West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez doesn’t just want his players to play fast, they must think fast, too.
That’s why the early stages of spring are so critical with the early coaching going on to get the players to understand the scheme and what is required out of them.
That is obviously true at the quarterback spot where once a play is called they don’t have a lot of time to decipher thing and need to play with the tempo that Rodriguez demands.
“So, they have to be fast thinkers. They have to analyze things quickly,” he said.
And the same is true on the offensive line where unlike some teams they don’t have a lot of time to think things through or make a lot of calls at the line of scrimmage given the pace of play. That makes being able to think on their feet and understand the scheme critical.
“It is a different dynamic,” Rodriguez said.
Thar has made the first spring critical in many ways, but Rodriguez admits that while it’s frustrating at times he has to remind himself that it’s the first experience with the scheme and what it demands. But that speed that the coaching staff wants to play with takes some time to adjust.
“Our pace is completely foreign to a lot of them,” he said.
But the good news is once the players to get it, it often sticks. It just makes the time in between more of a trial-and-error period where the Mountaineers throw a lot at them in a short period of time.
Rodriguez is optimistic that even with the usual hiccups of the transition in the first spring, it will allow the team to not only play but think at a faster speed.
“We want to teach the temp from the start, so they know what it’s going to be like,” Rodriguez said. “And then they got to catch up to it.”
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