Rich Rodriguez focused on correcting self-inflicted mistakes after opener
West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez would like to say that the season-opening 45-3 win over Robert Morris was a typical first game. But it wasn’t.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had or seen three fumbles in four plays. I think that’s what we had. I know we had three straight fumbles so we obviously didn’t play well in the first half. West Virginia beating West Virginia,” he said. There’s some things we did OK but we obviously weren’t playing like we should have.”
The Mountaineers held just a 10-3 edge at halftime over the FCS program despite an 234-81 edge in yardage largely caused by those miscues. The second half was a different story as West Virginia outscored the Colonials 35-0 and took complete control without any mistakes.
“In the second half it went like it should have went. We’ll take the win and learn from it obviously. There’s a lot of things to clean up and fix but there’s a lot of guys playing for the first time and a lot of things we have to do as a staff to be better the next week,” he said.
At halftime, Rodriguez said that he didn’t attempt to scrape the paint off the walls when addressing his team but instead focused on the need to take care of the football and simply play smarter. On top of three turnovers, the Mountaineers also finished the game with 9 penalties for 69 yards.
“That’s a lack of discipline. We got to get that fixed right away, we have to. We’ve got to correct the penalties and obviously have to correct the turnovers and just relax and run the offense,” he said.
The one encouraging thing for Rodriguez was even with those struggles the veteran head coach didn’t sense any panic from anybody at halftime. That’s from the coaching staff down to the players.
“They weren’t looking around big-eyed wondering what to do we do now? There was none of that whatsoever and we’re going to need that because we’re going to face adversity obviously with a whole lot bigger teams moving forward,” he said.
Rodriguez felt that his team played pretty hard, but didn’t want to make any assessment until he was able to review the film. But to address the fumbling issue, he did wonder if he should have gone more live in practice leading up to the season as well as examining the cause for each of those.
“That’s going to be a huge point of emphasis because if we do that in any other game we play this year we might not be able to recover. In this game, you could,” he said.
The self-inflicted mistakes will be a priority for West Virginia moving forward and it’s something they must fix in a day with a very good Ohio team on the road up next.
“We’ve just got to get better,” he said.
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