Welcome to Friday Feedback, live today from the ledge so many people wandered out onto Saturday night. Looks empty out here now, which is good. It’s been a long week for the players and the coaches and it’ll be a long time until they get their first shot at redemption Thursday night. That said, the attitude appears to be pretty good — or about as good as you could expect. The offensive line was humbled, but a little angry. Brandon Hogan was eager to prove he’s better than he’s played. Everyone on defense said they’ve never practiced better than they have this week.

I guess you’d expect them to say all of that, but you didn’t expect what happened Saturday, did you? They accepted everything and made no excuses. Call it encouraging, a small victory, the first of many needed to get this thing back on track.

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, you need a little Pat Lazear in you.

“I screwed up,” the sophomore from Bethesda, Md., said. “We all screw up every day. It’s all about coming back the next day and screwing up less.”

Yes! 

philip said:

sobering. unfortunately, the test to see how we respond requires high altitude baking instructions.

(Insert “rise up” or “end up flat” or “deflating” quips here)

thacker said:

You’re right. ECU will be favored in all remaining games at this point and as they should. Every ball club the Mountaineers play, at this point, will be believing they can make the WVU squad their ‘bitch’.

September 18th will say a lot. Colorado is big and ‘all go no quit’.

By the way, if a ball player has that absolute need to do something stupid and slap an opponent in the head after a play, don’t slap them like some wussy little choir boy. Take their damn head off.

I said this once, but I have to say it again. That final point cannot be emphasized enough. What, are they going to give you a 30-yard penalty? Make it count!  

Michael said:

The idea that we could go 11-1 or 10-2 this season seems ludicrous in the clear, post- ECU light of day. This Mountaineers football team was exposed more than the protagonist in the new Chuck Palahniuk novel” Snuff”.
We lost 80% of our coaching staff & 75% of our defense and we REVAMP our offense. In hindsight, we should have seen this coming.
The most troubling aspect for me( OFFENSE OFFENSE OFFENSE) is how we have gotten away from the bread and butter that made our program famous…. the run: we saw no PW read options and no Slaton sideline zone stretch… and forget about the Owen Schmitt plays.
We do not know how to pass block and all of that motion seemed downright profligate in the second half. P Rod’s vanilla play calling is looking much better after watching ” the best O line in the nation’s” sieve like pass protection.
We need to throw out the Mullen chess board and go back to offensive checkers.  

I know it’s been said, but my concern was that it i didn’t look like we had a game plan at all and then didn’t adapt to anything. It just felt that we came out uninspired and flat.

OK, that’s an all-inclusive review of what went wrong and there really is no argument, BUT do you really expect all the problems to persist? It was almost like a coincidental meltdown, where so many things went bad at once. The biggest thing to come out of the game, I believe, is many of the new and/or untested parts realize it’s not as easy as those before them made it look. I don’t anticipate another effort like that again this year and it seems naive to say nothing will get better. Remember, WVU was 1-4 in 2003 and won seven in a row.

Alli said:

We’re a SOFT football team. No one wanted to go out there and hit someone. ECU was 100 times more physical than we were. We’ve always prided ourselves on being a tough football team, but that has completely disappeared this season, and I don’t know why. Our No.1 rated O-line isn’t anywhere close to being in the top 25, because we’re slower than molasses. Just a horrible, horrible performance.

At least my Bobcats put on a good show against OSU.

ECU deserves all the credit in the world though. They are a very good team, and I hope they have a great season. Can you imagine what the score would have been if their top running back was healthy? Yikes. I guess we have to prepare for a season like UofL had last year. Fantastic.

Oh, and Can someone please catch the &*#@ Ball!  

There was an alarming lack of passion and physicality and that seemed to be the thing most players and coaches were determined to change. It’s important to remember just how good and experienced ECU was, though. Older players are typically stronger and more physical players and the Pirates had a clear edge there. Sometimes you need to be smacked in the head to realize a mistake.

oklahomamountaineer said: 

I also had a concern that we did not seem to make significant adjustments at the half. The line was having trouble, but I didn’t see that any adjustments were made to address such as keeping the fullback into block or rolling the pocket away from the rush.

Defensively, we always seemed to have one guy in coverage out of position and that’s the guy Pickney was picking on.

