What Rich Rodriguez Said Following the Loss to Arizona

The West Virginia Mountaineers (3-3, 0-3) fell to the Arizona Wildcats (5-1, 2-1) Saturday afternoon 52-31.

West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez gave his initial thoughts on the Mountaineers third consecutive loss.

The two WVU turnovers in the first half

“It's really frustrating.

“First off, our fans, they were fantastic. I mean, they showed up today. I thought it was a great crowd. They tried to lift our defense up, had great crowd noise, and we just didn't reward them enough.

“Very frustrating because we couldn’t get a stop on defense, and then offensively, there's probably a little bit of feel like pressure that you can’t have a turnover. You got to score in every possession, and it's just extremely frustrating.

“I told the team, I think we're playing hard, but there's some stuff that we as coaches got to figure out in a hurry and fix in a hurry, and I think our guys are conscientious enough to try to do that. But we didn't get it fixed today defensively, especially, and then offensively, when we had a couple turnovers, it really cost us, and we couldn't get the momentum that we needed.”

Senior receiver Prince Strachan’s five catches for 121 yards

“He's a big, strong guy. We missed a couple other opportunities. They blitzed the whole game, and we hit some and some we didn't hit. Mike was competitive, as he always is, but we missed a few throws here and there.

“Going back to Greg's point, I think there is—I don't know if the players feel it, but I feel a little bit like, you know, every possession is so critical that sometimes your calls reflect that when we shouldn't do that. We, you know, there's a lot of possessions in the game, but golly, man, this is as frustrated as I've ever been defensively.”

The defensive giving up explosive plays

“I don't blame the fans for being upset when the guy just hands the ball off and one guy's out of a gap, and then he runs for 60 yards.

“Well, I inquired what it was, and, oh, one guy is out of a gap. Well, where's everybody else at? Does that mean there's 10 other guys that can't rally to the ball or whatever? I mean, like I said, it's ridiculous that some of those—and I think Fifita is one of the best quarterbacks in the country. I got a tremendous amount of respect for him. He's tough. He's competitive.

“He doesn't take sacks. He gets rid of the ball so quick. And, you know, second-and-one, and you go cover zero. He's going to find a guy and get rid of it before he gets hit. And that's exactly what he did. So, I don't know if we didn't think he would do that or what have you, but he's really good, and I thought he played really sharp and made—he's a great, great player.”

The decision for defensive coordinator Zac Alley to be in the coaches’ box

“It was his [decision].

“And I'm like, I'm—you know, I signed off on it, I guess it's like. I'm not insane. We expect a different result and not change anything, but the result wasn't any different. We'll have a lot of long conversations again tomorrow.

“And like I said, these guys know ball. But, you know, there's a—and I don't want to—it's not an excuse to say, ‘Well, we're still learning who our guys are.’ No, we've played six games. We've had most of them here since the spring. We know who our guys are. And so that part of it, you know, we can't use that as an excuse. We got to play better. We got to put them in positions to play better and then work really hard and play better football. Just play better football. And there's a lot to that, but it's not my first rodeo.

“But it is as frustrating as I've ever been as a head coach with one side of the ball. It's not like they're not trying, trying to figure it out and not having progress like we need, if that makes sense. And, you know, we got to make that progress starting tonight.”

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