After film review, Rich Rodriguez discusses scrimmage
West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez and his coaching staff have had the appropriate time to review the film from Saturday’s scrimmage and some things stood out to him.
For one, Rodriguez didn’t believe that the effort was bad. He expected more times that he would need to encourage his team to go full, but overall, the effort was solid.
The physicality of the over 100-play scrimmage was alright but not where it needed to be up front on the offensive line and defensive lines.
“I didn’t think we were as physical with that part of it,” he said.
Football is a physical game and it’s admittedly not natural to do some of the things that players are asked to do on a per-snap basis. There is a balance of not having players be too aggressive in that department while trying to get them to understand how physical the games are going to be.
The tempo that West Virginia operated with was OK but overall, his biggest takeaway was that there are still a lot more decisions that are going to need to be made on who is going to be the players that go out on the field first at a lot of different positions.
In some ways that can be a good thing with increased competition, but the scrimmage didn’t provide as much of a roadmap as Rodriguez believed coming into it.
“It didn’t clarify it as much as maybe we would have thought,” he said.
There is still time to decide that moving forward, but the competition is still very much ongoing at a lot of different spots on the roster.
One area that irked Rodriguez initially about the scrimmage was with penalties and he believed that it was a combination of things that led to the miscues. When it comes to procedural penalties, some of that is due to all of the different quarterbacks competing and repping, they need to be more consistent and in command with their cadence.
There was also too much thinking going on up front and that led to snapping the ball quickly and other linemen not getting off the ball as quickly. The holding penalties simply boil down to linemen getting lazy in their technique and grabbing instead of moving their feet.
“We can’t have 10 or 11 penalties where we did on Saturday, that’s ridiculous,” he said.
Rodriguez did say that when it comes to the offensive line, he isn’t as concerned as he was in the spring after the Mountaineers added some new pieces.
“I think we have the guys that have the ability to do it, but they’ve got to do it. And again, we got to get more physical up front. And I think it was a very, the O-line is a group and this is always, seems like it’s always a very conscientious group,” he said.
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