MORGANTOWN — A loss is a loss is a … well, sometimes it’s more than just a loss.
How a team reacts to that loss is what becomes important, for losing can be reach epidemic proportions if it isn’t handled properly.
And that is where a coach earns his money.
If he has a bad team, there isn’t much he can do, but it isn’t only bad teams who lose games. Sometimes talented teams lose games they should not lose, and that certainly can be said of what happened to West Virginia University at Auburn on Saturday night.
The better team did not win, only the team with more points.
And now Bill Stewart has to regroup his team, look back at that loss and fix what was wrong.
More importantly, he has to see that it doesn’t become part of the fiber of the season.
“I relate coaching to parenting,” Stewart said during his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “If I was the kind of parent that continued to harp and point fingers and blame, then I would probably lose that child because I would turn him away.”
In many ways, college football coaches are parents, and they have 135 children, each with his own thoughts and feelings.
Take Jarrett Brown, the quarterback who had a rough night at Auburn, throwing four interceptions and losing a fumble. It was the first game of his career that he had started and lost, and after the game he was emotionally distraught, some coaches pointing out that he had tears in his eyes.
He needed an arm around his shoulder, not a boot in his fanny.
At the same time, the coach can’t simply let that player begin to believe there are no consequences with losing.
“If I was a lackadaisical parent, I probably wouldn’t get much out of them, either,” Stewart said.
And so you approach losing not much differently than you approach winning, analytically and straight forward.
“What we have to do is try to be as constructive and as truthful as we can be, and figure out what happened good, bad and indifferent,” Stewart said. “There are 11 guys on offense, 11 on defense and 11 guys on special teams that could have all played better at some time during the course of the game. That is just the fact. No one guy lost this game for us.”
Just as you don’t want to have one many feel he must carry the team, unless you happen to have a Michael Jordan or Jerry West, you can’t let one play feel he let the team down. If Jarrett Brown threw some interceptions, he also had receivers running wrong routes and had offensive linemen missing blocks that had him running for his football life.%
“You have to look at the total picture. What did you do well? I really don’t care who we are playing this week. All I care about is, ‘What can we do to become as good as we possibly can.’ We look at the positives, the negatives and the things that are 50-50,” Stewart said.
The positives you build on. Yes, WVU lost to Auburn, 41-30, but the offense gained 509 yards and scored 30 points. The Mountaineers converted third downs. They ran well.
Build on that. Build on special teams play that was so improved, other than one missed extra point, which is more the kind of thing that just happens rather than a problem to address.
“I thought we played Mountaineer football in its true form. We were aggressive offensively, defensively and on special teams,” Stewart said. “I thought we had some very fine performances by several people, and we had a heck of a game plan. But in football, the ball doesn’t always bounce your way, and we got bit at the end with turnovers and not taking control of the game when we thought we had a chance to.”
And so, as a coach, you build on Jarrett Brown’s completions, on Jock Sanders’ receptions, on Noel Devine’s running yardage. You re-enforce the good, reconstruct the ball and find the reasons to accept the defeat while building up what is left to accomplish.
Teams do not go undefeated in today’s college game, and no one expected this West Virginia team to do so. What it can’t do is let a game lost turn into a season lost.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
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