proud of our team, proud of our staff. When I say the team, I mean the guys that are back home, scout teams did a great job this week. All the support staff. We had a good week of weather at home it was in the 70’s come down here it was in the 80’s and that takes everybody.
Really proud of the team, players and staff all around. We’ve got a resilient group and if you’ve been paying attention to us all year, we’ve been a group even when bad things happen, we’ve always responded. I said this in our press conference on Monday, we’re really close to being a 6-1 team and now we’re close to being a 7-win team but we’ve been resilient. We’ve been able to bounce back when bad things happen and that was again today. We had some guys get hurt and we played two backup lineman for a majority of the game we had a couple receivers go down; we played a bunch of different receivers in the game. Linebackers we rotated some guys that hadn’t played before. Raleigh Collins came in and played and we had a lot of different guys on special teams. I told the guys; we earned this on Tuesday and Wednesday. When we brought them back, we mixed up our week last week we practiced on Sunday we won’t do that the rest of the time, but we practiced on Sunday and when we brought them back in Tuesday morning the group had energy. They had really good energy and I think that speaks to our leadership and I think it speaks to the leadership coach wise on each side of the ball. But we earned that. I thought really what it came down to was our brand of football when we’re playing well is we’re disciplined, and you see that we had four penalties in the game and two of them at the end were careless. Four penalties, fundamentals, I think it shows up in time of possession. We’re a team that plays really hard and you talk to any opposing group we play hard. We’re tough and I talked about the mental toughness, but we’re physically tough on both sides of the ball up front. We didn’t tackle as good as we needed to today, better than last week but I think we did a really good job striking people. We play relatively smart football. There are things we’ve got to get corrected; I love Garrett there are things he has to be smarter about. He’s learning. That’s who we are. I sat here last week after a disappointing loss and the one stat that really sticks out was points off turnover differential. And that’s something we had worked a ton. Go back and look at who wins games in the big 12. Everybody talks about the turnover margin and that’s true but it’s really the differential. Who scores points off turnovers. We worked a lot of it in the spring into fall camp and today that was the reason we won the game. We had 21 points off takeaways. That was the story of the game.
We were going to be in attack mode. My message to them last night and I usually don’t talk to them on Friday night I usually wait for Saturday morning. But I wanted them to understand two things. The first was we need to be the most excited to play. Not just when everything is going good I thought we had great energy.
Shooters are going to shoot tomorrow. That was the mentality we’re going to be in attack mode. I think as a coach you just can’t talk that, you have to show it. We went for it on fourth and one in our own territory to start the game because I knew when he did it he said we were going to shoot and he did it. Same on fourth and two we called a pass play.
Basically, we’ve ran the ball really well. CJ had a different mentality this week so I had a lot of confidence in him and they’ve had a difficult time stopping the run so the data and analytics which I go heavy into Thursday think about it and Friday I pretty much know how I’m going to play the game on fourth down. Made the decision Friday we’re going to be really aggressive. We probably would have gone for it fourth and one at the minus 30. That was the thinking felt good about running the ball.
We played a lot more base. We two gapped a lot up front to try to clean up the picture for our linebackers. Two-gap we can run in a bunch of bodies, that’s one area we have some depth we showed that depth today on the d-line and on the o-line. We got some big bodies thought that cleared up linebacker wise thought we played better. we’re limited with what we can call due to personnel right now in the secondary.
Beanie Bishop has played outside one game has really played well for us. I think he’s leading the country in passes defended. He’s really cleaned up some of his ball skill habits. Even at this level it’s really simple, above the waist band your pointer fingers together, below the waist band your pinkies together. We’re actually taking that and using it and we actually caught some interceptions today. That was huge especially the first one we got because they were driving we turned that into a touchdown.
Nick Malone and Ja’Quay Hubbard have played a lot of football. Penn State on, Malone and Ja’Quay who on paper are sixth and seventh they’ve played a lot of football and Malone has played tight end, too. You don’t blink when they go in. There’s been times in my career where you go uh oh, you really have to think about how you’re going to call the game. We just kind of rolled with it.
Felt like we were going to need some takeaways. They’re good on offense, some of the areas they’re good we’ve got some issues. So, I felt like the key was us getting first downs on offense. This was a game where we had to control the clock. 36 to 24, we were 9-15 on end of possession downs. We were able to stay out there and those first downs led to touchdowns.
This was CJ’s best game since Pitt. When he runs like that he’s a load. The thing today is he was so good after contact even on that last drive. He was so good after contact.
I love the kid but some of his toughness he gets himself hit. We’ve got a shot every week because of him but he’s got to play within himself. We put a ton of Garrett in this game. We ran it more, we did a bunch of read stuff. We put a lot on him so you know he’s going to miss one or two but it can’t be egregious.
Nester lower leg injury, going to get it looked at when we get home but it’s pretty swollen.
This is the best group we’ve had. When you think about it we’ve got some guys that have been in the program. Lee is his second year, Aubrey has been here three years, Zach Frazier four, Sean Martin been here four, Doug Nester full third year. Those guys have been in our program. Our o-line is our hardest working group and they’ve helped push our d-line, who’s turned into our second best group.
Jaheim White gave us a spark. This is really what I thought after fall camp what he would be. When you play true freshmen it's always a trust deal so he's taking care of his body better, so he's able to practice on Tuesday and Wednesday to get the reps Saturday now. But he's not making errors and stuff that could be critical errors. Not picking up his guy in blitzes, aligning wrong. This week he was locked in and had a great week and he really played well.
westvirginia.rivals.com
mattsarzsports.blogspot.com
