MORGANTOWN — Considering the road ahead of West Virginia in this 2009 football season, it is difficult to think of them any longer as anything but spoilers in the chase for the Big East Conference championship.
Playing as an unranked, twice beaten team in a conference that features the nation’s No. 4 team in Cincinnati, whose home you must visit in a game upon which perhaps the viability of your program depends, and also having a Pitt team that has had your number for the past two seasons and now is blossoming as a national power itself hardly makes any conference title dreams realistic.
Add to that questions about how your team will react to a terribly disappointing performance at South Florida when it comes home on Saturday to face a Louisville team that isn’t very good but that does have absolutely nothing to lose and you find yourself at a crossroad.
Six and two is not a bad record by any standards, but with the heart of your schedule ahead and coming off a loss it leaves you as a team that is very difficult to analyze.
Who shows up from here on?
“We have to grow from the South Florida game, learn from it and continue to press forward,” Coach Bill Stewart said on Monday during the Big East coaches conference call.
Certainly, the defense, especially in the area of the passing game, will come under a microscope this week, both from the coaching staff during the week and from the public on the weekend. It had not exactly been impregnable prior to the South Florida debacle, when it crumbled like the proverbial cookie.
There are those who would point only at cornerback Keith Tandy, but he was more the fall guy for a general defensive deterioration that saw nothing on defense really work.
But to say, as some people are trying to say today, that South Florida passed well because it first was able to establish the run is to ignore one obvious point:
The Bulls scored on their fifth offensive play of the game with a 49-yard touchdown pass, and considering that two of their three runs went for a negative 1 yard and a 2-yard gain, the other being a quarterback draw play, you cannot exactly blame that on WVU’s inability to stop the run.
South Florida did make a lot of yardage on the group, but more than half of it belonged to quarterback B.J. Daniels, who was scrambling on plays that began as passes.
No, the first fix has to be on the pass defense, both the rush and the secondary defense, but in the end this WVU team is going to be as good as its offense, not its defense, and that brings us back to the offensive line, which had huge problems with South Florida’s penetrating defense.
Certainly, when given a chance, Noel Devine has proven himself to be spectacular.
Louisville Coach Steve Kragthorpe had this to say about facing Devine this week:
“Every time that guy touches the ball, you feel something magical is going to happen.”
Friday night it was black magic, the Bulls wearing the black.
Devine gained only 42 yards all night, 10 of them on a draw play, not his bread and butter stuff.
What happened was really quite simple.
“Penetration was the key,” Kragthorpe noted, after having watched the film. “You have penetration on the back side, and then you can’t leave any seams where he can stick his foot into the turf and cut upfield. You have to get him before he gets into open space.”
And that is just what South Florid did, their linebackers and safeties staying home and taking the cutback stuff away from Devine as he started wide.
Rest assured that when Louisville comes to Milan Puskar Stadium at noon on Saturday, they will come in believing they have a chance to win and that the outcome is going to be decided on whether or not WVU can shake off the effects of the South Florida game.
“I anticipate another Big East bang,” Stewart said. “We bang each other up pretty good in this conference, and this shouldn’t deviate from the norm.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
Stewart: Team has to move on
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