Execution, evaluation will be key for West Virginia defense
Since the calendar flipped to Big 12 Conference play West Virginia has had issues on the defensive side of the football that must be sorted out.
After permitting just 14.7 points per game and 300.3 yards through the non-conference portion of the schedule, the Mountaineers have seen those totals jump to 42.3 points and 478.6 yards per game. Earlier in the week coordinator Zac Alley said that some of the issues had been covered up before, but the Mountaineers have seen those come to a head with the increase in competition.
It isn’t only that side of the ball either as the offense has it’s own issues, but West Virginia has certainly dipped in production.
While the unit has generated four turnovers in the past two games, West Virginia has only forced one punt and has allowed over 500 yards of total offense against Utah and BYU.
“Hell, we can’t make a play on the ball in the air, all those long pass plays, they did whatever they wanted, I don’t know how many first downs they had. We can’t make them punt. Don’t make the other team punt you’re probably going to lose. Two games in a row,” a visibly frustrated head coach Rich Rodriguez said following the loss to BYU.
Explosive plays were a problem against the Cougars as they hit on six pass plays over 20+ yards including gains of 85, 54 and 47, while there were 10 runs over 10+ yards.
“I think if you limit a lot of the explosives this is a different football game. A lot of their touchdowns came off explosives so we can’t play great defense and give up a bunch of explosives,” linebacker Chase Wilson said.
The redshirt senior linebacker believes it boils down to technique and not trusting the things that the Mountaineers are doing successfully in practice to translate those over to the games.
There has of course, been an increase in competition in the Big 12, but the unit has to find a way to make that occur to experience success on that side of the ball. Still, Wilson was encouraged by the way that his defensive unit continued to battle even with the issues.
“It wasn’t perfect and it’s not perfect. And we need to get closer to perfect but I can get behind a bunch of guys who are not going to quit on each other,” he said.
That makes the bye week critical as the Mountaineers will have the opportunity to rest and rehab, but more importantly, it’s a chance to improve and get ready for the last six games of the season.
“Because everything that’s happened in the past is in the past now and we can rewrite the whole rest of the season and a bunch of great opportunities still ahead of us,” Wilson said.
And the off week lends itself to evaluating not only the past game, but week to week in order to take the games collectively and see what they have done well or poorly in all phases.
“You can compile all those games into one and see what our strengths and weaknesses are,” he said.
Offer Alert
Fall camp is here and there’s no better time to sign up with us to get all your WVU intel! Sign up today – $1 for the first week, plus a complimentary year of access to The Athletic included. Join – http://gowvu.us/Join
__________________________________________
• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot
• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting
• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel
• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan
•Like us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok
