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Campus Connection: Weekend Notebook
August 21, 2015 01:35 PM | Football
The depth chart Dana Holgorsen released earlier this week is by no means final, and changes could happen right up to September 5 when the Mountaineers open the season against Georgia Southern, but there were some interesting things to take away from Holgorsen’s latest snapshot of his lineup.
One, all three incoming wide receivers are going to play, particularly at X where JC import Ka’Raun White and true freshman Jovon Durante are both listed No. 1 on the depth chart. And at Z, true freshman Gary Jennings is battling it out with sophomore Shelton Gibson.
Other green players on the two-deep included redshirt freshman Yodny Cajuste at left tackle, redshirt freshman William Crest Jr. at quarterback, and redshirt freshman Donte Thomas-Williams at running back. Cajuste remains ahead of junior Sylvster Townes at the all-important left tackle position.
There are no true or redshirt freshmen listed on the defensive two-deep.
Two, several West Virginians are listed on the latest depth chart, including Morgantown natives Jon Lewis (defensive end), Shane Commodore (free safety), and Billy Kinney (punter and holder).
Other state natives on the two-deep include Alum Creek’s Cody Clay and Martinsburg’s Darren Arndt at tight end, Huntington’s Elijah Wellman at running back, Martinsburg’s Justin Arndt at mike linebacker, Hurricane’s Mike Molina at kicker, and Princeton’s Nick Meadows at long snapper.
And finally, there are a combined 206 career starts among the top 25 players listed on the defensive two-deep, including 11 with 10 or more career starts, giving West Virginia one of the most experienced defenses in the country this season.
That can make a football coach sleep a little better at night.
By the way, Holgorsen’s next media briefing is scheduled for Tuesday at noon.
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It seems like just about every other player on West Virginia’s roster these days has a hyphenated name. I’m not sure when the trend became popular, but the very first Mountaineer player I can ever recall having a hyphenated name was quarterback Macadoo Harrison-Dixon.
Harrison-Dixon didn’t last long at WVU and I always wondered what happened to him. Well, thanks to Google (and Macadoo’s unique name), I learned that he transferred to Delaware State where he completed his collegiate career in 1995. As of 2014, Macadoo was a high school football coach back in his native Delaware.
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Gyorko
It’s good to see former Mountaineer baseball standout Jedd Gyorko experiencing some success at the plate once again for the San Diego Padres.
Since returning to the major’s at the end of June following his demotion to Triple-A, Gyorko has raised his batting average to .233 after beginning April in a miserable 7-for-52 slump (.135 average).
Gyorko has hit six home runs during the last two months and now shows eight home runs for the season.
According to to the website FriarsonBase.com, Gyorko was tinkering with his swing in order to avoid a sophomore slump in 2014, which he ended up having. Since returning from the minors, Gyorko has altered his batting stance and the results have been positive.
Recently, Gyorko made his first big league start at shortstop. That was Gyorko’s regular position in college at WVU.
Here is more on Jedd: http://friarsonbase.com/2015/08/02/padres-analysis-jedd-gyorko-finding-success-since-call-up/
***
The start to Kevin White’s professional career could be delayed by a year, according to the Chicago Sun Times. Last week, the Chicago Bears announced White is having surgery to repair his ailing shin and could miss most, if not all of his rookie season.
White was the seventh overall player taken in the 2015 NFL Draft following an impressive senior season at WVU and an equally impressive performance at the 2015 NFL Combine in Indianapolis: http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/7/71/890963/fair-question-kevin-white-injured-bears-drafted
Meanwhile, West Virginia’s other drafted wide receiver, Mario Alford, is turning heads in Cincinnati as a return specialist and specialty receiver in certain offensive packages. Alford was the 238th player taken in last spring’s NFL draft: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2550418-what-mario-alfords-usage-means-for-cincinnati-bengals-in-2015
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I recently received an email from Jim Hess, a former Mountaineer golfer in the early 1960s and the grandson of Piano Legs Hickman, a turn-of-the-century major league standout with West Virginia University ties. Jim is now living in St. Louis and frequently keeps me informed of how Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey are doing with the Rams.
The feeling here is that this is a big year for both players, particularly Austin, the eighth player taken in the 2013 NFL draft.
Austin has displayed flashes, but the sense I get is that Rams fans are looking for more from their No. 1 pick than just the 71 catches and four touchdowns he’s produced so far in two seasons there.
We’ll see.
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Izzo-Brown
Women’s soccer is the first sport to officially lift the lid on 2015-16 WVU sports season with this afternoon’s game against SIUE (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) in Bloomington, Indiana.
