They say failing to prepare is preparing for failure.
Well, Tony Gibson made sure his West Virginia University defensive players had their T's crossed and there I's dotted during last night’s impressive 44-0 shutout victory over Georgia Southern.
Because Georgia Southern is so unique and so unusual in what it does, Gibson said he had to begin preparing for the Eagles as early as last spring.
“In 2005, we played an option team (Wofford) but, no disrespect to them, it wasn’t Georgia Southern,” said Gibson. “This team went into the Swamp (two years ago) and put up 400 yards. In 2011, these guys went to Alabama when they won a national championship and got Alabama for 300-some yards rushing – NC State and Georgia Tech (last year) - when you watch them they do it to everybody. The only thing going through my head preparing for them was, ‘Oh boy.’”
So Gibson worked the phones and took a couple of road trips, visiting with some of his coaching buddies to get a better handle on how to defend Georgia Southern’s zone-read option offense. He even brought in some high school coaches last spring to clinic his staff on some of the old-school option principles.
“We were reaching out to a lot of different people. The one thing about it, the Sunbelt is pretty tight because they wouldn’t tell us anything. I hope they don’t call me for help now,” Gibson joked.
Each time Gibson put on a tape to watch Georgia Southern and begin to formulate a plan for how to stop it he would look at another game and come up with something else to do.
Each time he put in another tape something else would pop into his head and soon he was all over the place with ideas of how to stop it.
“I just didn’t feel good at all,” he admitted. “The whole summer I didn’t feel good and even at the start of camp I didn’t feel good. We were running plays and one day we’d run it against one front and coverage and the next day we’d run it against another front and coverage.”
Then, about two weeks ago, Gibson said enough is enough. He told the defensive staff this is what they were going to do and from that point forward they just made little tweaks to the overall plan.
Senior linebacker Nick Kwiatkoski admitted he couldn’t recall a time during his college career when the defense began working on a season-opening opponent so early in training camp.
“We were working it in a little bit each day,” he said.
Former athletic director Oliver Luck probably didn’t do the Mountaineers any favors by scheduling such an unusual (and successful) team, but he did do them one big favor by scheduling the Eagles in the opener to give the staff enough time to prepare for what the Eagles do.
Gibson said things really began to click for his guys on Wednesday, thanks to the play of freshman quarterback David Sills on the scout team.
Sills did an outstanding job simulating Georgia Southern’s option offense by giving the defense such accurate looks. Gibson said the job the scout team did last week was probably the best he’s seen in more than 20 years of coaching.
“The credit goes to David Sills. That kid worked his tail off to get us to this point because the looks he was giving us and how he maneuvers the ball,” he said.
Gibson’s first inclination is to blitz, but in this case he had to keep reminding himself during the game not to become overly aggressive because that plays right into what Georgia Southern wants to do offensively.
“I like to blitz, in case you guys (media) don’t know that. I like to get after them a little bit and it was frustrating,” he said. “When they got in their 10-personnel stuff on third down we got after them a little bit and all three of Karl’s picks were the same blitz, the same coverage and they ran the same route.”
Other than that, his defensive call sheet consisted of about four different calls, he said.
Where he did choose to play aggressively was on the edge by bringing pressure to force quarterback Favian Upshaw to make quicker reads. If he pulled the ball and took off running he was going to get hit and that got the Georgia Southern offense out of sync a little bit.
“That was from sending somebody right at him,” said Gibson. “We did not want to give him time to get out and try and make a move on us. We wanted that thing out as quick as we could and turn it into a toss sweep and let us run because we feel that we can do that pretty well.”
The defense ran well enough, in fact, to hold one of college football’s most lethal rushing offenses to just 195 yards while also ending Georgia Southern’s 242-game scoring streak that spanned nearly two decades.
The last time Georgia Southern was blanked was on December 2, 1995 in the Division I-AA playoffs against Montana, a pretty impressive run at any level of football.
After watching the film later today all of the hard work the defensive staff did getting prepared for Saturday’s opener is going right into the dumpster because hardly any of it carries over to what the Mountaineers will face during the remainder of the season.
“I told our GAs yesterday, ‘Clean the boards and throw it all away. I’m tired of looking at it,’” said Gibson.
“You can’t take much from the scheme because we’re not going to face anything like this the rest of the year. Sorry for teams that watch this and think they’ve got a bead on us, but they’re not going to see that again,” he concluded.
