Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
Campus Connection: WVU's Long Right Back Into the Fray
October 13, 2017 01:19 PM | Football, Blog
Tony Gibson felt the best way to ease sophomore outside linebacker David Long Jr. back into things was by throwing him right into the fire.
It's like the old days when grandpa taught you how to swim - paddle the boat out to the middle of the lake and then push you in backwards and tell you to swim!
At least that was the method my grandpa once used.
After suffering a preseason injury, which forced him to miss the first four games of the year, Long played nearly every snap in last Saturday's 31-24 loss at TCU.
It was either sink or swim.
"All but nickel," Gibson said. "That's the only time I rested him. That's how we use him. He wanted to be out there."
Of equal importance, Gibson wanted him to be out there.
Long clearly makes a difference in the defense the way he plays, the way he disrupts things and the overall energy he provides the team. His stats from the game weren't overwhelming - three tackles, two pass breakups and two quarterback hurries - but go back and watch the tape and you will notice No. 11 was around the football just about every time TCU snapped it.
He was the only defender who recognized the throwback pass TCU successfully pulled near the end of the third quarter that resulted in a 48-yard touchdown. Everyone else took off like mad dogs chasing after KaVontae Turpin on the jet sweep until they realized Turpin wasn't running that fast, or trying to make any moves.
But by then it was too late.
TCU had assembled a convoy of blockers down the near sideline resembling the 16th Infantry Regiment about to storm the beaches of Normandy.
And Long nearly sabotaged it.
"Sunday night he was still pissed off he missed the tackle on the trick play where he fought through four linemen to get there," Gibson said.
"Yeah, during the jet I saw that the runner wasn't really running so that's what brought me back," Long explained. "Then I ran into like five linemen and I got through them but I couldn't make the play. It was just instinct. They're not that fast, so I just used my speed to get through them."
Instincts and energy are what Long bring to the table in abundance. The way the defense played earlier this season against East Carolina, Delaware State and Kansas, you wondered if the Horned Frogs might drop 50 on them like they did against SMU earlier in the year.
But they didn't, and with the exception of a handful of plays, the defense really shut down a pretty good TCU offense.
"I feel like the energy is more. The defense without me is still good, but I'm just an energetic player and I think that's what I bring to the defense," Long admitted. "I think we got it back a little bit last Saturday. If we can keep that up and fix a couple of things, I think we can get back on track."
Tomorrow afternoon would be a good time to continue that process with 24th-ranked Texas Tech coming to town.
West Virginia has lost its last nine games to nationally ranked opponents since defeating No. 4 Baylor at Milan Puskar Stadium on Oct. 18, 2014. WVU is 1-13 in its last 14 against ranked teams, the defense allowing an average of 40.6 points per game. Two of those losses were to Baylor by scores of 73-42 and 62-38, while 10th-ranked Oklahoma defeated West Virginia, 56-28, last November in Morgantown.
The fewest points the defense has surrendered to a ranked team under seventh-year coach Dana Holgorsen was the 16 16th-ranked Oklahoma scored in Norman on Sept. 7, 2013 - a nine-point Sooner victory.
We'll see if West Virginia can hold down Texas Tech's high-powered attack tomorrow afternoon.
It's too bad Richard Dawson isn't around to see the Family Feud brewing at Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday. That's because two brothers will be coaching against each other - West Virginia offensive coordinator Jake Spavital versus Texas Tech linebackers coach Zac Spavital.
Tina Spavital, their mother, understandably is sitting this one out.
"She went to the TCU game; she and my dad (Steve) drove down from Tulsa, but they're not going to touch this one," Jake laughed.
Texas Tech has another tie to West Virginia University - defensive coordinator David Gibbs, who actually lived in Morgantown for a few years when his father, Alex, was a member of Bobby Bowden's staff in the early 1970s.
