Cornerback battle underway for West Virginia football
One of the fiercest spring competitions will be at cornerback.
While junior Nicktroy Fortune returns to bring stability to one side, West Virginia has a hole to fill at the other after Dreshun Miller exited the program via the transfer portal. Miller started nine games for the Mountaineers last season and vacates 557 snaps across his 9 games started.
And although he was further down the depth chart, West Virginia also lost an additional cornerback when freshman David Vincent-Okoli left the team. That boils the primary competition down to junior Jackie Matthews and freshman Daryl Porter.
“Those two guys you named are two guys we talked about really before anybody left,” coordinator Jordan Lesley said. “Those are two guys that have to step up and be contributors and they can be.”
Matthews saw the most experience with 74 snaps, but over half of those came in the bowl game where he started in the place of Miller. Matthews played 44 snaps in that contest but graded out at his highest performance of the season, especially in the tackling department against the run-based Army.
The former junior college all-American wasn’t tested in coverage often though allowing 2 completions on the 4 passes thrown his way for a total of 21 yards.
Porter played only a total of 17 defensive snaps last season across a pair of games. Almost all of those were in the opener against Eastern Kentucky when the game was already decided. Because of his limited sample size, he only had one pass thrown his direction all year which was an incompletion.
But both players put together strong off-seasons where they were able to mold their bodies for what they were going to see at this level of football. That is typical for players that are just coming off their first year in a major college program and Lesley has been pleased with what a full winter off-season has done with both in terms of their development.
There isn’t expected to be any sort of decision on who could get the nod until well into fall camp and Lesley has made it clear that the Mountaineers are still looking to add a defensive back.
But so far so good, with one player making a little more waves early into the spring.
“Jackie has stood out probably a little more up to this point. Making some competitive plays on the ball in certain drills so that competition is going to be fierce,” Lesley said.
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