Rich Rodriguez Voices Frustrations and Attempts to Find Positive Following Loss to Utah

The West Virginia Mountaineers (2-3, 0-2) fell to the Utah Utes (4-1, 1-1) Saturday afternoon 48-14.

West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media following the game and gave some insight on the second consecutive Big 12 Conference loss.

Opening Statement

"Disappointing. Its embarrassing how we just failed to execute and didn’t have anything that was really good. Coaching wasn’t good, playing wasn’t good.

"They never even had a punt – didn’t punt one time. They had 33 first downs. We only had 14 first downs.

"There’s just a lot of things to fix.

"I know coming in we don’t have a big margin for error because we’re a little nicked up and stuff like that, so I don’t want to say you got to play perfect but you certainly got to play better than what we did today to beat a good Utah team.

"We got a short week. I don’t think anybody in that locker room will lay down or quit or anything like that and it’s my job to make sure we get this going in a better direction in the next four days because we got a short week to get going against another really good team at their place. We’ll work hard to get it fixed in a hurry."

Defense's tough outing

"I thought we had been pretty consistent and played well in a lot of our games. Today, we were leaving guys wide open, missing tackles and giving up the deep balls. I thought a couple of time we had a chance to make a play and the ball – didn’t quite do it. "

Redshirt freshman Khalil Wilkins’ two drives leading the offense

"I thought he competed well for a young guy in his first action. I thought he ran hard. A couple of throws probably would like would to have back – missed a couple easy ones there. I was proud of the way he competed."

Looking for any positives in another lopsided loss

"I think you take whatever you can positive. There’s not a whole lot from this game. We’ll watch the film.

"I don’t think we were as physical maybe in the front on either side in the first half of course. We’ll see who played well – watch the film and kind of go from there.

"(Redshirt senior offensive lineman) Kimo (Makane'ole) was out and (redshirt junior offensive lineman) Landon (Livingston) was out. Landon was already out, but Kimo got out the first half. I mean, there are opportunities for guys to see what they can do. We don’t have an open date till after this [next] one. The open date will help us I think, but right now we got a short week against a good team. We’re not just going to sit back and say, ‘woe is me.’ We got to get back to work right away and come up with an idea or plan to find out what’s going on."

Opening Statement

Defense's tough outing

Redshirt freshman Khalil Wilkins’ two drives leading the offense

Looking for any positives in another lopsided loss

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