By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Now that West Virginia University has its defensive unit together and healthy, safety Sidney Glover and defensive tackle Scooter Berry playing and middle linebacker Reed Williams feeling no pain in his shoulders, the unit is playing its best football of the season.
The goal now is to get the offense back on track in time for West Virginia’s regular-season ending road date at Rutgers Saturday, a game coach Bill Stewart simply says is “colossal” in importance.
And, despite appearances, he feels he’s getting closer to getting the offense clicking.
The Mountaineers have not scored 30 points in a game since winning at Syracuse, 34-13, on Oct. 10. They scored only 19 at South Florida, 17 at home against a weak Louisville team, 21 at Cincinnati and 19 against Pitt.
They rank fifth in scoring in the Big East Conference averaging 26.8 points a game, barely ahead of South Florida’s 26.4 points a game. Total offense is fourth and that vaunted passing attack that came into the season is fifth, averaging 205.5 yards a game.
Most of that just won’t crack it in the big time and Stewart knows it.
“Up to the Auburn game, even Colorado, we were clicking, we were freewheeling, our quarterback was exciting,” Stewart said. “Once he got whacked at Marshall, it changed. Did you see Oklahoma shut out Oklahoma State? What did that quarterback come back from? Same thing.”
The same thing was a concussion. Jarrett Brown’s was diagnosed as a mild concussion, but something did happen with him.
“The medical people played Jarrett Brown when it was right to play him, when it was safe to play, but there was something about it that it wasn’t clicking,” Stewart said. “It’s not all on Jarrett. There were some other guys.
“I thought we really strained on offense,” Stewart continued. “To play Louisville and get one touchdown, we’ve not really clicked since the Marshall game. We started to get it back against Cincinnati. I thought we got it back the other night. We were just a play here, a play there.
“Honest to gosh, we got that 88-yard trap that Noel Devine ran but there were three other times when one block and we’ve got it — No. 7 to the house.”
Stewart refuses to sugarcoat it though.
“We hit a wall in the middle of the season and we pressed. I don’t think we’re playing very well (on offense),” he said.
Certainly the offense isn’t what he had pictured.
If you recall, he came in talking about throwing the football all over the lot, stretching the field deep.
But as the season went on, as Brown went into his brief funk, there was less of that and more a run mentality, more emphasis on an I-formation, more Ryan Clarke in the offense, a big fullback.
Believe it or not, WVU leads the Big East not in passing but in rushing, averaging 185.5 yards a game. It has run the ball 426 times, thrown it 308.
In a way, what has happened is that the Mountaineers have not been able to establish any kind of offensive identity. They have stumbled around trying to find a personality and that hinders the development of an offense.
Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt talked about the philosophy of offensive football on Monday’s Big East coaches’ conference call. He has gone steadily with a pro-set, power offense that features play action passes and a big fullback.
When asked why he felt that was the right way to go, he answered it this way:
“It’s not the best way, obviously, for everyone. I remember an analogy when we first went to the Dallas Cowboys from the University of Miami. The Giants had won the Super Bowl with a 3-4 defense and Lawrence Taylor. San Francisco used a 4-3 and won a Super Bowl. We won one at Dallas with our college 4-3.
“The point is there are a lot of ways to win. The key is to have some philosophy. The coaches who have a little bit of everything and are not good at anything are the ones who have problems.”
And that is what West Virginia has to avoid. It has to have a system, a philosophy, recruit to it and win with it. To think that you can be a running team one week and passing team the next isn’t where it’s at.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
