Quick Hits: Depth Chart Talk, No Drama, Explosiveness + More

We are moving right along through the first week of the season as West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez just wrapped up his weekly chat with the media, looking ahead to this week's game versus Coastal Carolina.

Here are some of the highlights from today's press conference.

If the ORs that will show on the depth chart a bad thing

“I think mostly for us, it’s in a good way. If you have an OR because you’re not sure either one of them are ready to do that, that makes that not so good. Most of our ORs, probably all of them, are because we feel good about multiple guys at those positions. I think we’re a deeper team for sure than we were a year ago.”

If this team being “more exciting” means being more explosive

“Yeah. I think there’s guys that have experience, so you think that they’re going to be guys that’s going to carry over. I think we’ve got exciting skill players on offense. We have some explosive guys on defense. I think our overall team speed is a little higher on both sides of the ball as well, and I think they’ll play hard. We’ll learn a lot in the first game.”

If he hit the target number he had of having enough players to win with

“Ask me that at 4 o’clock on Saturday. But I don’t want to put all of that on one game. I felt that after camp that this team is coming together pretty good. There were a couple of days I didn’t think we practiced really well, so that makes you nervous again. Our little dry run, Beanie Bowl that we had Friday, I told the team I couldn’t judge anything, but that’s because it was so scripted; it’s just really hard to play football. Our guys, for the most part, have been very receptive to all the stuff we’ve asked them to do, and we ask them to do a lot. Most of these guys have been here since January, so we’ve worked a long time together.”

What challenge does Coastal bring?

“They’re going to be very well-coached. They very rarely give up big plays or easy, cheap ones. They’re going to be in the right spot, and you can tell that by watching their games and their scheme and what they’re doing. They’ve got some really good football players, but you’re not really sure where they’re going to be lined up all the time, so that’s going to be a little bit of a challenge. And then offensively, they could be a whole lot of new stuff that we hadn’t seen.”

More on him liking this team

“These guys have been very coachable. I’ve really enjoyed it. There hasn’t been drama, which you would expect with, I don’t know how many new guys we got. You’d expect a little bit of drama here and there, but there really hasn’t been, so that’s what has made me feel good that they’re going to keep progressing.”

Pat White getting his No. 5 jersey retired

“That’s a great honor. It’s one of the greatest honors any athlete could ever have at a university — you’ve done so well there that they want to retire your number forever. And not just as an athlete, but what you meant to the program. Everybody that gets their number retired probably made an indelible impact on that program for decades, and that’s what Patrick did. People are still talking about what he did 20 years ago. He was always about the team first, and why do I need to do to have West Virginia have success?”

Add us as a preferred source on Google