MORGANTOWN — Let me put forth a few names that you might remember over the past decade:
Amos Zereoue, Avon Cobourne, Quincy Wilson, Kay-Jay Harris, Steve Slaton, Patrick White.
What do these West Virginia University players all have in common?
The answer is 1,000-yard rushing seasons.
Running the football is the WVU way.
Yet, what have you read about this year, over and over and over?
The answer to that is the WVU passing game.
Are times changing?
WVU head coach Bill Stewart says no, not in his lifetime.
“We’re going to run the football. That’s never going to change,” he said.
So why all the talk about throwing by the team that has been second only to Navy in rushing yardage over the past five years and that along with Texas has produced 10 1,000-yard rushing seasons in the past decade, to rank second behind Minnesota with 12?
Simple.
Stewart understands that he doesn’t have a whole lot of depth at running back and that the focal point of his offense is quarterback Patrick White.
Keeping them healthy is the key to the season, hence he doesn’t particularly want to see Devine unnecessarily running the ball through the defensive line and into linebackers and safeties when he thinks he can get him loose in space on pass patterns and he doesn’t want to see White carrying the football as much as he did a year ago.
“We just can’t keep running Patrick,” Stewart said. “He carried the ball 197 times last year. How can he not get hurt? A lot of that was prescribed, so to speak. It wasn’t just scrambles. It’s OK for him to scramble. I coached him on that and I told him, once you hitch up once, if you have to hitch up again, it’s time to go.”
Put another way, Stewart’s play is run less and gain more yards.
See, there’s no Owen Schmitt to block this year, “and that’s devastating,” Stewart admits.
And Steve Slaton is now earning a paycheck running the football.
“I don’t know why everyone thinks he had a bad year last year. He gained over 1,000 yards,” Stewart said.
Of course, 1,000 yards in 13 game season isn’t exactly All-America stuff, being slightly more than 61 yards a game, but if you don’t think it’s still difficult, consider this little tidbit.
Florida State is a pretty fair football team which has produced some pretty good running backs. The last time the Seminoles had a 1,000-yard rusher was 1996 in Warrick Dunn.
So, Stewart believes that he is going to have to throw the ball more often this year in part to open up the defense, in part to keep his key players healthy. White, as everyone knows, has been injured every year and had to play some games when a lesser man would have been soaking in the whirlpool.
What we need here is a definition of Stewart’s vision of a passing game. He’s admitted he likes to throw deep as he did in defeating Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, but that’s not what he has in mind.
“We’re not going to run Tito Gonzalez down the middle just to throw it. You have to have rhyme or reason,” he said.
And the rhyme may be that winning during the season is the reason.
“If you pass the ball — I don’t mean just throw deep — I mean if you pass … P-A-S-S. That means you have to have schemes and hot reads and blocking. Pat White is being taken now to levels he hasn’t been taken, just little stuff to help him take the pressure off,” Stewart said.
“If you were a defensive coach, would you rather have Noel Devine running the ball or catching it out in space? You’d probably like to keep him in the box. We’re trying to get flood situations, to get Noel the ball in space.”
While Stewart didn’t say it, he is inferring that with motion added to the offense, the Mountaineers will have a more sophisticated passing game than they had under Rich Rodriguez, a game that includes a tight end, that includes passes that are something more than quick flips to a wide receiver who’s responsibility is to beat the corner on the tackle and break a long gain.
There are a couple of costs that come with the philosophy. First of all, with motion, you can no longer keep your quarterback on hold calling plays, constantly looking to the sideline after the defense is analyzed.
“You have to go with what you called,” Stewart acknowledged. “If you called good flood routes, good passing routes that are safe and secure, it’s not as big a deal as you think.”
Will the change be dramatic?
“We’ll keep the same repertoire, run the ball, use the tempo. That’s who we are. We won’t change that. But we’ll add to that, and to make the recipe really exciting, we’ll have motion,” Stewart said.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
COLUMN: Stewart: Even more excitement with motion
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