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Campus Connection: Friday Notes
November 18, 2016 09:42 AM | Football
Think back to last winter when there was a five-alarm fire going on in WVU’s secondary room.
Daryl Worley had informed the coaching staff that he was leaving school a year early to take a stab at professional football, and then his position coach, Brian Mitchell, chose to take a lateral job at Virginia Tech shortly after signing day.
Who was going to replace Worley as the team’s lock-down corner? And more importantly, who was going to coach him?
Well, hit the fast-forward button to today, Friday, November 18, 2016.
How many times have the names Daryl Worley and Brian Mitchell come up in any discussions about the state of West Virginia’s DB play these days?
Worley is doing well with the Carolina Panthers and Mitchell is doing his thing with the 7-3 Hokies, and yet West Virginia is humming right along with Blue Adams coaching a secondary that includes senior corner Rasul Douglas, No. 2 in the nation in interceptions this week.
Douglas has come so far - and so quickly - that he’s likely going to be joining Worley in the league next year.
At least that’s what Adams, who came from the league to West Virginia last winter, believes is possible for the 6-foot-2-inch, 203-pound Douglas.
“Yeah, he has some redeemable qualities,” Adams admitted. “He’s a prototype. I think he has the height and weight. He’s strong, plays physical and I think he has good change of direction - good acceleration and good deceleration for a big man. Normally, you see guys that tall and they don’t transition that well. But he’s doing a good job because he works at it, now.”
There will be a bunch of NFL scouts at Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday night to check out all those skills guys Oklahoma is bringing to Morgantown, so they will get a chance to eyeball Douglas on the other side of the ball as well to see how he matches up against the talented Sooners, specifically Dede Westbrook.
It’s going to be a challenge for sure, but one Adams is confident one for which Douglas is ready.
“Rasul is playing with a different walk, a different swagger - a different look in his eye,” Adams said. “He’s not a rah-rah guy on game day but when I look at him I know he’s locked in. It’s different.”
There were a couple of plays Douglas made last week against Texas that certainly caught the eyes of scouts, and both happened in the second half when the Mountaineers were nursing a lead.
In the third quarter, Douglas pulled the football right out of the arms of Texas wide receiver John Burt to make a pretty interception along the Longhorn sideline - his sixth of the season. It was purely an instinctive play on his part.
The other happened late in the game when the Longhorns needed five yards on fourth down to keep a drive alive. Douglas, up tight on Texas’ 6-foot-6-inch, 212-pound receiver Collin Johnson, was able to slam him down to the turf a yard short of the sticks to make a critical stop.
That’s what ballplayers do and Douglas is becoming one heck of a ballplayer for the Mountaineers this year.
“I’m motivated to get more guys to where Rasul is at,” Adams said. “Rasul is going to continue to get better and I want more - I want more out of all of the guys.
“Kudos to him.”
And kudos to Adams, for helping get it out of him and the rest of West Virginia’s defensive backs.
“The bar was set kind of high before I got here so I just came in and tried to help everyone get better,” Adams said. “I try to keep the guys’ noses down. I tell them there is going to come a time when I tap them on the shoulder and it’s going to be over. Then we can look up and look at the portrait that we’ve painted, but until then our heads are down and we’re grinding.”
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Matt Wells
Matt Wells, senior associate athletic director for external affairs, says tickets sales for Saturday night’s Oklahoma game have been steady all week.
WVU ticket sellers have been fighting strong headwinds, from WVU students leaving campus for Thanksgiving recess, to Oklahoma returning some tickets to a less-than-desirable early-week forecast for Saturday’s game that does not seem to be as bad as once predicted, “My magic eight-ball says clear skies and temperatures in the 70s at game time,” Wells joked Thursday morning.
“We’re down to our last couple hundred in general public (seating),” Wells noted. “We have also opened up the upper-level student section to the general public.”
The athletic department worked with WVU Student Life and the WVU Student Government Association to make this possible.
