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MORGANTOWN – Rich Rodriguez comes into his second season of his second go-round as West Virginia’s football coach knowing he has to rebuild his offense from the ground game up and that makes the first order of business completely replacing an offensive line that could not move a moveable object, let alone an immovable one.
Working with a new cast of characters up front and with old friend Rick Trickett coaching them, one of the most pleasant successes out of fall camp is that new offensive line that both he and Trickett believe to be of Big 12 quality and just getting started with the process.
As they were preparing a depth chart late Tuesday afternoon that was expected to include true freshman Kevin Brown and Malik Agbo at left tackle, Nick Krahe and Devin Vass at left guard, Wes King and Josh Aisosa at center, Bubba Grayson and Cameron Griffin at right guard and Carsten Casady and Aidan Woods at right guard, coach Rodriguez was discussing the progress they have made.
“You got to accelerate the process and coach Trickett has done this a long time,” Rodriguez said. “But no one has done it in this day and age of college athletics where there’s so much turnover all the time. So, even though a lot of those guys have played some together, that’s the one unit where all five guys have to be on the same page all the time.”
A missed call, a missed assignment, a missed block, a wrong read and the next thing you do as an offensive lineman is pick your running back or quarterback up off the ground, hopefully in one piece and with nothing but a couple of yards.
Sometimes last year, quarterbacks and running backs were passing each other on the way from the stadium to the hospital. The problem, after a while, wasn’t that WVU didn’t have an offensive line, but that it did have one.
The “Hogs” of the 1991 Super Bowl champion Washington Redskins -- Joe Jacoby, Mark Schlereth, Jeff Bostic, Raleigh McKenzie, and Jim Lachey -- they weren’t.
The situation was such that as this season started, WVU wasn’t facing a rebuilding of the offensive line. The Mountaineers were starting over from scratch.
“We knew that was probably the first area we had to address in the portal, getting some grown men that have played a little bit,” Rodriguez said both on his radio show Monday night and at his first weekly media session to preview Saturday’s noon opener at home against Coastal Carolina.
They went from having one offensive lineman who had started a collegiate game last year to a group this season that has deep starting experience and, while mostly at the Group of 5 level, it has Rodriguez almost giddy having worked through camp with them.
"We got five or six guys out of the portal that have played multiple games at the Division I level and wanted to prove themselves moving up. You can tell the difference. We feel a lot better on the O-line. At least there's been some guys that have played some football at this level.
Two of them played at Jacksonville State last season, and while that was after Rodriguez had left there to coach at WVU, the system was similar and, more importantly, the offensive coordinator was wily old Rick Trickett, a long-time Rodriguez associate who Rich Rod snapped away to revitalize this line.
Trickett has worked this group as hard as he could and it was amazing to watch these young prime-of-life studs trying to keep up with the work the 78-year-old Trickett was throwing at them.
“There's a certain attitude (they play with), and they go through really hard practices. There's not another position group in the country that will work like our o-line works. I think we can play nine very easily in the game, and we're hoping there could be eleven."
The thing is, this is still their first year together as a group and most football programs believe it takes a couple of years to choregraph playing together, a theory in which Rodriguez believes.
“It’s the hardest position in all sports -- other than quarterback -- to play. Quarterback, obviously, there’s so much on there.
“Everything happens so quick, they’re moving around, not standing still and there’s big, strong guys on the other side. They’re not going to be perfect. They’re going to make mistakes in the first game but what I’ve seen in practice there’s a certain level of cohesiveness starting to happen and we haven’t even played a game yet. They’ll get better as the season moves on.”
"We got five or six guys out of the portal that have played multiple games at the Division I level and wanted to prove themselves moving up. You can tell the difference. We feel a lot better on the o-line. At least there's been some guys that have played some football at this level. There's a certain attitude (they play with), and they go through really hard practices. There's not another position group in the country that will work like our o-line works. I think we can play nine very easily, and we're hoping there could be eleven."