The Two Biggest Concerns from West Virginia's First Scrimmage of Fall Camp

Rich Rodriguez discusses some of the problems the Mountaineers had during today's scrimmage.

West Virginia University offensive lineman Landon Livingston | Christopher Hall – West Virginia on SI

West Virginia fans were holding their breath this afternoon, waiting to hear an update from head coach Rich Rodriguez in regard to how the team's first live scrimmage went. I'll be honest, I was expecting Rich Rod to be furious with a number of things and pointing out concerns left and right, but that didn't happen.

He still has to watch the film to truly evaluate how things went, but there were only two things that really stuck out to him initially that he saw as problematic. The rest? He seemed to be fairly pleased with.

As for the complaints...

West Virginia University offensive lineman Landon Livingston | Christopher Hall – West Virginia on SI

"The one thing we did have is we had too many penalties," Rodriguez told reporters. "We had a full Big Ten crew here, and we had four of five procedure penalties, which should never happen and are self-inflicted. I think we had three or so holding penalties, and those are like turnovers; we can’t have that. We had one critical jump offsides on 4th and 5, that should never happen. They’ll all learn from it.

“We’re still not getting enough push on the o-line up front," he continued. "Short-yardage situations, I think we’re stalemating too much. We’re not getting off the ball and changing the line of scrimmage, particularly a lot of short-yardage situations.”

Much like the penalties, the sloppy start up front is to be expected as well, especially when you take into account they're replacing all five starters from a year ago, and then some. That unit is going to take some time to gel, but both Rodriguez and offensive line coach Jack Bicknell Jr. have expressed confidence that they'll get things tuned up before the season opener, thanks to the scheme not being overly complicated up front.

Adjusting to the tempo is an ongoing process and can lead to procedure penalties early in camp. Although there are ten practices in the books, it's still early enough that it can be corrected. And the offensive line will continue to learn how to play off of one another with each rep they get, so three weeks from now, they should be in a manageable spot.

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