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Isn’t it amazing how good teams seem to get all of the breaks. I can recall many, many years when West Virginia used to play Penn State and we just waited for something bad to happen to the Mountaineers and something good to happen to the Nittany Lions.
It was as if these things were a part of the planning process whenever you faced those guys. Well, West Virginia seems to be finally getting some breaks this season, for whatever reason.
We have a guy in our office who always talks about teams of destiny and perhaps that is what we are seeing with this year’s Mountaineer team.
“Hell, in 2014 we couldn’t get a single break and this year we seem to be getting some,” defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said. “Who knows. I don’t know what it is - what kind of mojo we have right now - but I’m not changing anything that I do.”
***
Last night I was in the other room while the Houston-Louisville football game was going on and whenever you hear the game announcer say “beat down” several times during the telecast that’s never a good thing, I suppose.
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Tony Gibson
Do you remember a couple of years ago when former Maryland coach Randy Edsall complained about the state of college football when his Maryland defense had to face more than 100 snaps against West Virginia?
Well, our Statistical Savant, The Signalcaller, came up with an interesting stat that I can’t verify, but will repeat here anyway.
According to Jed Drenning, there have been 16 instances this year when teams have had more than 100 offensive plays in a game - happening twice against West Virginia - and in both instances the Mountaineers held their opponents to 20 points or fewer, the only defense to do so.
Missouri ran 100 offensive plays and scored 11 points in the season opener, and Texas had 100 plays and scored 20 points last Saturday.
Those 11 points Missouri scored against West Virginia were the fewest scored by a team with at least 100 snaps the last four years, according to the Savant.
Therefore, the key to Saturday’s game is letting Oklahoma run 100 or more plays.
“Ah, yeah,” was Gibson’s response to that suggestion on Tuesday afternoon.
Speaking of stats, the only three defensive stats Gibson says he pays attention to are turnovers, points allowed and third-down defense.
“The biggest stat is this … win first obviously,” he said. “The way you do that is be good on third down, be good on turnovers and don’t let them score. Those three things … (Texas) was 2 of 11 the other day on third down. Red-zone chances they got two field goals, we blocked a field goal and they scored 20 points. I don’t care if we give up 1,000 yards, if they tell me you can be in this league and give up 20 points a game, I’ll take it.”
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To me, the collection of skill guys Oklahoma is bringing to Morgantown on Saturday night might be the best we’ve seen since No. 1 Miami came here in 2002.
I know Baylor was really good in 2012 with Nick Florence, Terrence Williams, Tevin Reese and Lanear Sampson, but how much of those 63 points the Bears scored against that Mountaineers that afternoon was a product of bad WVU defense?
In 2002, the Hurricanes rolled up 524 yards of offense against a pretty good Mountaineer defense that year. That Miami team featured Ken Dorsey at quarterback, Willis McGahee at running back and a set of pass catchers that included Andre Johnson and Kellen Winslow Jr.
This group from Oklahoma with Baker Mayfield, Joe Mixon, Samaje Perine and Dede Westbrook appears to be in the same class.
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Saturday’s game against eighth-ranked Oklahoma will be the 11th time West Virginia has played a nationally ranked team at Milan Puskar Stadium since joining the Big 12 in 2012.
For perspective, during a seven-year stretch from 2004 until 2011 when West Virginia was playing in the Big East Light, WVU faced just eight nationally ranked teams at home - and only five of those were league opponents.
***
My buddy Eddie Hambrick from Columbus, Ohio, sent me a voicemail on Wednesday afternoon and followed up with an email Thursday morning expressing his growing concern about where the Mountaineers are at in the latest College Football Playoff rankings.
Eddie makes some good comparisons about where this team sits in relation to 1993 in the old Bowl Coalition Series when the undefeated Mountaineers were on the outside looking in:
I get it.
But the reality is West Virginia hasn’t beaten a top-25 opponent this season and its only matchup against a team currently in the top 25 was a 17-point loss on the road.
If West Virginia defeats eighth-ranked Oklahoma on Saturday, and is still sitting around 10 or 11 in the College Football Playoff rankings next Tuesday night, then it’s probably time to sound the alarms.