Alex departed WVU following the 1974 season to join Woody Hayes' staff at Ohio State, and later became known as the "godfather" of the modern zone blocking scheme working in the NFL with the Denver Broncos in the late 1990s when they had running back Terrell Davis.
Steve Dunlap, West Virginia's former record-setting linebacker while playing for Bowden and longtime defensive coordinator for Don Nehlen, once told me a funny story about the elder Gibbs.
Gibbs was coaching the WVU secondary in 1974 and convinced defensive coordinator Chuck Klausing to use a new "cover-two" defense behind the Mountaineers' standard 5-2 alignment in the '74 season opener against Richmond.
Of course today, just about every team in America plays some type of cover-two during the course of the game, but back then rolling two corners up to the line of scrimmage and playing two safeties behind them was about like driving down the street in reverse with your clothes off.
Well, it didn't work out too well for West Virginia because Richmond quarterback Harry Knight picked Gibbs' secondary apart to the tune of three touchdowns and the Spiders left Morgantown with a stunning 29-25 victory. Gibbs was supposed to host a party at his house after the game to celebrate a big season-opening victory.
"He canceled it," Dunlap recalled, "because he broke out in hives!"
Later that evening, coach Bobby Bowden was supposed to fly in a small airplane down to Charleston to tape his weekly coaches show for WNPB. As the pilot made his approach into the airport, the fog was so dense in the Capital City that evening that he was unable to land, forcing them to fly back all the way back to Morgantown.
An exhausted Bowden had to get in his car and make the long drive on those old twisty, curvy West Virginia roads to do his coaches show, making a miserable day for him even more miserable.
Here's some more story telling from the one of the best storytellers of all-time, Bob Huggins, who held court Thursday afternoon in the Basketball Practice Facility media room before the team's late-afternoon workout.
Veteran reporter Bob Hertzel jokingly referred to senior guard Jevon Carter as the "keynote speaker" at Thursday's media gathering, before asking Huggins to talk about sophomore wing Lamont West.
Hertzel was working off a little tasty morsel Carter gave us when he declared that West has made the biggest strides of any player since last year, in his opinion.
"Who said that?" Huggins asked. "I must have been watching the wrong guy. (West is) really shooting the ball, but he's got to rebound it. He's got to defend and he's got to do a bunch of other things. And he's trying. I give him that, he is trying."
Huggins added, "We had a practice the other day and he had one more rebound than (Jerry West's) statue, so …"
Huggins, on high-scoring prep wing Teddy Allen, who looks like he might be capable of giving the team a little of that old Boston Celtics pop coming off the bench.
"Teddy can score; it's just a matter of if Teddy can outscore his man," Huggins deadpanned. "At first he didn't think he had to play defense, like most guys who score a lot of points in high school, and now he's really accepted it. He's still not very good at it, but he's really trying so he will get better."
And, on the development of rugged sophomore forward Sagaba Konate, his 6-foot-8-inch, 260-pound man-child. Konate has been sparring with former Mountaineer forward Kevin Jones who is still in town getting in shape before heading over to Europe to begin another season of professional basketball.
"I think KJ being around has really helped him because it's kind of knocked his self-esteem down a little bit," Huggins said. "KJ gets every rebound like he always has and it's good for Sags to see somebody like that."
On the other hand, Huggins said Konate has gotten "dramatically" better offensively, to the point where they will likely run some offense through him this season.
"He's shooting it from the circle, his jump hook has really gotten better - actually it's better with both hands, just not his right hand," Huggins said.
As always, Huggs shooting from the hip.
Despite suffering a 1-0 loss at 17th-ranked Texas late last month, the West Virginia University women's soccer team is still in good shape to capture its sixth straight Big 12 title under veteran coach Nikki Izzo-Brown.
The Mountaineers currently lead the Longhorns by one point in the conference standings, 12-11, with three of their four remaining regular season games at Dick Dlesk, including tonight's match against 2-10-2 Iowa State.
