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Football Notebook: WVU Defense Trending Up
October 04, 2016 03:47 PM | Football
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - How can a defense go from allowing 521 yards and 32 points one week to just 286 yards and 16 points the next against basically the same type of offense?
“It’s college football,” West Virginia defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said. “Alabama, everybody talks about how great they are, well, they play a spread team like Ole Miss and give up 500 yards and 40-some points (522 yards and 43 points, actually). It’s just college football right now.”
A bar graph depicting West Virginia’s defensive performance so far this year would be similar to what you typically see from the stock market in October - up, down, up and down.
It was up in the season opener against Missouri despite allowing 462 yards to the Tigers because a lot of that came when the outcome was already decided.
It was down in victories against Youngstown State and BYU when the FCS Penguins generated 405 total yards and 21 points and the Cougars managed 521 yards and 32 points two weeks ago in West Virginia’s last-minute victory in Landover, Maryland.
And it was up again last weekend when West Virginia held Kansas State to 16 points and 286 total yards, including only 108 yards in the second half.
When was the last time you saw a Bill Snyder coached team unable to put away a 13-point fourth quarter lead, or, see the 76-year-old coach sprint down the sideline to call a timeout and throw his headset on the ground in disgust because there was confusion on offense?
Both of those things happened last Saturday.
“There were some communication issues,” Snyder admitted after the game. “You have to take your hats off to West Virginia. I thought they played awfully well defensively.”
Because Gibson played more aggressively at the line of scrimmage and brought some type of pressure on nearly every snap, Kansas State had to burn all six of its timeouts with the offense standing at the line of scrimmage.
Five of the six timeouts could be directly attributed to confusion.
“I think their quarterback was trying to check to the perfect play, and we’d go from a blitz back to our base package and he wasn’t sure how to go with that so there was some miscommunication on their part because they burned them quick,” Gibson said. “They burned them quick coming out of the gate in the second half, too, which was good. We wanted to do that. We wanted to disguise what we were doing and how we were doing it.”
Two years ago, West Virginia did some similar things and held Kansas State to a net of just one rushing yard. The problem was the Wildcats gained 400 yards through the air.
Last Saturday, Kansas State got 120 on the ground and just 166 via the pass, completing 10 of 30 with one interception.
“I thought we struggled offensively in the second half when we had to have some movement,” Snyder said. “(We) couldn’t get first downs. We did get the ball down field but once we got across midfield we just hit a stonewall.”
“They were running the ball a little bit and we wanted to slow it down,” Gibson added. “We knew they were going to check speed option. That’s the one play I regret because we knew it was coming and the quarterback got out and made a big run and got a first down and they kicked the field goal to start the second half.”
But other than that, the defense handled just about everything Kansas State threw at them, including the pop pass that has given the Mountaineers some problems in the past.
“The one when Kyzir (White) got the sack they were trying to do that and I don’t know who it was but whoever it was blew up (Charles Jones) who was trying to sneak out,” Gibson said. “He knocked him down, the guy had nowhere to go and Kyzir came off the edge and made it so that was good see.
“Our kids knew what sets that play was coming out of, our guys were alerted to it and every (meeting) room who has that really stressed whoever has that back, make sure you stay with him, bang him and don’t give him a free release,” Gibson added.
Overall, the defense made significant improvement in almost every statistical category, going from No. 108 in total defense to No. 80 this week, from No. 106 against the run to No. 93, from No. 81 in pass defense to No. 65, from No. 74 in first downs allowed to No. 49 and most importantly, from No. 39 to No. 32 in points allowed.
With the exception of the BYU game, the defense has been particularly stingy in the second half, limiting K-State to 108 yards and Youngstown State to 185 yards. Even Missouri, which had a lot of yardage in the fourth quarter when the outcome was already decided, managed to gain less than half of its 462 total yards in the second half.
“They were locked in,” Gibson said of his unit’s performance against the Wildcats. “They were good on the sideline making adjustments. Every part of that game from the sideline adjustments to being out there, they were good. I was afraid at the end that they were going to get too emotional. The crowd was into it, our kids were into it and I told them on that last drive, ‘Guys, settle down, don’t get caught up in it, just go do your job.’ Then we got bad field position to start that and then we stepped up big. That was a huge stand there when they got it to the 30.”
Gibson said earlier in the week that he felt BYU’s offense dictated play more than his defense did - something he said needed to change against Kansas State.
The solution he came up with was to bring more pressure and attack the Wildcats.
“I wanted to get our kids going. I was tired of them sitting back and trying to read and fit things perfectly,” he said. “The one thing these kids do - maybe more than any other defense I’ve ever been a part of - is they are out to please their coaches. They want to do everything perfect. They don’t want to make mistakes and sometimes they just think too much instead of reacting. (Saturday) what I wanted to do was just turn them loose. Quit thinking and go.”
The chore will not get any easier in two weeks when the Mountaineers face the No. 1-rated passing offense in the country in Texas Tech, which is averaging 547.8 yards per game.
The Red Raiders also rank No. 1 in points scored (59.5 ppg.) and total yards (664.3 ypg.) and are fourth in total first downs with 134.
Of course, there will be plenty of eyes trained on this Saturday’s Texas Tech-Kansas State game to see how effective the Red Raiders are going to be against K-State’s stout defense.
However, Gibson’s crew should have more confidence when it travels to Lubbock based on the way it played last weekend.
“We just needed to play well and I thought we did that. We actually played a full game and I thought we finished, which is good,” Gibson concluded.
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