It was more a function of letting Pat make a play…..

I know the players believe in the coaching staff….but I didn’t see that they were able to help them get better on the fly…..anxious to hear what Stew has to say on Statewide Sportsline this week.

Can’t speak on coaching or adjustments other than to repeat what they said afterward — wanted to be balanced, got too far behind — but it did look like problems from the first half sneaked into the second half. Except the fumbles. Those were huge. As for the defense, Pinkney is a pretty smart, pretty experienced quarterback and he knew where to go and when. They had a plan for every down and distance. Seriously, on the first drive alone they handled two penalties, called a timeout at the line of scrimmage on one third down and never really blinked on second-and-10, third-and-1, first-and-15, second-and-13 and third-and-9, the last one coming when Mortty Ivy was a whisker away from sacking Pinkney, who instead stood in there and completed a 35-yard pass he never saw.

Josh24601 said:

I wonder what the C-USA replay crew was doing. Sure, it was a close play that may or may not have been overturned, but the point of the replay personnel is supposed to be to stop things right away if a questionable play comes up. If they don’t stop for a play like that, why be there?

And as for Stewart’s explanation for not challenging: the aftermath of a strange call is not the place for a major-college head coach to display a staunch, unquestioning respect for authority. Add that, at most, only two officials–not seven–saw the play, and Stewart’s seeming bewilderment is coaching malpractice of high order.

And, fine, ECU might have won even if the call had been overturned, but they would have been worse off at that moment if WVU had kept the ball. Just because your grandma might fall in the bathtub tomorrow doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help her cross the street today.

Yes, the officials on the field were from the Big East and the officials in the replay booth were from C-USA. I won’t forward a conspiracy, but I will say I thought it was really weird they didn’t pause the game. What’s the harm? As for coaching malpractice — ow! — let’s see how he handles the next situation. It should start with making sure his assistants in the coaching box have a replay monitor.

Foul Shot said:

We were sitting on the 50 yard line in the WVU upper level section across the field from the play. It looked to me from there that White made the 1st down, set the ball on the field and went out of bounds simultaneously. So, if I can see that with my terrible view, Stew must have at least had some doubt on the call from his better view, so he should have challenged. Simple as that. At that point of the game, WVU was trying to answer ECU and it looked like a decent drive. It was early and a score there maybe could have given WVU some momentum.
Let’s face it, the whole day was a complete WHIFF by the team and coaching staff. Hopefully, it gets better the rest of the year.

No one has asked this yet and it might be insane, but is it possible that on the first drive of the game Stewart left the call to the officials and wanted to keep the timeout and, more importantly, his challenge in case he needed one or both for later? Just asking…

Rob W. said:

Let me state that I was not in favor of the Bill Stewart hire and even expressed my fears that it could happen in the fourth quarter of the Fiesta Bowl. However, he is WVU’s coach and I will support him. But I have genuine concerns and am very afraid that my worst fears about the FUTURE (not just one game) of WVU football may come true.

USF….Louisville….USF….Pitt….. Those are games that WVU have lost but you were not dominated. You could look at those games and look at plays within those games and say “what if….”

You can’t do that with the ECU loss. This team was dominated. It went up against a team that was more physical. WVU didn’t play disciplined. They did not appear to play with a lot of energy. To me, these characteristics reflect on the head coach. AND, let’s not forgot that Villanova pushed them around at some points.

I am very afraid that there is a reason that Coach Stewart has been a QB/ST coach and only has one short stint as a head coach. I’m very afraid that he could be in over his head. And IF that is true, panic and confusion is likely to follow.

Were ECU and Villanova flukes? Is this just going to be a bit of a worse year due to youth and inexperience? Is this a staff committed to a new way of doing things even at the expense of this season with payoffs in the future? Or are there real issues and concerns? Only time will tell but I don’t like the looks after two weeks.

Let’s Go Mountaineers!

There are no answers here, but that’s a popular common opinion. The “I told you so!” crowd came out of hiding this week. 

thacker said:

Maybe not underestimate Bill Stewart? Sometimes a good ass kicking is just what is needed — as in the ECU ballgame. If anyone could have made the WVU squad lay down and roll-over, it was Oklahoma. A couple of weeks before that game, they got their ass kicked just not publicly on a ball field. September 18th will have much to say.  

