West Virginia football defense wants to avoid too many steps backwards

Vic Koenning hasn’t done the country two-step in a long time.

The veteran coordinator is hoping his defensive unit follows his lead.

While taking one step forward and two steps back makes for an interesting line-dance number, as far as the progression of a football team – especially one with so many new faces – it isn’t ideal.

The goal is to get each individual a little bit better each day in order to improve the defense as a whole.

“As long as we don’t take backwards steps or too many backwards steps and just keep making steps forward we’ll get as good as we can get,” he said.

The Mountaineers are needing to replace five of the top ten graded players from the 2018 unit but even that number is a little misleading as only two of those played over 200 snaps a season ago in Keith Washington and Dante Stills. In terms of snaps played only four of the top ten from last season are back.

With the doldrums of fall camp setting in, the challenge for Koenning and the rest of the coaching staff is to capitalize on each day that the players can practice from an effort and teaching standpoint.

West Virginia is in the process of trimming down the available players to a two-deep and then discovering which of the newcomers are going to be able to participate this fall. The coaches are getting closer to that point and that’s a good thing because the opener is rapidly approaching.

The Mountaineers will kick off against James Madison Aug. 31, just a little over two weeks from now, and fall camp will wrap up Wednesday before moving into focusing on the Dukes. The program will hold their second scrimmage of the fall Friday night and that will help determine some of those choices.

“We’ve got to because before we turn our head the game’s going to be upon us,” Koenning said.

There has been natural ebb and flow in camp, which is encouraging as the defense has certainly had its moments in camp. Now the focus is consistency.

The Mountaineers have been working on inserting various schemes that the defense will use later this year against various opponents on the schedule in order to familiarize the players with the concepts before they are asked to do it in games.

That practice will end soon as well with the focus shifting entirely to preparation for the season opener against the FCS program.

But in the meantime, the goal is to keep moving forward and avoid any country two-steps.

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