Here's Everything Rich Rodriguez Said After Losing to the Ohio Bobcats

The West Virginia Mountaineers (1-1) fell to the Ohio Bobcats (1-1) Saturday evening in Athens (OH) 17-10.

West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media following the game and addressed some of the issues resulting in the stunning loss to the Bobcats.

Overall thoughts on dropping the game to Ohio

"I’m just very disappointed. It starts with me. I told the guys I failed them this week. I thought we had a good week of practice. I thought we were ready to play and we weren’t. We didn’t execute. A lot of things to work on. I knew there were would some growing pains. I’m going to do a better job, and we’ll get better from this."

Team morale after losing junior running back Jahiem White and senior receiver Jaden Bray to injury

"We got banged up a little bit. The guys were playing hard, and the guys went in there and battled.

"It's (the loss) going to hurt all of us for the next 20 hours or so and then we know who's next. So, we got to get to work, and I got to get these guys ready to go and they’ll be ready to play next Saturday.

"I think the biggest thing we got to do with the loss, and the wins, but the losses you got to learn as much as you can from it, like everybody – players, coaches, and everybody in the program."

Substituting Jaylen Henderson in for starting quarterback Nicco Marchiol for two series in the second half

"[I was] Just trying to get a spark. Tried to get a little spark, you know? Particularly with maybe some of the quarterback run stuff and it didn’t really... It wasn’t Jaylen or Nicco’s fault, it’s just more mine. We’ll evaluate the film, see what went wrong and what we can fix to get better."

Ohio quarterback Parker Navarro producing 334 yards of total offense and a touchdown

"He’s phenomenal. That was a big worry coming in that youd have everybody covered and there was times we kept him from going outside but he’d duck inside and scramble. He’s just a phenomenal playmaker and there was no question he’s pretty dynamic."

The status of Jahiem White's injury

"It didn’t look good from the sidelines, but I haven’t even talked to the medical staff yet, so I don’t know what’s going on."

What the offense lost with White out of the game

"Obviously hes a great player and so you lose some of his explosiveness, but we weren’t executing even before then. Again, that’s my job. I take responsibility for the lack of execution. I thought we had two really good practices on Tuesday and Wednesday, but that didn’t show up today for sure."

The performance of the West Virginia defense forcing three turnovers and holding Ohio to 17 points

"They forced turnovers – plenty of opportunities. We missed a couple tackles here and there and they gave up just a couple of things – third downs, but they battled and played hard and played well enough for us to win but when you lose, everybody loses and like I said, we’ll take this and learn as much as we can from it."