Jeff Koonz

MORGANTOWN — If there was one horrifying moment from what was generally a satisfying West Virginia 2023 football season, it would probably be unanimously voted by fans — it being the last-second Hail Mary pass that snatched a victory away from the Mountaineers against Houston.

But, one could argue that as horrifying as that Hail Mary pass was, it was only made possible because Houston’s first score came on a 100-yard kickoff return from Matthew Golden.

If that breakdown in kickoff coverage was the worst moment of the year, the second and third moments came within a few minutes of each other in the Baylor game.

That was when Michael Reese ran consecutive kickoffs back for touchdowns of 96 and 93 yards, forcing the Mountaineers to dig down into their own bag of miracles and come up with a 29-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Garrett Greene to running back Jaheim White with 23 seconds left to pull out a 34-31 victory.

In that Baylor game, WVU gave up 279 yards on kickoffs, and in the two games between WVU and Baylor and Houston, the Mountaineers gave up 463 kickoff return yards. To put that in perspective, in all 13 games last year, the Mountaineers themselves managed only 360 kickoff return yards.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is something is being done about it.

“We’ve done some version of kickoff every day in the spring,” inside linebacker coach and special teams coordinator Jeff Koonz points out in Monday’s spring interview session. “It’s been highlighted as a point of emphasis.”

Koonz didn’t offer up any promises, but instead offered an explanation of the approach that is being taken to tighten the screws on special teams, especially kickoff coverage.

“At the end of the year it became a little bit of rotating and trying to find fixes. We were searching a little bit, whereas if we didn’t have some of those guys go down with injuries … if we have Trotter and have some of the guys we lost for the year we would have had more options,” he said.

“And that’s where we took the biggest hit, on kickoff coverage. That is how important it is to find and get talented, mid-skill linebackers, tight end, running back body types that can compete. It carries over to special teams.

“All of our special teams come down to technique. We call them Mountaineer techniques and there’s about eight or nine of them … whether it’s how to defeat blocks, how to avoid blocks, how to make blocks ….that’s what special teams come down to,” Koonz continued.

“Cover units have to avoid and defeat blocks and finish plays with tackles. Return units you have to get offensive and defensive guys skilled up enough to create contact and make blocks so the returners have a chance.

“We have to categorize those into certain movements and we tag those movements for a specific unit. Our entire team knows those. We can spend the entire spring working just those techniques and get a lot of work done.”

It is difficult to do live, full-team work on kickoff coverage. There’s an injury factor heavily involved in that and, to be honest, the players who are on special teams in the spring have a lot of work to do on their position play, most of them linebackers, receivers, running backs.

“They break it down into groups so one group is working on how we will avoid a block at full speed halfway down the field on kickoff or punt while another group is working on how we’re going to tackle and we can do that in a close setting working on a bag, where there is minimum injury risk but full-speed technique work,” Koonz said.

The idea this spring isn’t so much in figuring out the personnel who will man those teams, but instead to get a pool of players competent enough to do what’s asked of them.

“The one thing we identified was that it was a personnel issue. It wasn’t that we didn’t have good enough guys on the field. It was that we, as coaches, probably moved guys around too much, trying to get guys in the perfect spot,” Koonz said.

“Then after that, we believe there were techniques we could teach better to allow them to play faster. We’re not getting into the personnel side of it this spring. We’re teaching technique and then we’ll get the right pieces in the right spot as we get into summer and fall camp.”

Once they have the players up to speed, then they put in the coverage schemes that they use. It isn’t just “See ball, tackle ball.”

“There’s always two parts of scheming,” Koonz said. “No. 1, we want to take away what the other team does best. So, every time we are game planning against a kickoff return, we’re going to do it based on tendencies, what they do most. They might lean on this certain player, might have a counter return that is really explosive. They might have a man system where the returner just finds a gap.

“Then, the second part of that is within our scheme, how can we defeat the return but play within rules.

“We’re not talking about the rules that draw a flag, but the rules they set up as assignments on the return.

“If I just take 10 guys and tell them to just run down the field, they are going to run slow. They will be looking all around, trying to find the ball, which we did at times last year, and they are not going to do their job as fast as they can.

“We want to give them tips, what to expect, not change every guy’s job every time they run down the field covering a kickoff.

“It’s a fine line over-teaching returns and what we’re going to see and getting guys down fast and play as violent and physical as they can. It’s about reacting. Everything about special teams is about making split-second, game-time decisions and reacting as fast as possible.

“You get him thinking ‘OK, I’ve one lane, this one job, I’ve got this one twist, I’ve got this one fold fit and everything else will take care of itself. If we have guys going down the field looking around, they will get the heck knocked out of them and then there goes the ball. You have to limit what you tell them and what they have to know.”