After that, it's Texas Tech in Morgantown on Thursday, Oct. 19 and TCU at home on Sunday, Oct. 22 before the regular season concludes at Kansas on Friday, Oct. 27.
The team will then travel to Kansas City to take part in the Big 12 tournament the following week, meaning WVU could spend a total of 11 days in the Sunflower State.
Such is the life in the Big 12 these days.
Speaking of hardships, how about football getting the 8 p.m. time slot for its game at Baylor on Saturday, Oct. 21?
That means the Mountaineers won't be arriving back in Morgantown until the wee hours of the morning on Oct. 22 before facing nationally ranked Oklahoma State in Morgantown the following Saturday.
By the way, the Baylor game is slotted for FS2 but could be switched to FS1 if game seven of the ALCS matchup between New York and Houston is already decided.
Stay tuned.
And finally, West Virginia's Marlon LeBlanc deserves a lot of credit for rallying his up-and-down men's soccer team to an impressive 1-0 victory over sixth-ranked Michigan State on Wednesday night.
Sophomore Albert Andres-llop's goal in the 51st minute was a thing of beauty when junior Jorge Quintanilla took a pass on his look at the net to give Andres-Llop a much better look.
Also impressive was the way West Virginia continued to attack and press forward against the Spartans and not sit on its 1-0 lead.
Beating Michigan State, ranked No. 1 in the RPI this week, should give 7-3-3 West Virginia a big boost when the next ratings come out next week. The Mountaineers were No. 73 heading into the Michigan State game and one unofficial RPI formula posted online gave WVU a 21-spot jump to No. 52.
Now, the team has to figure out how to build off its great victory against Michigan State in upcoming matches at Bowling Green on Saturday night and against Western Michigan here in Morgantown on Friday, Oct. 20.
WVU is looking to snap its streak of five straight years of not qualifying for NCAA Tournament play, the Mountaineers last going in 2011.
Beating Michigan State certainly proves the potential is there to do so.
In the meantime, I hope to see you at Milan Puskar Stadium tomorrow afternoon on what is shaping up to be a very important Homecoming game for Dana Holgorsen's Mountaineers.
Have a great weekend!
It's like the old days when grandpa taught you how to swim - paddle the boat out to the middle of the lake and then push you in backwards and tell you to swim!
At least that was the method my grandpa once used.
After suffering a preseason injury, which forced him to miss the first four games of the year, Long played nearly every snap in last Saturday's 31-24 loss at TCU.
It was either sink or swim.
"All but nickel," Gibson said. "That's the only time I rested him. That's how we use him. He wanted to be out there."
Of equal importance, Gibson wanted him to be out there.
Long clearly makes a difference in the defense the way he plays, the way he disrupts things and the overall energy he provides the team. His stats from the game weren't overwhelming - three tackles, two pass breakups and two quarterback hurries - but go back and watch the tape and you will notice No. 11 was around the football just about every time TCU snapped it.
He was the only defender who recognized the throwback pass TCU successfully pulled near the end of the third quarter that resulted in a 48-yard touchdown. Everyone else took off like mad dogs chasing after KaVontae Turpin on the jet sweep until they realized Turpin wasn't running that fast, or trying to make any moves.
But by then it was too late.
TCU had assembled a convoy of blockers down the near sideline resembling the 16th Infantry Regiment about to storm the beaches of Normandy.
And Long nearly sabotaged it.
"Sunday night he was still pissed off he missed the tackle on the trick play where he fought through four linemen to get there," Gibson said.
"Yeah, during the jet I saw that the runner wasn't really running so that's what brought me back," Long explained. "Then I ran into like five linemen and I got through them but I couldn't make the play. It was just instinct. They're not that fast, so I just used my speed to get through them."
Instincts and energy are what Long bring to the table in abundance. The way the defense played earlier this season against East Carolina, Delaware State and Kansas, you wondered if the Horned Frogs might drop 50 on them like they did against SMU earlier in the year.
But they didn't, and with the exception of a handful of plays, the defense really shut down a pretty good TCU offense.