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WVU’s long-time director of football communications Mike Montoro tells me his press box is going to be completely full for the OU game - the first time that has happened since TCU in 2014.
Among those expected for Saturday night’s game include scouts from the Alamo, Russell Athletic, CFA Peach and AllState Sugar bowls.
There will also be five NFL scouts and my guy, Jake Trotter from ESPN.com, at the game as well.
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Dana Holgorsen
Dana Holgorsen was asked by veteran Big 12 reporter Wendell Barnhouse earlier this week how he has been able to identify all those “hard-edged players” he seems to have on his football team this year.
Holgorsen said that mentality is a product of the state where West Virginia University is located.
“I don’t think you can really see that in recruiting, it’s tough,” Holgorsen admitted. “You see effort on video. You see physicality on video but that mental edge, I don’t know how you gauge that. You don’t get to spend a whole lot of time with them, plus, they’re always on their best behavior when you are recruiting them so you don’t really see that hard edge that they have.
“But yeah, our team has that,” he continued. “I think we develop that some. It’s what the state of West Virginia is all about with just blue-collar, hard-working individuals and I think our team kind of develops that kind of mentality here. We breed toughness and we try and develop toughness and I think we’re at a point where our team does play with some toughness and a hard-edge as well.”
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Bob Huggins
Stepping away from Saturday’s big football game briefly, Bob Huggins’ nationally ranked men’s basketball team is going to have a little stiffer challenge on Sunday afternoon when New Hampshire comes to the WVU Coliseum.
The Wildcats won at Temple, 57-52, on Monday night and are one of the favorites to win the American East this year.
It is hard to get a read on how good this year’s team is because of the nature of the two games the Mountaineers have played so far against Mount St. Mary’s and Mississippi Valley State, but we should get a little better idea on Sunday leading into some interesting Thanksgiving break games coming up against Illinois on Wednesday afternoon in Brooklyn, New York, and either Temple or Florida State on Thanksgiving day.
Huggins recently completed his early recruiting class with the signing of 6-foot-8-inch, 200-pound forward Wesley Harris, a guy Huggins really wanted in this year’s class, I am told.
His five-player group also includes South Charleston guard Brandon Knapper, now at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Virginia. The word is Knapper is playing lights out at Hargrave and is now considered one of the top point guards in prep school basketball circles for 2017.
Knapper’s coach at Hargrave is former Marshall player A.W. Hamilton.
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Mike Molina
And finally, have you ever been on the driving range killing it with your driver but when you get out on the golf course your tee-shots take down tree limbs, bounce off parked cars and scatter construction workers during their lunch breaks?
Yeah, me neither.
But that was sort of how Mike Molina was beginning to feel whenever he was about to line up to kick a field goal longer than 40 yards.
Mighty Mike has been almost money from 39 yards and in, hitting 13 of 16 from that distance, but whenever he has been required to pull the big dog out of the golf bag and let ‘er rip, he hasn’t been totally sure where the ball was going.
The 43-yarder he tried against Texas Tech had plenty of distance but was a little wide. It was the same deal with the 47-yarder he tried against TCU a few weeks ago.
So when he finally made a 44-yarder in the first quarter of last Saturday’s game against Texas, it was like having all 14 clubs in his golf bag once again.
“Yeah, I guess that’s how you can look at it,” Molina said earlier this week. “You’ve just got to go out there and do it. You can’t really worry too much about it or else you’re going to mess up. You’ve just got to do what you do every day.”
The key with kicking a football that distance is the same thing we always seem to forget when our wayward tee shots land on the dining room table - don’t swing too hard!
“You want to be smooth with it and you don’t want to overcompensate and think you need to hit it harder than the last ball or an extra point,” he said. “All kicks should be the same so really that’s how you kind of have to look at it. I’ve just got to go out there relaxed and do what I do every day.”
So there is your free golf advice for the day, courtesy of Mike Molina!
I hope to see you at a jam-packed Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday.
Otherwise, have a great weekend!
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