Coach Wannstedt had his press conference today.
On defending WVU’s offensive scheme:
They’re very explosive. They’ve got explosive players, number one. They’ve got guys that can run. And they put a lot of pressure on the defense. But you also need to credit their defense and their special teams. I think if you ask any coach `What are the most important factors in winning a football game?’ everybody’s going to talk about turnovers. Well the other thing that you should talk about, at least I do, is running the football and stopping the run. If you can’t do those two things, you really are going to struggle in my opinion. They’re leading our conference in both of those categories. Their defense does a very good job of playing the field position thing. They haven’t had to move the ball the length of the field a whole lot. They’ve played on a short field. They’ve caused some turnovers. They’ve played real good defense, and I think that has contributed to the success they’ve had on offense.
On WVU’s 3-5-3 defense:
The thing that makes it tough is you don’t see it every week. It’s kind of like playing a wishbone team on offense. We used to play the wishbone teams when we were at Oklahoma State and Miami. We always felt like that was their biggest advantage, besides having real good players. It was an offense that you had to try to simulate with your scout team players and work through defending some things that you normally would not. In the NFL it would probably be the run and shoot in the old days. It was different. That’s really how I kind of look at their defense. It’s not that they’re doing anything that we haven’t seen before or don’t have answers for. That’s not the issue. They’re not doing anything different than anybody else.
Coach Wannstedt was about as close to the vest in what he said in the press conference as I’ve read this year. The only tidbits were that LaRod Stephens-Howling will likely be doing some kick returning and that they have worked on some other things on defense. Otherwise, he says they are ready to play today.
As far as other things regarding the Backyard Brawl, the game notes are available (PDF). The depth chart doesn’t show anything significant.
