Quick Hits: Game-Ready QBs, Adding a RB, Legit Position Battles + More

Day four of fall camp is in the books, and while the team is far from being where they need to be come August 30th, West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez is starting to see some encouraging signs.

Below are some of the notable quotes from today's press conference.

Opening statement

“Second day in shells. Thought there was some parts of it that were better than yesterday, some parts of it, not as much. I’m trying to get and this is more a staff issue — trying to get everybody more engaged with the down and distance and awareness of the situation when we’re out there, and sometimes the coaches, when you’re on the sideline, you just kind of let me run everything. I don’t want to run everything. We’ll get that fixed, but thought we made some steps.”

Non-negotiables for a quarterback to be considered “game-ready”

“They’re going to make mistakes. But is it a physical mistake? If it’s a mental mistake, is it like an egregious mental mistake that we overemphasize not to do? Obviously, taking care of the ball, everybody will tell you that, but what you can’t have is the repeated mistake. They have so many decisions, they’re going to have some bad ones, but are they repeating it over and over again? There’s so much to coach that we don’t have the time to keep going over the stuff we should have already fixed.”

Where they are at in terms of installing the offense

“I think we’re slower to put more in. A lot of people put it in three days, and they got ten different runs in on the first day or something. We’re slow to add, and it has to be relatable. In other words, our original three-day, four-day install, we haven’t met at all. (Mainly) because I’m like, oh, we can’t move on to that because we don’t have this down yet. Or, eh, that doesn’t look like it’s going to be a good fit, so we’ll take that out and revisit that later. I’ve always kind of enjoyed that part of it.”

How the quarterbacks are picking up the offense

“It’s a smart room. The coaches are smart. The players are smart. Even the young guys, Scotty Fox and Khalil (Wilkins), got a pretty good grasp, and Rhett’s done a pretty good job with them. But when you come to practice against our defense and they’re seeing all kinds of stuff, they’re making some mistakes that we got to get corrected in a hurry.”

Thoughts on the defensive line group

“We’re athletic. It looks like we’ve got some pretty good competition with the guys that we’ve added since the spring. Pretty active group. Eddie V(esterinen) has played a little bit, Ham(mond Russell), Nate (Gabriel). Some of the other guys have played at other places, so I think our competition is so much better than it was three or four months ago.”

If the running backs have been better

“They’ve been a little banged up. I think we had four practice today — Jahiem (White), (Diore) Hubbard, Clay Ash, Kannon (Katzer), so numbers are a little bit less. We may add a guy or two here because we’ve got to have more guys at running back. Larry (Porter) is an experienced coach. He’s picked up our system really well. We don’t have the bigger back yet, so we’re still looking at that, but it’s a pretty good group.”

Any update on waiver situations

“Nothing yet. We’re still on somebody else’s time. It can be frustrating, but at the same time, I seen someone the other day just got eligible. We got four guys we’re waiting on, and we’ll see where that goes. It seems like all the guys that decisions have been made in the last few weeks, it’s been whatever court they went to or something.”

If there’s enough legit competition in position battles

“From what I’ve seen the last four days, way more than the spring. To me, it looks like there’s some pretty good position battles going on just about everywhere. We haven’t gone live, and that’s going to be the real test, but we got some pretty good competition going on.”