By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — He was the architect of the beginning of the end for West Virginia’s run as a nationally ranked football team, this man who now was nothing but a scratchy voice that kept breaking up on the other end of a conference call that almost never was.
The name isn’t exactly a household word, not even in Pittsburgh, which was where his mail was delivered last year, for Paul Rhoads stayed mostly in the background, which is how it often is with coordinators who are dubbed neither genius or jerk.
In fact, when you ask Patrick White about Rhoads’ performance defense last year and if he gives that much thought, White simply says, “I didn’t see him on the field last year. If he ain’t on the field, I’m not worried about him.”
Rhoads was the author of the defense that kept West Virginia out of the national championship game last year, a defense that seemed to know who would run the ball when, where he would be going, and that had Rich Rodriguez analyzed down to the “o” in ego, certain that he would not take the deep passes down the middle that he had left open.
This has become important this week because Rhoads’ success in that single game was rewarded with a new job, a premier job in the world of college football.
He took over at Auburn, where football isn’t a way of life but is life itself. Ask the man who would have been offensive coordinator, Tony Franklin, who was fired in mid-season of his first year when his spread offense failed to take hold.
That’s something you see as rarely as you see what happened when both those coordinators came to the forefront this year, Auburn winning college football’s first 3-2 game in 43 years against Mississippi State.
The question, as Rhoads could best make it out on this phone call, was what happened, why was he able to do what few had done and control the WVU offensive machine.
“There’s a few things,” he began. “It’s such a tremendous rivalry game. When two rivals get together, it’s been said, you can throw out the record book, throw out the talent. Teams tend to play up. Our team played up that night.”
Indeed they did, holding WVU to 193 total yards and to nothing more than a single touchdown.
“We tackled extremely well that night,” Rhoads said.
Tackling had been preached all week, but no one would know that Pitt would have no more than two missed tackles in an entire game. Some players have two misses on a single play against the likes of Patrick White, Steve Slaton and Noel Devine. And those two tackles cost Pitt exactly eight yards.
“There were several plays when a shoestring tackle was made, just grabbing the legs. Had those tackles not been made those would have been 30 and 40 and 60 yards, or would have gone for touchdowns,” Rhoads admitted.
But that certainly wasn’t all of it, for he had been the defensive coordinator the two previous years and WVU scored 45 points in each game and went up and down the field unchallenged. They didn’t do that because in those years they wore Velcro cleats instead of those with shoestrings.
Rhoads noted that WVU was not as precise as in previous years and that Pitt was.
“Being away from the right spot by two years is a big difference against Steve Slaton, Pat White and Co.,” he said.
He noted, too, that Pitt controlled the football last season offensively, making life easier for the defense.
And, of course, there was a little matter of thumb injury that kept White on the sideline for about half the game, too.
Ah, but then there was the idea that he could get away with putting everyone but the cheerleaders at the line of scrimmage and daring WVU to throw because Rodriguez just wasn’t about to back off the macho image he had created for his team.
“When Rich came in in 2001 they were throwing the ball all over the yard,” Rhoads said. But that changed as his personnel dictated, Rodriguez’s offense becoming a power spread.
Rhoads saw that by the bowl game, with Rodriguez gone and Oklahoma the opponent, WVU was less macho and more intelligent, running from the I, throwing the ball deep, making Oklahoma’s defense look like it was running around with its shoestrings untied, tripping all over themselves.
“They obviously had self scouted,” Rhoads said.
Now Rhoads is busy developing a defense to stop a WVU offense that has mostly stopped itself all year, one that averages only 22 points a game, that measures many of its gains in feet, not yards.
Make no doubt he’ll have something new for the Mountaineers this year, something that addresses not only Noel Devine’s running ability and White’s ability to scramble, but at least the threat that WVU will throw the ball this year.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
