Quick Hits: What the Problems Are, Lack of RPOs, Passing Game Progress + More

Rich Rodriguez answers questions from the media in his weekly presser.

West Virginia University linebacker Ben Cutter | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

Tuesday afternoon, West Virginia head football coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media for his weekly presser, and while there were a few questions about this week's game against Cincinnati, a lot of it, as you would imagine, was on what they need to do to get the defense fixed and if they can fix it.

Here are the top quotes from today's presser.

Evaluation of the defense after watching tape

"We've looked at everything. The whole staff watched the film for four and a half hours Sunday morning, watched it with the whole defense Sunday afternoon, and trying to get to the bottom of exactly why, because it's been a different issue or issues every week. I know what the answers are, and the coaches know what the answers are, and we have good enough players to play better. We just as a staff got to find ways to get our guys to play better, and that includes everything: How we're practicing, who's playing where, fundamentally, schematically, everything. I think there is the ability for us to be pretty good on defense with the guys that we have and the coaches that we have, but it's not shown up."

If the defensive issues are fixable

"Most of them, yeah. There's no question. When you give up two halfback passes in the Iowa State game and a flea-flicker pass in this game, those are just embarrassing. That should never happen. We just got to get coached better and obviously perform a lot better to give us a chance to win games. I'm encouraged because I know we can play a whole lot better."

If going slower tempo on offense would help the defense

"If you looked at the time of possession, 109 plays, I don't know how many yards it was...12-play, 16-play drive, 10-play drives...it's almost as if you're slow tempo and controlling the thing. When they score in three plays and two plays, and four plays, if it was that, I would be like, 'Golly, we need to slow down and help our defense out.' But if we would have had two- or three-play drives, it could have been worse."

Evaluation of freshman S Matt Sieg

"He's been solid, but he's a true freshman. There were a couple of times where we put him in a spot that was really, really difficult that we probably shouldn't have put him in. But for a true freshman playing in the secondary where there's a lot going on, I think Matt's done pretty well. He's going to have a great career here. Football is important to him; he's a really good athlete. There are things we can do to help Matt out."

How Mike Hawkins Jr. is coming along as a passer

"His decisiveness was pretty good. There was a couple throws that weren't the most accurate that he missed on a little bit, and some of that could have been technique-wise or foundationally, where his feet were set, but I thought he saw the field pretty well. There was a couple of things we didn't connect on, and the wide receivers can help in that regard. The first thing you look at in the pass game is: Are we making the right decision? Are we throwing to the right guy? Are his eyes in the right spot? And he's been really good with that for his first year in the system."

If there is a reason there aren't as many RPOs being called

"A lot of times, it's just the way people are playing us. A lot of times, they are playing man and just jumping the man, taking all that stuff away, and trying to outnumber you in the box. We still have the ability to do it. Our version of RPOs was started 20-some years ago, so it's a little different version of RPOs now, but we still have them."