Rich Rodriguez press conference summary: 8-8

West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez addressed the media Friday on fall camp and here is a summary of what was said during the press conference.

–Tomorrow will be an important day for them to play some football. Today was in shorts so it’s hard to judge on some things.

–Cyncir Bowers is a good football player and one of the fastest guys they’ve got. He was back today after being banged up.

–Today was more situational and two-minute but tomorrow the focus will be on playing football and being situationally aware. End of half was a focus today and they’ve got to get a lot of that stuff in with if they have one timeout when are they going to take it and getting out of bounds and that kind of stuff.

–Rodriguez wants to label guys certain positions and he understands why. Rodriguez feels that they have a couple guys that can be pretty good.

–Rodriguez wants to see the effort tomorrow and not making the same mistakes they did before. They want to see physicality and see his team play football. Part of his goal in the scrimmage is to not have as much coaching and let the guys play and correct the moments when they have to correct them.

–Rodriguez said what he likes from Jahiem White is that he is physically able to run 25-30 times a game. He doesn’t overthink it if a running back is in there and breaks off a big run and taps out to get a blow but once you sub it allows them to sub. They’re not going to sub. The type of mentality the backs have is that you can hand it to me ten straight times I can run it and be in shape but you better have three you can win with at any time.

–Before school starts Rodriguez said his team should have who we are offensively, defensively and the plays they’re going to run. The identity should be established by the time school starts.

–To break a big run some of it is execution and some of it is awareness. The execution part is on the players and the coaches, but then you have to have somebody that can make a guy miss. You can teach the execution part of it but for the most part the explosive ones came from somebody who took advantage of a little bit of space and took off.

–If any of the freshmen can help, Rodriguez said they will play. Eventually Rodriguez believes that eventually it will be five years to play five. He is looking forward to getting them ready to play. All of the freshmen are really good players and have earned the opportunity to be here but the ones that have great success are the ones that are engaged and cognizant of getting better.

–Rodriguez said they don’t have a lot of experience from here but they have played football somewhere else in the secondary. They are still learning the system because it’s unique and different but the secondary play has to get better and they’ve got some veteran experience. Secondary gets exposed a little bit more because of the nature of the position. There is urgency for them to get them to play at the right level in a unique type of defense. They get tested in practice quite a bit.

–Rodriguez told a funny story from when he was recruiting Xavier Bausley at Jacksonville State and he said that his dad burned all of Rodriguez’s pictures and everything in 2007 when he left and cussed him out. He had a good laugh about that. The expectations for those guys are higher all around.

–Rodriguez said he tries to roll people in and out and they got to be able to show their competitiveness no matter the situation that the players are in. Rodriguez is looking forward to the scrimmage. He won’t put things up in the booth tomorrow but they’ll do that eight days before the first game. In some regards they put weight on a good day, but it matters who he’s going against.

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