Rich Rodriguez Voices his Frustrations Following the Loss to BYU

The West Virginia Mountaineers (2-4, 0-3) fell to the BYU Cougars (5-0, 2-0) Friday night 38-24.

WVU head coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media for his postgame press conference and discussed the play of quarterbacks Khalil Wilkins (r-fr.) and Scotty Fox Jr. (fr.) and the continued woes on both sides of the ball.

Wilkins making his first career start

“Played hard. He competed. A freshman in that environment, I thought he was into the game. I think he’d like to have a lot of plays back, but I also think he competed his tail off. I think Scotty did too when he got in there.

“We got to get some help, I mean, hell, if you can’t score from the one-inch line – It's ridiculous. Get shoved around on offense and get shoved around on defense. Its not good. We got to get better at that.”

The defense allowing explosive plays

“Can’t make a play on the ball in the air – all those long pass plays. They did whatever they want. Don’t make them punt. If you don’t make the other team punt, you’re probably going to lose. Two games in a row.”

Searching for positives on offense

“We had to have a quarterback run game to run anything.

“The two young quarterbacks – they’re freshman... Scotty made throws, made a nice run. Khalil made some nice runs. He probably had a few things he’d like to come back. Shoot, that was a tough environment to get your first start in. The guy that wasn’t able to practice all the way up to until August because of injury in the spring. Proud of those two guys”

LaVell Edwards Stadium atmosphere

“I hadn’t been here for a game – I’ve heard about it. Kind of like our student section – our students get into it and theirs do to. When we were back up a little bit in there, it was hard hear a couple of times. They did a nice job of that whole atmosphere.”

Is the playbook scaled back with the limitations at offensive line?

“We can’t pass protect long enough if we do drop back pass and can’t get open on press pass [coverage] sometimes, sometimes we can. So, we just got to find and create some ways for those guys to have some success. I don’t want to say you have to be perfect with your assignments and stuff, but you got to be pretty close on mark and the hard part is everybody is going to play different fronts and change things up a little bit. And we can’t overcome a lot of negative yards plays.

BYU freshman quarterback Bear Bachmeier's career night

“We made him look like the Heisman winner in the first half… He’s a good player. Tough, runs. His accuracy on his deep balls was great. Their guys made some nice plays, and we didn’t. I thought he was outstanding.”