That, too, is a commom opinion. In recent years, WVU was a very resilient team. It remains to be seen if these players and coaches are the same.  

Karl said:

My impression was that we didn’t hire BS to build a program. We hired him to stay the course; to win now, while we still had the players. Incorporating your own wrinkles into the offense is one thing. If Pastilong & Co. were out to rebuild the Mountaineer program, they would have hired someone with a proven track record for doing so.

I still haven’t lost faith that we can right the ship and have a very good season. Anyone who thought this was a nat’l championship team was not thinking realistically. Beyond that, all of our goals — especially a Big East championship — are still on the table.

Yeah, that was a bizarre postgame comment from Stew, especially since the big defense of his hiring was continuity and that he could do the most with the current roster. A program-builder would have been, oh, I don’t know, Skip Holtz. And Karl’s right — the Big East is awful and WVU could still win the conference and get into the BCS for the third time in four years. 

oklahoma mountaineer said:

Mike, in response to your article on players needing to relax and play. Isn’t that a reflection of the coaching staff?

Does the staff, feeling the pressure to put the appearance of no falloff from last year, make these guys press in that they want Stew and crew to succeed?

Headline was a little misleading there — I don’t think relaxing does anyone any good. I just think the team and the offense in particular needs something to feel good about. Right now, there’s a lot of pressure, but it comes from the struggles, not the coaching. In two games, they’ve had six plays go for 20 or more yards. They averaged about seven per game last year. I think coaching could put the players in a better position to make positive plays and Stew and Mullen have said they’ll go back to some of the zone reads and belly options they’ve had success with in the past. Obviously, the new staff wants new ideas to work, but I don’t think they ever call one play saying, “That’ll show ’em!”

glibglub said:

I say there should be one officially sanctioned form of celebration. Any player could perform this celebration without a penalty. That way, players could still celebrate, but the rules committee would still have the satisfaction of removing all spontenaity from the game.

I can get with that, but I think a team should have one one officially sanctioned celebration, so long is it remains within well-defined guidlines. Make it something the coaches clear with the officials before the game just so a flag isn’t thrown. Any deviation from the celebration is a penalty. Imagine if there were 119 different division I celebrations. Wouldn’t that add some spice to the nonconference games? And not only that, but it’d give some of the scout team guys an extra purpose on the team. I mean, if they’re supposed to know the opponents well enough to impersonate them in practice, shouldn’t they also know how to choreograph a celebration to get under their skin? 

Matt said:

I find it interesting that Edsall commented on this and sided with the rule book. Last year he saw nothing wrong with his player faking a fair catch on a punt return and return the punt for a touchdown to beat Louisville. Edsall didn’t seem to care what the rule book said then.

Highest of irony, highest of comedy.

Mack said:

“I saw all that and I don’t know why everybody got upset,” Edsall said.

If this is true, then Edsall really is a dork and I would not like to meet him. What I find amusing is how television would have you think that there doesn’t seem to be any sensable people in the world. One half of society wants the rule to be no celebration (meaning the word “excessive” doesn’t apply).

The other half of society thinks it’d be a crime if Chad Johnson and T.O. weren’t able to do their antics that have nothing to do with football OR celebrating a touchdown.

What I love is that WVU is generally so under the radar that all national pundits have no idea that in 2004 it got about 30 excessive celebration penalties for the arms-crossed pose.

The crossed arms nearly tore that team in half. To be honest, I couldn’t wait for WVU to score because there was nothing — NOTHING — funnier than seeing the celebration and then the flag.

JP said:

lol – I forgot about this Hawkins rant about his players wanting more vacation time before the start of summer conditioning: IT’S DIVISION I FOOTBALL! IT’S THE BIG 12! IT ISN’T INTERMURALS! … YOU’RE A LITTLE BUMMED OUT YOU DON’T GET THREE WEEKS? GO PLAY INTERMURALS BROTHER! I can’t imagine ol’ bill going off like that, but it would make the press conferences more entertaining.

I’m trying, JP. I’m trying.

thacker said:

I don’t know about all that stuff — Hawkin’s lid flipping, Hnida’s allegations, etc.

What I do know is that one thing is needed out there with you and out on that ball field —-

Ryan

J

BOYD

Enjoy the weekend!