"I feel like the energy is more. The defense without me is still good, but I'm just an energetic player and I think that's what I bring to the defense," Long admitted. "I think we got it back a little bit last Saturday. If we can keep that up and fix a couple of things, I think we can get back on track."
Tomorrow afternoon would be a good time to continue that process with 24th-ranked Texas Tech coming to town.
***
West Virginia has lost its last nine games to nationally ranked opponents since defeating No. 4 Baylor at Milan Puskar Stadium on Oct. 18, 2014. WVU is 1-13 in its last 14 against ranked teams, the defense allowing an average of 40.6 points per game. Two of those losses were to Baylor by scores of 73-42 and 62-38, while 10th-ranked Oklahoma defeated West Virginia, 56-28, last November in Morgantown.
The fewest points the defense has surrendered to a ranked team under seventh-year coach Dana Holgorsen was the 16 16th-ranked Oklahoma scored in Norman on Sept. 7, 2013 - a nine-point Sooner victory.
We'll see if West Virginia can hold down Texas Tech's high-powered attack tomorrow afternoon.
***
It's too bad Richard Dawson isn't around to see the Family Feud brewing at Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday. That's because two brothers will be coaching against each other - West Virginia offensive coordinator Jake Spavital versus Texas Tech linebackers coach Zac Spavital.
Tina Spavital, their mother, understandably is sitting this one out.
"She went to the TCU game; she and my dad (Steve) drove down from Tulsa, but they're not going to touch this one," Jake laughed.
Texas Tech has another tie to West Virginia University - defensive coordinator David Gibbs, who actually lived in Morgantown for a few years when his father, Alex, was a member of Bobby Bowden's staff in the early 1970s.
Alex departed WVU following the 1974 season to join Woody Hayes' staff at Ohio State, and later became known as the "godfather" of the modern zone blocking scheme working in the NFL with the Denver Broncos in the late 1990s when they had running back Terrell Davis.
Steve Dunlap, West Virginia's former record-setting linebacker while playing for Bowden and longtime defensive coordinator for Don Nehlen, once told me a funny story about the elder Gibbs.
Gibbs was coaching the WVU secondary in 1974 and convinced defensive coordinator Chuck Klausing to use a new "cover-two" defense behind the Mountaineers' standard 5-2 alignment in the '74 season opener against Richmond.
Of course today, just about every team in America plays some type of cover-two during the course of the game, but back then rolling two corners up to the line of scrimmage and playing two safeties behind them was about like driving down the street in reverse with your clothes off.
Well, it didn't work out too well for West Virginia because Richmond quarterback Harry Knight picked Gibbs' secondary apart to the tune of three touchdowns and the Spiders left Morgantown with a stunning 29-25 victory. Gibbs was supposed to host a party at his house after the game to celebrate a big season-opening victory.
"He canceled it," Dunlap recalled, "because he broke out in hives!"
Later that evening, coach Bobby Bowden was supposed to fly in a small airplane down to Charleston to tape his weekly coaches show for WNPB. As the pilot made his approach into the airport, the fog was so dense in the Capital City that evening that he was unable to land, forcing them to fly back all the way back to Morgantown.
An exhausted Bowden had to get in his car and make the long drive on those old twisty, curvy West Virginia roads to do his coaches show, making a miserable day for him even more miserable.
***
Here's some more story telling from the one of the best storytellers of all-time, Bob Huggins, who held court Thursday afternoon in the Basketball Practice Facility media room before the team's late-afternoon workout.
Veteran reporter Bob Hertzel jokingly referred to senior guard Jevon Carter as the "keynote speaker" at Thursday's media gathering, before asking Huggins to talk about sophomore wing Lamont West.
Hertzel was working off a little tasty morsel Carter gave us when he declared that West has made the biggest strides of any player since last year, in his opinion.
