Things have not gone well for West Virginia on the defensive side of the ball, to say the least. I could rattle off the total yards, points allowed, yards per play, etc., but there's really no point. In this regard, the eye test doesn't lie — it's been as bad as it has looked.
Whether or not they find any fixes remains to be seen, but head coach Rich Rodriguez is doing everything he can to search for some of those answers. The last two Sundays have turned into long meetings with the staff, watching film, trying to identify the problems and how to fix them.
"Some of it is we've got to find something we can hang our hat on. We have no identity," Rodriguez said on his radio show Monday night. "There's nothing that we're hanging our hat on, and so we've got to find that as best as we can. We're moving guys around, we had some injuries, and that always creates a little bit of an issue. But I'm convinced that we can play a whole lot better, and we're going to have to play a whole lot better. The solution is not just simplifying. It's getting the guys to play fundamentally because their effort's not bad. It's not like they're loafing. I don't see the urgency. I don't see the see-ball, get-ball (mentality). They're pressing a little too much or whatever it is. It's been a lot of hard conversations with coaches and players in the last couple of days to get us to play better because you can't win games playing defense the way we're playing defense, so we've got to fix that."
What could those hard conversations be about?
I don't want to speculate too much, but I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of it is about something needing to change. Whether that's the personnel that is on the field, how guys are being coached, how things are being called — you name it.
Continuing to do the same thing over and over again isn't going to work. Defensive coordinator Zac Alley knows that and told the TNT TV crew last week that he trimmed down the call sheet to 12 plays for the Cincinnati game. At times, the defense looked good, but those pockets of success weren't sustained, nor did they last long enough.
If WVU's defense doesn't look any better this week against TCU, it will cause Rodriguez and the staff to really consider shaking things up during the bye week.
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