Rich Rod Not Blaming Injuries for 'Disappointing' & 'Embarrassing' Losses in Big 12 Play

Nicco Marchiol, Jahiem White, Jaden Bray, Tye Edwards, Cyncir Bowers, and so on. West Virginia has a long list of injuries, and that has certainly played a part in the team's early-season struggles. But could having some of those guys make things change some of these outcomes? Head coach Rich Rodriguez was asked that by someone in his postgame press conference, and he was not having it.

“You want me to give a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question? I mean, you get beat like that, whether that makes a difference or not, I don’t know. Did you hear me say injuries are the reason we lost? No. It makes things more difficult and more challenging, but you can overcome them.”

Having those guys, among others, would certainly help, but injuries are a part of this game. Once a guy goes down, it's on the coaching staff to make sure they have the next guy ready to play. Over the last two weeks, that hasn't happened. The injuries don't have anything to do with poor pass protection from the same repeat offenders along the o-line, execution in the pass game, poor tackling, or self-inflicted penalties. All of those things are what make these last couple of weeks so frustrating for Rodriguez.

"Disappointing. It's embarrassing how we just failed to execute and didn’t have anything that was really good," Rodriguez said. "Coaching wasn’t good, playing wasn’t good. They never even had a punt – didn’t punt one time. They had 33 first downs. We only had 14 first downs. There’s just a lot of things to fix.

"I don’t think anybody in that locker room will lay down or quit or anything like that, and it’s my job to make sure we get this going in a better direction in the next four days because we got a short week to get going against another really good team at their place. We’ll work hard to get it fixed in a hurry."