To repeat, Jeff Braun will start at center for West Virginia Saturday and Jeff Braun is not worried about how Jeff Braun will perform.
We got to watch only a little bit of the senior in action and it looked mostly uneventful. Mostly. Not entirely. Watch the second snap here.
I’m being picky, I know. Braun’s job is not easy, though.
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There’s the shrine to Fordham’s Seven Blocks of Granite, which is not to be confused of the Seven Blocks of Ice that is the media from the Charleston Daily Mail, Charleston Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, West Virginia Illustrated and WTAE.
Very cold, windy day for the outside practice, but, hey, it was outside. And Fordham had a nice place with plenty of room.
I’ll upload some interesting videos from practice later, including something I’m certain we were meant to see because there’s no other explanation for why we saw it. I’d have it done, but the WiFi on the media shuttle, which has been super useful, blocks access to YouTube. We’re two hours minutes into a 30-minute ride from Fordham in the Bronx back to Brooklyn.
Anyways …
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Onward bound to what’s the final practice a reflective Shannon Dawson will have with Geno Smith, Stedman Bailey and Tavon Austin.
There was a mostly silent gripe that former WVU defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel preferred to keep under his ever-present hat in 2011. The Mountaineers offense didn’t have a tight end, which meant the defense wasn’t practicing against one when WVU would go good-on-good.
Further, the roster didn’t have too many tight ends, which was more a problem of the past than the present, but Tyler Urban was about it and he was in indispensable part of the offense as an inside receiver. He couldn’t be a part of the scout team offense when Casteel was trying to get his defense ready for a team that featured the tight end. WVU really didn’t have someone to fill that role.
And all of those hushed talking points became quite loud after Syracuse riddled WVU with tight ends last season.
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WVU’s head coach didn’t seem too concerned about anything when he spoke to the media at the bowl function Wednesday night.
You are looking live at Brooklyn Heights from high atop the Marriott New York at the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s starting to get bad outside and the mayor has already put the emergency operating system in effect.
It’s too windy to be productive outside and, by the sound of it, it may be too dangerous to travel before long.
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He hasn’t said it and don’t expect him to say it, but, man, you better believe Geno Smith wants to win this Pinstripe Bowl.
He’s 0-2 as the starter against the Orange — and that follows WVU’s eight-game winning streak in the series. He’s been the one leading offenses that scored 14 and 23 points in the two losses. He was sacked nine times and he threw five interceptions.
The only other team that he has multiple losses to is LSU … and no offense to Syracuse, which did a fine defensive job two times against Smith, but the Orange are not the Tigers. And Geno lit up the Tigers in 2011.
Then again, maybe he hasn’t said he wants this one because maybe he isn’t consumed by this one. Maybe there were many other factors at play in those losses that explain the Mountaineers had more problems than just Smith. Maybe Geno understands that after all these years.
The reality is those are all true and WVU’s record-setting senior quarterback is better able now than ever before to realize his team’s failings don’t fall squarely on his shoulders.
“That’s how I’ve grown mentally,” he said. “I can look back three or four years ago and had I been in this situation, I probably wouldn’t have handled it well. I remember losing to UConn my first year starting (2010) and I had to go back home just to talk to my mom. I was down in the dumps and she picked me up.
“Now she’s calling me, like, ‘Are you OK?’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ That’s different for her, but I feel like I’ve grown a lot in that respect.”
Syracuse fit in a nice little practice at Columbia University this morning and then had the rest of the day to do meetings and fine tuning before the players get some time to themselves. WVU would wait until the afternoon to practice at Fordham University, but that’s not going to happen.
The “monster storm” is on the way and should be hitting hard when WVU was to be hitting in practice. So that practice has been scratched. The wind and the snow are expected to be that bad.
Rather than go to the designated indoor facility at Hofstra, the Mountaineers will instead work out in their hotel. I’m serious. It is a Hilton, though, and there should be big ballrooms. I doubt there’s an indoor facility.
Why the hotel? Hofstra is in Hempstead and Long Island is probably too long and too treacherous a trip for the expected conditions. No travel is required to work out at the hotel, but the setup is a nightmare, to be sure.
No media availability at the WVU practice today, for obvious reasons, but Coach Dana Holgorsen, quarterback Geno Smith, receivers Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey, defensive end Will Clarke, offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson and defensive coordinator Keith Patterson will be available at the bowl’s media day even tonight at Yankee Stadium.
How we’ll get there, I have no idea. Fun!
So thought Andrew McGee upon learning he’d been red flagged and cut by the Chicago Bears just days after signing as an undrafted rookie last year.
His playing days were over, and though he’d dealt with and actually conquered that possibility previously, that was in college. He’d later prove himself wrong and return from a broken neck to share the Big 12 lead with five interceptions in 2010, but the bad news the Bears brought effectively ended his playing days.
Just not his coaching days.
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