It’s never a good idea to poke an angry bear, which is exactly what Maryland safety A.J. Hendy did on Saturday when he decided to take a late shot at quarterback Skyler Howard on the Maryland sideline during the Mountaineers’ opening drive of the game.
Howard was clearly out of bounds at the 50 when Hendy came up and gave the defenseless quarterback a high, hard one to the chops.
“It kind of shakes your cage and wakes you up a little bit,” Howard said afterward. “That early, first series, I think it’s good to take a lick – you don’t want to take one like that - but it’s good to hear the pads hit.”
Hendy was assessed a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness on the play but remained in the game when replay officials determined that his hit was not targeting.
Yet even more important than the 15 yards in additional real estate for the West Virginia offense was it rallied an already determined Mountaineer team.
“I think it got pretty nasty,” said running back Wendell Smallwood. “It got the players going and we knew it was going to be a brawl. We knew some stuff was going to happen – bad calls, personal fouls – that always happens in rival games.
“There were players running over there, and I had to run over there to make sure everything was good with our quarterback,” he added.
Howard said it was nice to see his teammates rally behind him after taking that hit, “We’re all in it together and they showed it,” he said.
According to Smallwood, that wasn’t the moment when the team got fired up, though.
“It was on when we stepped on the field,” he said.
Briefly:
- At one point late in the fourth quarter West Virginia’s offense was a balanced as an offense can get – 297 yards rushing and 297 yards passing.
“That’s funny because I looked up and saw that stat (on the scoreboard) and I walked down to the mark where we had to get to to get over 300 and we got it on the next run so I was pulling for that,” said offensive line coach Ron Crook. “I just feel like in the second half we didn’t finish the way we needed to. We didn’t finish blocks the way we needed to. We didn’t finish drives and it was good to get that one done and get it in (Daikiel Shorts one-yard touchdown catch at the start of the fourth quarter) so that was a good confidence boost moving forward.”
West Virginia’s run game finished with a season-high 304 yards on 59 carries, and a lot of that can be attributed to what quarterback Skyler Howard is bringing to the table with his feet.
Howard only accounted for 13 net yards on Saturday against the Terps, but he ran it just enough on the zone play to keep the backside defensive end from crashing down to chase West Virginia’s runners from behind.
Crook explains.
“It keeps putting pressure on guys. They can’t make a mistake. They can’t squeeze because if they go a little too far (inside) it’s a big play the other way, so it makes them play a little more responsibility-oriented football,” he said.
Smallwood finished with a career-high 147 yards while Rushel Shell played his best game of the season with 15 carries for 77 yards. Both attributed what Howard was able to do in the run game for helping them find holes on Saturday.
“When we were getting outside they were scared Skyler would pull it so the D-ends were sitting flat-footed and I think I ran around them a couple of times,” said Smallwood.
Shell admits the run game this year has a much different element to it with Howard under center.
“Clint (Trickett) was more of a pocket passer but Skyler can run and that’s really hurting the defenses just because they just can’t keep chasing us because he will get 10 yards, 15 yards, 20 yards, so it’s really helping the run game,” admitted Shell.
What makes the zone-read so effective to the overall rushing attack is that Howard doesn’t have to run the play 20 times to get the defense’s attention. They only need to see it a couple of times on film to have to spend time working on it during the week.
“I talk about this all of the time, but we take what they give us,” said Howard. “If we see (the end crashing down to attack the running backs) we are going to take full advantage of it.
"Every element of our game compliments each other, whether it’s me running, Wendell running, Rushel running or putting the ball in the air, it all compliments each other,” he said.
That is the one aspect of West Virginia’s offensive attack Howard wants defenses to see and remember when they study tape of them.
“It’s something that they have to focus on in practice, so that’s good,” he said.
Additionally, it adds one more weapon to Holgorsen’s offensive arsenal. In the past, Holgorsen’s answers to specific things defenses were doing against them was either in the pass game or with his running backs, but having a mobile quarterback gives him something his prior offenses didn’t possess when he had primarily pocket passers.
Consequently, Holgorsen has found himself calling more running plays than he did when he was at either Oklahoma State or Houston.
“We have called 60 or 70 percent run plays for about a year and a half,” he said. “If they give us numbers, then we are going to run the ball every snap. When they don’t give us numbers, we are going to throw the ball downfield.”
- If you want to compare this year’s and last year’s West Virginia teams, what the Mountaineers have done against Maryland that last two seasons might be a pretty good indicator.
Last year in College Park, West Virginia jumped out to an early 28-6 lead against the Terps and then had to fight and claw to pull out a 40-37 victory on the last play of the game.
WVU got up early on Maryland once again this year and this time stuck its foot on the Terps’ throat. Saturday’s game was already over with 10:36 to go in the second quarter when Howard hooked up with Shelton Gibson on a pretty 41-yard touchdown pass down the far sideline.
Speaking of Gibson, he caught six passes for 118 yards and two touchdowns on Saturday and now appears to be developing into Howard’s preferred target. In three games this year Gibson has caught a team-best 12 passes for 329 yards and four touchdowns.
- Senior Shaq Petteway got the first sack of the season for the defense in the first quarter when he hauled down Caleb Rowe for a seven-yard loss. It was also the first sack the Maryland offensive line allowed this year. The Mountaineers got to Terp quarterbacks three times on Saturday.
- West Virginia’s 39-point triumph over Maryland was the largest margin of victory ever for the Mountaineers in the 52-game series, eclipsing the 1988 team’s 31-point win in Morgantown. West Virginia’s other blowout wins over the Terps came in 1919 (27 points), 1969 (24 points), 1991 (27 points), 1998 (22 points) and 2006 (21 points).
- Maryland coach Randy Edsall is probably glad his Terps won’t be coming back to Morgantown, West Virginia for a while. Edsall is now 0-6 against West Virginia in games played in Morgantown, going back to his days at Connecticut, and most of them have been blowout losses.
Edsall’s most competitive game against WVU in Morgantown came in 2009 when his Huskies dropped a 28-24 verdict. UConn took a late lead on an 88-yard touchdown reception in that game, but Noel Devine answered with a 56-yard touchdown run on West Virginia’s ensuing possession to win it for the Mountaineers.
The numbers for Edsall’s teams in those six losses to West Virginia are not very good, his teams falling by an average of 26.2 points per game while giving up an average of 481.3 yards per constest.
- Asked if Saturday’s 45-6 victory makes up for the 37-0 beating the Mountaineers absorbed against the Terps two years ago in Baltimore, Holgorsen smiled and replied, “We rectified that in the first half.”
Then he winked at the person who asked the question.
- Following Saturday’s 45-6 victory over Maryland, West Virginia should make a return to this week’s top 25. The Mountaineers were just outside the top 25 in last week’s AP poll at No. 27, and were No. 26 in the coaches’ poll, four points behind No. 25 Auburn.
If WVU gets in, that will make five Big 12 teams in this week’s top 25.
