in the run game so we are going to have to account for him.
“They have great skill at wide out. (Senior wide receiver) D.J. Foster is one of the best in the country. They are averaging 5.8 yards per play, they are moving the ball and they’re not turning the ball over,” he said.
Defensively, Arizona State is going to blitz at least someone on just about every play. Sun Devils coach Todd Graham has a defensive background and his teams are known for bringing pressure and being disruptive.
Arizona State has one of the better run-stopping units in the country but has been vulnerable to the pass, particularly down the field.
“On video, it seems like they blitz 100 percent of the time,” Holgorsen said. “It’s as much as I’ve seen, and they are really good at it. They are great against the run, and that’s because they are big; they can tackle, their ‘backers go lateral and they can also fill gaps and get you behind the line of scrimmage. They blitz to get you behind the chains.
“Obviously, we are a run-first team. We work hard at trying to get the ball in (Wendell Smallwood’s) and (Rushel Shell’s) hands,” Holgorsen said. “If they take that away, we have to be efficient and effective in the pass game, and we have been working hard at that for the last couple of weeks.”
West Virginia will practice today, tomorrow and will have one more workout in Morgantown on Monday, December 28, before flying down to Arizona to continue on-site preparation.
Tickets for the 2016 Motel 6 Cactus Bowl are available online by logging on to WVUGAME.com.
Briefly:
Keith Patterson
* There are some staff ties to this year’s game. Arizona State defensive coordinator Keith Patterson spent the 2013 season coordinating Holgorsen’s defense at WVU and he also worked with defensive coordinator Tony Gibson on Todd Graham’s coaching staff at Pitt. Graham, of course, spent two seasons working at WVU on Rich Rodriguez’s defensive staff, spending one season as co-defensive coordinator in 2002.
“If you start talking about coaching familiarity then you will have that same conversation virtually every game we play,” Holgorsen said. “There is so much crossover in the Big 12, and we deal with it every day. If (Patterson) knows me and how I think, I guess I know him and how he thinks. He calls it defensively and I call it offensively, so it should be a lot of fun.”
* Holgorsen said Monday it’s difficult to conduct later practices down at the bowl site to get acclimated with the late kickoff (10:15 p.m. ET). The game will likely end sometime around 1 a.m. on the East Coast.
“You can practice later in the day but there are bowl activities that you have to go to,” he said. “There are dinners and functions. If you let them sleep to 9 a.m. or 10 a.m., it’s noon here. Then you let them go to the pool for six hours or go buy a t-shirt and walk around and you practice later in the day from 6-9 p.m. then your day is done. We will be as late as we can.”
* The coach said he had nothing to report on mid-semester grades.
* The process has already started for some of the underclassmen to submit their paperwork to see where they stand as far as the NFL draft. Holgorsen said some discussions have already begun with some of his players and will continue after the bowl game.
“Every kid wants to know their draft status and I have bad news for a lot of these guys – they are not going to get drafted, so they have to stay in school, play their tail off and enjoy their college experience,” he said.
Holgorsen said the NFL is making a big push to encourage underclassmen to remain in college, but yet they are getting a record number of early submissions.
“They are starting to put a limit on it,” Holgorsen said. “We will submit a few and I can tell you what they are going to say, but we will wait until they come back.”
* Holgorsen was asked Monday if he has any interest in the high number of starting quarterbacks planning to transfer to other schools.
“I am always interested in a good player, whether he’s a quarterback, running back, O-line or whatever,” he said.
Holgorsen said he’s not sure why so many quarterbacks are seeking transfers these days.
“It comes down to that there are more quarterbacks playing now than there have ever been,” he said. “Guys get their feet wet and they play. They have experience, and they might not be the guy where they are at, but they can be that guy somewhere else. That is my guess. Every kid has a different situation.”
* West Virginia had 17 players go through December graduation last Friday afternoon, a number Holgorsen termed “pretty healthy.”
And a number of those December graduates still have eligibility remaining.
“We are proud of that,” he said. “I don’t know how fourth- and fifth-year seniors leave here without two degrees with as many opportunities as they have. A lot of those guys are in grad school right now and that is something we are definitely proud of. How many times have we talked about these seniors? It’s a special class because so many came here to get a degree and there are even three or four that came in that aren’t here anymore and they have their degrees. The high percentage of those signing classes four or five years ago are leaving here accomplishing what they want to accomplish.”
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