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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Rich Rodriguez says that his goal is to get 25 first downs in a game and that his West Virginia Mountaineers will usually win.
Will they? Let’s take a look at the games he has coached in Morgantown.
-In games in which WVU had 25 first downs or more with the Mountaineers, they are 17-2. If you cut that number back just by one to 24 first downs, they are 20-4.
-His first year, 2001, WVU won only three games and they had 22 in two of them and 28 in the other.
-That year he had his highest scoring game ever, beating Rutgers, 80-7, but that was not the game in which he scored 80. The 28 first downs came in beating Kent State, 34-14, the first game out of the grieving period for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
-In the Rutgers game, WVU ran 75 plays and scored 80 points. Try that on for size.
-Rodriguez’s all-time high in first downs came the second game of the 2006 season in beating Eastern Washington, 52-3, when they rang up 32 first downs.
-The next season, oddly, facing Western Michigan, they had 30 first downs and between the two games they gained enough yardage to go from one of those schools to the other.
-Some days first downs don’t come very easily, as Rodriguez and West Virginia learned last year in a humbling 49-0 season-ending defeat to Texas Tech when they managed only 9 first downs. You might say there wasn’t much offense last season as they went 4-8, but they did have 20 or more first downs in each of the four victories.
And one of those victories was against Pitt in the Backyard Brawl when they had 28 first downs and ran 90 plays.
-That made up some for that 2007 loss in the Backyard Brawl that ended Rodriguez’s first stay in Morgantown. The score was 13-9 and WVU had only 12 first downs as a 28-point favorite.
-In that 2007 season, WVU had 24 or more first downs in six of their victories.
-Virginia Tech was always tough on the Mountaineer offense -- as well as just about everyone else -- but the Hokies held WVU to 11 first downs in 2001 and to 10 in 2005.
-And in 2003, Maryland really put the clamps on the Mountaineers as they played twice and held WVU to 11 first downs in the regular season and 9 in the bowl game.
-Overall, under Rodriguez, WVU is 4-14 when they fail to get 15 first downs in a game.