West Virginia mustered just 85 rushing yards in the season opener.
It was a total that snapped their mark of 16-consecutive 140+ yard rushing performances which began when the offense took its current shape at the end of the 2022 season. But head coach Neal Brown believes that the performance up front wasn’t as poor as the numbers would lead you to believe.
That’s because the Mountaineers lost 19 yards on an issue with the timing on a snap, another nine yards on another snap issue and then six more on a fumble by quarterback Garrett Greene.
“You add all that minus yardage, and it looks worse than it actually was,” Brown said.
At the point of contact, West Virginia only had one outside run that lost yardage on a six-yard loss to Jahiem White where the Penn State three-technique Zane Durant made a nice play.
Overall, Brown felt that the offensive line did a good job on the edge, but the quickness on the interior of the defensive line did bother the Mountaineers front some.
“I thought we got good movement,” Brown said.
Pro Football Focus gave the Mountaineers a grade of 51.4 in the area of run blocking, but Brown also pointed out that the offense didn’t do a good job getting White enough touches in the game. Some of that was not making the right read or the fact that he left with an injury, but Brown also placed the blame on himself for not getting him more opportunities to get the football.
The head coach also was displeased with how the wide receivers were not running the Penn State defensive backs off in man coverage.
“We probably left 30 to 50 yards in rushing offense out on the field just because our receivers didn’t run off and that was disappointing,” he said. “You can turn on our film from last year and we were as good as anybody that was playing in running people off and for whatever reason we did not do that Saturday.”
Time will tell, but West Virginia is hoping to address these issues moving forward in order to get back on track with the run game which is a big part of the formula for the Mountaineers.
----------
• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot.
• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting.
• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel
• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan, @wesleyshoe