On Sunday, Nikki Izzo-Brown’s 12th-ranked Mountaineers will take on Virginia Tech in Bloomington. The Hokies have been a thorn in West Virginia’s side in recent years, knocking the Mountaineers out of the NCAA tournament in 2013 and 2011.
***
Junior defensive end Noble Nwachukwu believes there is a lot more depth on the Mountaineer defensive line this year. “As far as the D-line goes we’re really interchangeable,” he said. “We don’t really have ones and twos, they call the twos 1A. They can come in for us whenever we need them. We know we can’t play the whole game by ourselves, so we know we are going to need them.”
Nwachukwu admits he was worn down by the end of the season.
“I tried to go every play, but it’s really hard,” he said. “We have a little more depth this year so I think it will be good for us.”
***
The rendering released yesterday depicting what the new concourses are going to look like at Milan Puskar Stadium will be a major upgrade for Mountaineer fans attending games at the 35-year-old facility, in my opinion. The fan experience has changed dramatically since stadiums were being constructed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that’s for sure.
***
The competition was somewhat suspect, but West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said he saw enough from his guys during last week’s Bahamas excursion to come away encouraged with his team.
“We’re going to score in flurries,” he said earlier this week. “It was 15-13 and then it was 51-15, or something like that. I think it’s the cumulative effect of us playing so many people it wears people down.”
Huggins admitted he was disappointed with the way some of his older players performed in transition, however. “Those are things I hope we can fix,” he said.
The player who made the best decisions in transition?
Huggins said it was freshman James "Beetle" Bolden. “I think he’s pretty good with the ball,” said the veteran coach, adding that Bolden still needs to add a lot of weight and strength to hold up for an entire season in the Big 12.
Also, Huggins said he doesn’t know if junior college guard Teyvon Myers, who signed with the Mountaineers last spring, will be available this season.
“(The compliance department is) working on it,” said Huggins. “If (he’s not available) then we will bring him in December and redshirt him. He’s missed a lot already. You could really see the difference with Beetle and Lamont (West), in particular, as they got (more playing time). The first game they were nervous and feeling their way through but I think after each game they got more and more comfortable. Beetle was terrific the fourth quarter of our last game.”
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And finally, an old-school Mountaineer football story to take you into the weekend.
Bill McKenzie's game-winning kick
Bob Pitrolo, a student manager for the 1975 team, emailed me the other day wanting to set the record straight on a story I wrote several years ago concerning West Virginia’s great victory over Pitt that season.
When Bill McKenzie made his game-winning kick to defeat the Panthers, I wrote that former Mountaineer player Bernie Kirchner was the person who caught the football in the student section and delivered it to McKenzie in the locker room after the game.
That was a story I got from McKenzie.
Well, McKenzie did get the football, but that’s not exactly how it ended up in his possession. Pitrolo said retrieving it from Bernie was a little more complicated than that.
Back then, it was the responsibility of the student managers to position themselves in the back of the end zone to retrieve all field goals kicked into the stands. West Virginia didn’t have the budget it does today and Carl Roberts, the man in charge of WVU’s equipment at the time, took an Ebenezer Scrooge approach to equipment disbursement.
If a player got two jock straps from old Carl during the season then he was considered lucky.
So when McKenzie lined up to kick the game-winning field goal, Roberts deployed three student managers in the stands, one of them being Pitrolo.
As McKenzie’s kick sailed through the uprights, Kirchner was there to secure the football while a mob of students ran out onto the field to begin celebrating with the players. Pitrolo saw Kirchner with the football under his arm and went after him to get it.
Instead of tossing the ball back to Pitrolo, Kirchner figured he might have a valuable piece of memorabilia on his hands so he hightailed it out of the stadium and began walking briskly up the hill toward Sunnyside where another mob of WVU students was already assembling to start their outdoor barbeques of porch furniture.
“I had to chase Bernie up to Sunnyside and when I got him stopped, I had to convince him to return the game ball,” recalled Pitrolo. “It wasn’t easy, and I had to promise to give Bernie another ball to replace it, which I did the next day.”
When Pitrolo returned to the locker room with the game ball, he gave it to Coach Bobby Bowden, who presented it to McKenzie in front of the team.
To this day, McKenzie says he still has that football in his recreation room – the real 1975 Pitt game ball, not a substituted one, thanks to the fast thinking of student manager Bob Pitrolo.
And now you know the rest of the story!
Have a great weekend!
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