"Who said that?" Huggins asked. "I must have been watching the wrong guy. (West is) really shooting the ball, but he's got to rebound it. He's got to defend and he's got to do a bunch of other things. And he's trying. I give him that, he is trying."
Huggins added, "We had a practice the other day and he had one more rebound than (Jerry West's) statue, so …"
Huggins, on high-scoring prep wing Teddy Allen, who looks like he might be capable of giving the team a little of that old Boston Celtics pop coming off the bench.
"Teddy can score; it's just a matter of if Teddy can outscore his man," Huggins deadpanned. "At first he didn't think he had to play defense, like most guys who score a lot of points in high school, and now he's really accepted it. He's still not very good at it, but he's really trying so he will get better."
And, on the development of rugged sophomore forward Sagaba Konate, his 6-foot-8-inch, 260-pound man-child. Konate has been sparring with former Mountaineer forward Kevin Jones who is still in town getting in shape before heading over to Europe to begin another season of professional basketball.
"I think KJ being around has really helped him because it's kind of knocked his self-esteem down a little bit," Huggins said. "KJ gets every rebound like he always has and it's good for Sags to see somebody like that."
On the other hand, Huggins said Konate has gotten "dramatically" better offensively, to the point where they will likely run some offense through him this season.
"He's shooting it from the circle, his jump hook has really gotten better - actually it's better with both hands, just not his right hand," Huggins said.
As always, Huggs shooting from the hip.
***
Despite suffering a 1-0 loss at 17th-ranked Texas late last month, the West Virginia University women's soccer team is still in good shape to capture its sixth straight Big 12 title under veteran coach Nikki Izzo-Brown.
The Mountaineers currently lead the Longhorns by one point in the conference standings, 12-11, with three of their four remaining regular season games at Dick Dlesk, including tonight's match against 2-10-2 Iowa State.
After that, it's Texas Tech in Morgantown on Thursday, Oct. 19 and TCU at home on Sunday, Oct. 22 before the regular season concludes at Kansas on Friday, Oct. 27.
The team will then travel to Kansas City to take part in the Big 12 tournament the following week, meaning WVU could spend a total of 11 days in the Sunflower State.
Such is the life in the Big 12 these days.
***
Speaking of hardships, how about football getting the 8 p.m. time slot for its game at Baylor on Saturday, Oct. 21?
That means the Mountaineers won't be arriving back in Morgantown until the wee hours of the morning on Oct. 22 before facing nationally ranked Oklahoma State in Morgantown the following Saturday.
By the way, the Baylor game is slotted for FS2 but could be switched to FS1 if game seven of the ALCS matchup between New York and Houston is already decided.
Stay tuned.
***
And finally, West Virginia's Marlon LeBlanc deserves a lot of credit for rallying his up-and-down men's soccer team to an impressive 1-0 victory over sixth-ranked Michigan State on Wednesday night.
Sophomore Albert Andres-llop's goal in the 51st minute was a thing of beauty when junior Jorge Quintanilla took a pass on his look at the net to give Andres-Llop a much better look.
Also impressive was the way West Virginia continued to attack and press forward against the Spartans and not sit on its 1-0 lead.
Beating Michigan State, ranked No. 1 in the RPI this week, should give 7-3-3 West Virginia a big boost when the next ratings come out next week. The Mountaineers were No. 73 heading into the Michigan State game and one unofficial RPI formula posted online gave WVU a 21-spot jump to No. 52.
Now, the team has to figure out how to build off its great victory against Michigan State in upcoming matches at Bowling Green on Saturday night and against Western Michigan here in Morgantown on Friday, Oct. 20.
WVU is looking to snap its streak of five straight years of not qualifying for NCAA Tournament play, the Mountaineers last going in 2011.
Beating Michigan State certainly proves the potential is there to do so.
In the meantime, I hope to see you at Milan Puskar Stadium tomorrow afternoon on what is shaping up to be a very important Homecoming game for Dana Holgorsen's Mountaineers.
Have a great weekend!
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