Quick Hits: Hawkins' Decision-Making, RB Depth Takes Minor Hit, Fixable Issues + More

The top quotes from Rich Rodriguez's weekly press conference.

West Virginia University quarterback Michael Hawkins Jr. | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

Mountaineer head football coach Rich Rodriguez just wrapped up his weekly press conference, and as you could imagine, there weren't very many questions about this week's opponent, UT Martin. It was more about what happened last weekend and what we could see moving forward.

Here are some of the highlights from today's presser.

If the issues from game one are correctable

“Yeah. The good thing about it is I didn’t see anything we can’t fix. It wasn’t from a physical standpoint, like ‘Boy, this guy got dominated’ or something like that. It was silly penalty here or some kind of assignment mistake. It seemed like in the second half on defense, it wouldn’t be all 11 guys; it was just one guy maybe out of position or something like that. The effort was good all game.”

Mike Hawkins’ decision-making

“It was Mike’s first game in our offense, and he’ll get more comfortable, but I think his decision-making was pretty good. I think he was pretty decisive on what we were doing. And again, second half was a little bit different because we had limited possessions, and there were things we were just running the ball and killing the clock, what have you. I think he’ll continue to get better.”

Evaluation of the offensive line

“Thought they played hard. I thought there were a couple M.A.'s here and there, but for the first game together for all five of them, I thought it was a pretty solid effort, and they’ll grow from this one. We wanted to get more guys in the last game, but it was weird how it happened in the second half. We’re going to have to play a lot more people in every game going forward, not just this week. I’m talking about for the rest of the year. Eight straight games with no open dates is a pretty good stretch.”

Being conservative in the second half

“If I look back at it, there were probably times in the second half where I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to run and get a first down.’ We had opportunities to take a shot, and I should have took a shot. You know, trust our protection and our wideouts and our quarterbacks and try to get a pass play going. We kind of played it maybe too close to the vest in the second half with that lead. I was just trying to calm us down a little bit, get our defense some rest. I could have been more aggressive, especially in the third quarter.”

First game for Kevin Brown

“He played pretty well. There was a couple of freshman mistakes in there, but for a true freshman playing for the first time, I was really pretty proud of him. He’s a very, very competitive guy. He’s very conscientious. We thought he played pretty well.”

If Chris Talley being out threw a wrench into the RB plans

“A little bit because he was going to be the next guy in probably, to get some reps. Martavious Boswell is probably that next guy now. But Lawrence Autry has been hurt, and now Lawrence is healthy, so today, Bos and Autry will get the third running back reps, and we’ll try to get them ready to go. It’s week to week (for Chris Talley) with the hamstring thing.”