Fim Review: Rodriguez Gives Final Evaluation of WVU's First Scrimmage

Over the weekend, the West Virginia Mountaineers held their first scrimmage, and there was a good mix of everything — flashes of explosive plays on offense, togetherness on defense, turnovers, penalties — you name it, it happened.

When head coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media immediately following the scrimmage, he seemed to be pretty pleased with how things went, which was a surprise to many. With it being such an important day of evaluations, the assumption was that the team would be far away from meeting a certain level of physicality, effort, and execution that Rodriguez was looking for, and that it would be a press conference full of rants.

That was not the case.

Although he did provide some initial thoughts, Rodriguez did throw out the typical, "I've got to go watch the film" phrase a handful of times, reserving final judgment of how the day went. On Monday, he gave the that final evaluation.

“I think the effort part wasn’t bad. I expected more times that we’d have to yell at guys. The effort was pretty good. The physicality was okay, but not what it needed to be up front. Tempo was okay, we’re still servicing each other. And probably the biggest takeaway out of that is that we still have a lot more decisions to be made on who’s going to be the first guys running out there on a lot of positions. It didn’t clarify it maybe as much as we thought.”

Among those decisions is, of course, the quarterback battle. It's the third week of fall camp, and still, Rodriguez has five guys taking reps at the position. The picture will begin to become clearer with each day of practice, but certainly with each "live" setting that takes place. This Saturday, the plan is to conduct another scrimmage where the quarterbacks are also live, giving the staff another key data point to evaluate off of. He's hoping to have a tentative two-deep by the time school begins on August 20th.

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