Quick Hits: Defense Shows Up, Scrimmage Setup, Safety Depth + More

Another day of practice has just wrapped up for the West Virginia Mountaineers, and it was the team's second day going fully padded. Head coach Rich Rodriguez discussed how the morning went with reporters, and we've pulled some of the top quotes from today's press conference for you below.

Opening statement

“Did a little bit of live, about 20 minutes worth. Thought the defense got a little better today. I’m not sure the offense took a lot of steps. But I think the defense got a pretty good grasp of what we got put in so far. So, we’ll go shorts tomorrow, and we’ll have a pretty big scrimmage Saturday and maybe try to get about 100 plays or so in.”

If the physicality improved today

“Not much today. I thought defensively, we were pretty active. Offensively, part of it we weren’t coming off the ball, and part of the reason wasn’t their fault. We got quarterbacks that aren’t being vocal enough. I mean, I’m standing behind them and I can barely hear the cadence. When you don’t come off the ball the way you’re supposed to, it can be a multitude of things, and that was just one of it. We’re not verbalizing enough.”

How far along the team is compared to where he thought they would be

“Probably about where I thought we would be, which means we still got a long way to go. I wanted to do a little bit more scrimmaging today, but we’re down to just a couple running backs practicing, that makes it hard. I even put slot receivers back there a little bit. We’re still learning a lot of stuff, that’s why Saturday, we got to play a lot of football, because we got to get a lot more evaluations done. I’m not panicking. We still got three weeks and two days. We’ve got time to get ready.”

Thoughts on the safety group

“I think it’s a pretty athletic group. They’re not nearly as big and athletic as they were in the early 80s. These guys nowadays, they’re not quite as big, but boy, they’re athletic. There’s a whole bunch back there.”

What kind of player Fred Perry is

“He’s a physical guy. He played a couple different positions for us. And my expectations for all the guys from Jax State is probably a little higher because they’ve been both in the offense and the defense before, and they’ve been in the practice routine. The transition for those guys should be easier, and I’m probably coaching them a little harder because they should know what to do.”

How the scrimmage will operate on Saturday

“I’ll create scenarios from field position standpoint — backed up, midfield, gold zone, red zone. The down and distance stuff usually takes care of itself. And I’ll intermix the groups. I might have one group of offense and a different group of defense, and then switch it up. We do that during practice from a substitution standpoint and like not as ast as a hockey shift because you can’t do it midplay, but pretty close to it. For no reason whatsoever, it could just be 2nd and 7, and I’ll be yelling, ‘Give me the second offense, third defense, whatever.’ Just keeping guys aware of it, and if it’s a fourth down situation and we can be punting or punt blocking it, everybody’s got to be ready. I told the guys I don’t want any spectators in the program on the field.”

Other things that caused the offense to not take a step today

“It’s not just one guy, but we’d have one guy make a mental mistake on one play and have another guy make a mental mistake on another play. It’s the same plays we’ve been running for four or five days, and to me, we’ve got to coach them better. We’re all going to make mistakes every day. Let’s not make the same one tomorrow we did today. That’s the frustrating part. If we’re making the same mistake in three days that we made today, we did a crappy job coaching them.”

If he saw anything he learned about the quarterbacks today

“Nah. You want to know the depth chart? Alright, I’m going to tell you who’s going to start here in three, two, one…nah, probably not. Y’all know that, even if I know, why the hell would I tell you? I mean, seriously? I don’t play a game with it like Oh, this quarterback is going to do this and they’re going to prepare for that guy. That ain’t it, it’s just like, I want people to buy a ticket and come to the game. We’ve sold 32,000 season tickets, and it holds 60(k). And you can still buy a season ticket, right? Boy, I tell you what, I might just do an email, and everybody that bought a season ticket, they’re going to know who the starting quarterback’s going to be one hour before everybody else. The rest of y’all got to wait until 2 o’clock.”

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