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Campus Connection: Some Random Thoughts
December 04, 2015 05:19 PM | Football
I often read the notifications timeline on my Twitter feed during football games to get a feel for what fans are thinking, and to be quite frank, a lot of it is pretty amusing.
Of course, a popular subject this year has been West Virginia’s inconsistent passing game, which is now averaging about 11 fewer pass attempts per game this season compared to the 41 passes a game the Mountaineers were throwing last year.
Naturally, junior quarterback Skyler Howard has been an easy target – as all quarterbacks have been easy targets since they became the primary guy throwing all of the passes back in the late 1940s.
I can remember when Terry Bradshaw was just a dumb hick from Louisiana before he won four Super Bowls for the Steelers.
Do you?
Do you remember when Troy Aikman was throwing all those interceptions for the 1-15 Cowboys back in 1989? Probably not. Or all those bad games Fran Tarkenton had before he finally figured out how to throw passes to the players in the same colored jersey he was wearing once got tired of scrambling around?
Now this is not to suggest that Howard is even remotely in their class - far from it - but it does illustrate that even some of the game’s best quarterbacks have had their rough moments.
Overlooked with those early Steelers teams Bradshaw played on was the fact that the franchise was being totally rebuilt from the ground up.
Overlooked about that bad Cowboys team Aikman played on in 1989 was the fact that they were in the process of getting a massive infusion of talent from the Minnesota Vikings via the Hershel Walker trade.
And overlooked was how bad those early Vikings and Giants teams were that Tarkenton played on when he was running around out there like some kind of Johnny Manziel - 40 years before Johnny was being Johnny – not the playmaker he came to be in the mid-1970s when Minnesota dominated the NFC.
What I’m getting at is that there are usually reasons beyond the obvious for why things don’t always work as efficiently as they should.
In West Virginia’s case, Howard is not throwing to NFL-caliber wide receivers as Mountaineer quarterbacks were doing a year ago. Admittedly, Howard hasn’t always been accurate with his throws, but he also doesn’t have a Kevin White to get the ball to when all else fails either.
Sometimes the best play is simply throwing the ball up in the air to your 6-foot-3, 215-pound wide receiver in man coverage and watching him high-point it against a much smaller defensive back.
Name one time that has happened this year?
You can’t because it hasn’t.
Howard has also been the victim of several drops at key moments in games. Call up the Baylor and TCU games on your DVRs and count the number of dropped passes in those two games – and at key moments when momentum was shifting the other way, too.
Who wore those drops, the guys who dropped them or the guy who threw them? Of course it’s the guy who threw them, which has always been the case – and always will be. That’s just a part of the game and something Howard has handled very well, in my opinion.
Here is something else to chew on as you get ready to hit your send buttons on Saturday afternoon: West Virginia’s two leading receivers have 32 fewer catches and 212 fewer yards than West Virginia’s No. 2 receiver last year, Mario Alford.
That bears repeating: West Virginia’s two leading receivers this year have 32 fewer catches and 212 fewer yards than West Virginia’s No. 2 receiver last year, Mario Alford.
Throwing the football is a complicated deal involving a lot of moving parts, and all of them have to be working in unison for it to be successful. It’s clear from listening to Dana Holgorsen’s press conferences and observing his body language on the field during games this year that he’s not happy with the way the passing game has been going.
But he is happy to be winning football games right now, as we all are.
***
The silly season in college football has started with significant changes already taking place at several major programs.
Guys on the outs are back in, as is the case with Mark Richt, who is returning to his alma mater to coach the Miami Hurricanes. What Miami is getting is 15 year’s worth of experience from a head coach who has won 74 percent of his football games in the toughest football conference on the planet - even more difficult than the AFC East, according to some of the living brain donors down there – and the team that let him go is getting a guy who has yet to win a college football game when his headset is plugged in to both channels.
Of course, it was pointed out to me by one of our resident SEC experts that Georgia has gone down this path several times before, with Vince Dooley in 1964, and once again with Richt in 2001.
The one occasion when Georgia veered off course and hired an experienced head coach it didn’t turn out too well. That’s when the Bulldogs lured Jim Donnan away from our friends down in Huntington.
