MORGANTOWN — There is this scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” where Harrison Ford, playing the adventurous archeologist, is threatened by a sword-wielding assassin who menacingly waves his sword in threatening loops only to have our hero pull out a pistol and casually shoot him.
There is a moral to this one-sided confrontation: Never bring a sword to a gunfight.
We think of this today as Pitt prepares to bring a butter knife of an offense to Morgantown on this Saturday evening to challenge a West Virginia team armed with college football’s equivalent of a nuclear arsenal.
While the Panthers do have a rather spectacular weapon of their own in LaSean McCoy, a precocious freshman who has run for 1,180 yards, they are directed by freshman quarterback Pat Bostick, who a week ago threw four touchdown passes.
Unfortunately for him, two of them went to South Florida defenders while a third was carried back 60 yards to the Pitt 1.
To be honest, at this stage of his young career, the only thing Bostick has in common with the West Virginia quarterback, Pat White, is his first name.
Panthers’ coach Dave Wannstedt knows that he is totally outmanned by a WVU team that offers not only White, but Steve Slaton, Noel Devine and Darius Reynaud. He saw all of that two years ago on the Mountaineer Field turf when West Virginia minus Devine ran circles around his plodding forces in a 45-13 victory.
That, in fact, led to a now-famous — thanks to YouTube.com — video of Wannstedt’s halftime comments to a TV analyst as he left the field.
“Two-hundred and fifty yards and without B.J. Blades. What kind of halftime adjustments do you make to stop West Virginia?” asked the analyst.
“The two biggest plays they made are double screens and we covered those double screens both times. The quarterback took the ball and ran. You don’t practice those plays. The kid’s making great plays.”
And then Wannstedt summed up the problem he faced in one five-word sentence.
“We just gotta run faster.”
Run faster … run faster … run faster.”
It hasn’t changed.
In fact, WVU is faster now than it was two years ago or last year when they also put 45 points on the board against Pitt.
And now that Rich Rodriguez has decided that it might be a good thing to play Owen Schmitt at tight end and use White, Slaton and Devine in the same backfield with Reynaud at wide receiver it’s like facing the U.S. Olympic 400-meter relay team.
Asked what that does for the WVU offense on the Big East coaches’ conference call this week, you could almost see Wannstedt begin to shiver.
“More speed, more big-play options on the field,” he said. “It makes a difference, you know. Devine obviously brings a big-play dimension they don’t have when he’s not on the field.”
Like runs of 31 and 76 yards against Maryland, like runs of 36 and 23 yards against Connecticut.
Go ahead, it screams out, stop Slaton if you can. Stop White if you can. Stop Reynaud, if you can.
What about Devine?
Think about it for a minute. You have to defend the zone read, the quarterback draw, the option, the bubble screen, passes to Slaton and then White ad-libbing all over the field, with Schmitt being thrown in there at fullback.
It may not be the greatest running offense of all time, and when one considers that the 1971 Oklahoma team rushed for 5,196 yards for an average of 472 yards a game you know WVU isn’t quite there yet, but it’s among the best.
Pitt, however, not only has to worry about defending that, but it must also figure out a way to not turn the ball over while getting some takeaways, a highly unlikely occurrence considering that Pitt has 22 turnovers to 16 takeaways while WVU has 18 turnovers and 31 takeaways.
Randy Edsall, the Connecticut coach, may have put it best when he said, “No one stops West Virginia’s offense. The only way they are stopped is when they turn the ball over.”
As proof of that we offer the most overlooked statistic of this season, and last and the year before.
WVU is 41-1 the last 42 times it has won the turnover battle.
“We have to make sure we make every possession count on offense,” said Wannstedt. “You have to be able to hold on to the football, make first downs, convert third downs and score touchdowns. Field goals won’t get it this week.”
Field goals and butter knives won’t beat West Virginia.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
Even more WVU speed
COLUMN
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