Rich Rodriguez planning for scrimmages to get WVU game ready in short fall camp
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MORGANTOWN -- In less than a week, students will be back on West Virginia's campus. The new school year starts. That goes for the football team as well. Instead of just football being the focus, in a week, they'll have to juggle assignments and classes as well.
Rich Rodriguez had just a week and a half of his players’ full attention, which is a lot less than in years past.
"I can’t remember a time of not even having two weeks of practice, of camp, and that’s it, and school starts," Rodriguez said. "But that’s the way the calendar falls this year. There is a sense of urgency to try to get as much done when we got all ball last week and this week, and then next week when school starts, it’s going to be a little bit more limited."
The less time before school starts doesn't help when you have 70 new players, and a majority of those players haven't even played college football at the FBS level.
Time is quickly running out before Rodriguez's squad takes the field against Coastal Carolina. It's just over three weeks away on Sept. 5.
"Nervous isn't the right thing, but a little apprehensive," Rodriguez said. "That’s the whole thing. You try to put them in as much game situations in practice as we can because we don’t have any preseason games or scrimmage games, and so the first time they go out live is against Coastal."
Rodriguez plans to have scrimmages during the Saturday practices and create as many game-like situations as possible. He'll use the practices to figure out what players "he can win with."
That goes for the quarterbacks, too. But Scotty Fox Jr. and Michael Hawkins Jr., who have separated themselves from the rest of the QBs, probably won't be live, meaning they'll be in black tag jerseys.
"I’m not worried about either one of those guys’ toughness per se," Rodriguez said. "I’m trying to decide whether I want them to go live or not. Because when it’s live, it’s better for them. They want to be live. They can outrun sacks or make big runs or whatever. I don’t know if I’m gonna let them go live at all in scrimmages. I got to think about that."
He's not too worried his team will be shell-shocked Week 1 against Coastal Carolina. Most of the new players he brought in are mostly new to his system. The transfers Rodriguez added in the portal have a lot of college football experience, whether that's in the Power Four or the Group of Six.
Part of Rodriguez's portal strategy was to add players with a lot of reps no matter what school they were at.
"Like some of these guys, even though some of them are new, they've played college football, started, so it’s not going to be that big a deal," Rodriguez said. "Because they played in college games and played in games on national TV and big crowds. A lot of them, it’s not going to be that big of a wild thing early in the season because they’ve been there, done that."
When Rodriguez looks at the calendar and sees players starting classes on Tuesday, his mind might start racing with thoughts settling in that his time is quickly running out to have his team ready for Week 1. More than ready because the expectations are a bit higher in Year 2 after a 4-8 season.
Rodriguez might be frustrated at times after practice because he thinks he's behind, but that's happened the last 29 years.
"If I look back at my notes and I’m ticked off after Week 1 because we hadn’t made more progress, that would probably be the same thing I said 29 other times," Rodriguez said. "I like to be further along right now, but if I looked at my notes, we’re probably further along than we were in the past. In fact, I know we are, so I can’t complain.