Their solution to that problem was to go back out and hire the best young assistant coach in the game, which turned out to be Florida State’s Richt.
We’ll see if the Georgia formula works once again with Kirby Smart.
***
Now, switching gears … overlooked (notice a pattern here?) in the resurgent play of West Virginia’s defense this year has been the outstanding work put forth by the three guys up front – Kyle Rose, Noble Nwachukwu and Christian Brown – and that’s a direct reflection on Bruce Tall for the outstanding teaching and coaching he’s done this fall.
If you remember, Tall was coaching the WVU safeties on those disruptive Mountaineer defenses that helped them win major bowl games on a regular basis under Rich Rodriguez, and it was Tall who defensive coordinator Tony Gibson specifically wanted when Tom Bradley left to become UCLA’s defensive coordinator.
Look at what Tall’s three players have combined to do through 11 games this year – 101 tackles, 17½ tackles for losses and 13½ sacks playing in a scheme that is not necessarily designed to have its defensive linemen involved in that many plays.
It is their job to eat up blockers and allow the guys behind them to roam free, which speaks to how effective they have become working with Tall on a daily basis.
“They all work together, all three of them,” Tall said of his three starters. “I think Christian Brown kind of gets lost in the conversation a little bit and each week he has gotten better and better and has been extremely productive, too. It’s a combination.
“The very first play last game Noble got the tackle, Kyle got the assisted tackle and Christian got the two-for (double team),” Tall continued. “He ate up the two blocks that allowed the other guys to be successful. That’s the plays I like to highlight in meetings to show them, hey, all three of you made something happen on that one play.”
What these guys have done shouldn’t be taken lightly, either, especially in this day and age of poor tackling. Tall admits he’s had to adjust the way he teaches his guys how to tackle as the rules continually change.
“Tackling has taken on a new style now and you have to be ahead of the game because you can’t teach tackling the way we used to,” he noted. “Way back when people used their head more and stuck their head right in the target and that’s not the way you do things today. It’s utilizing same-shoulder, same-leg and understanding proper technique. You can still be very powerful and very explosive if you do the right things.”
Clearly, Tall’s guys are doing it the right way.
***
And finally, some words of congratulations are in order to Mike Carey for winning his 302nd career game Wednesday night against Morehead State to become West Virginia University’s all-time winningest women’s basketball coach.
As I wrote last week, Carey has earned every single one of his wins wherever he’s been, from high school boys and girls to small-college men’s basketball to now Power 5 Conference women’s basketball.
When Carey took over the WVU program in 2001, West Virginia was winning about 37 percent of its games during a nine-season stretch from 1992-2000, and the Mountaineer women’s program had very little success or tradition to sell to recruits when he got here.
Clearly, Carey has changed that over the last 15 years.
Some words, too, about the person he surpassed: Kittie Blakemore.
Miss Kittie, as we called her when she was working here at WVU, is the epitome of class and dignity and she has probably made the single biggest impact of anyone in furthering the cause of women’s sports at West Virginia University since the adoption of Title IX in 1972.
It was Kittie who developed the women’s sports plan and cleared the path that we continue to travel down today.
Kittie was a successful basketball coach, but relationships were always far more important to her than ball reversals or rebounding, and she wasn’t one to casually lob grenades in a room full of administrators just to see what would happen. She had an easy-going, grandmotherly way about her that proved just as effective as her younger, sometimes more zealous colleagues.
She could always find a way to get her point across forcefully without punching you in the face, a skill that is seemingly becoming much more difficult to possess these days.
Many years ago, I remember her once explaining to me the necessity of gender equity in college sports this way: “John, if you had a son and a daughter wouldn’t you want your daughter to have the same athletic opportunities that your son has? Well, right now that’s not possible, but we can do both, and not do it at the expense of your son, either.”
Looking back on it, she explained things in a way that a childless 25-year-old male from a conservative small town in West Virginia could understand and appreciate - even more so now that I am 47-year-old father of a teenaged daughter and son.
Kittie killed you with kindness, for sure, but she has a steel bar beneath that soft exterior of hers that also makes up the fabric of who she is.
You can’t do what she did for as long as she did without having that, too.
Have a great weekend!
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