MORGANTOWN — If West Virginia goes to have an opportunity to beat Oklahoma at midday on Saturday at Milan Puskar Stadium, it’s going to should get quarterback JT Daniels again on his sport after the worst sport of his profession and his third below-par efficiency.
The man charged with straightening issues out at quarterback is offensive coordinator and one-time Texas Tech star Graham Harrell, who says he understands what Daniels has gone by way of. In final a all-time low efficiency towards Iowa State during which Daniels accomplished simply 8 of twenty-two passes for 81 yards with a landing and an interception, Daniels appeared like a sore-armed QB, one thing that coach Neal Brown neither confirmed nor denied whereas saying he would begin this week.
“You’ll have to ask him,” Brown mentioned when requested if Daniels was injured. “JT was just off. He had some drops; there was pressure up the middle. He has to play better, and I think he will bounce back and play well this week.”
Harrell backed Brown up in calling it an off day.
“Sometimes you have an off day at any position,” Harrell defined. “The hardest thing about an off day at quarterback is 1. It’s pretty apparent, and 2. you’d give yourself much of a chance to win.”
He mentioned he went by way of it himself, at the same time as he was setting unapproachable data at Texas Tech.
“There’s going to be days where you’re not playing great. I remember plenty of days when I was playing and was a little off. The answer was to keep at it, and if it doesn’t come around, it’s going to be a long night. When that happens, you turn to the run or have other guys step up to get out of that funk.”
But there are additionally days when you possibly can’t miss, and what was in all probability Harrell’s best second got here beneath Air Raid founder Mike Leach at Texas Tech after they upset the No. 3 Oklahoma Sooners 34-27 in 2007.
Harrell threw a staggering 72 passes in that sport, finishing 47 of them for 420 yards and a pair of touchdowns.
“That was really a fun game. I think on that first drive, we threw a pick and me and Danny Amendola almost fought on the sideline. But after that, we got it together.”
They actually did. Danny Amendola caught 109 passes that season … and was Harrell’s second choice to Michael Crabtree, who caught 134, of which 22 had been touchdowns whereas gaining almost 2,000 yards by way of the air.
After that interception and the confrontation on the sideline, Leach approached Harrell.
“Leach says to me, “Hey, we’re not going to block these guys so stop checking to the run. We’re going to throw the ball.”
And they did.
“We threw it a ton in that game,” Harrell mentioned, selecting up the narrative. “We knocked Sam (Bradford, the Oklahoma quarterback who would win the Heisman Trophy the following 12 months) out of the sport early, which in all probability helped our trigger.
“It felt like we threw it every down and it might have been every down after that first quarter. It gave us the best chance to win.”
Bradford would end that sport with two completions in three tries for simply 11 yards.
“It’s never good to knock someone out, but it helped us that night,” Harrell admitted, having thrown 69 extra passes within the sport than Bradford. “That was a crazy night in Lubbock. Oklahoma probably could have won the national championship that year.”
The subsequent 12 months Oklahoma beat Tech, 65-21, with Bradford finishing 14 of 19 for 304 yards and 4 touchdowns whereas Harrell went 33 of 55 for 361 yards with three touchdowns and one interception.
“If we could have won that game, we might have won the national championship. I guess we paid each other back,” Harrell mentioned.
Harrell laughs when he thinks again upon that whipping in 2008.
“They knew every play we were going to run, probably because Leach had been at Oklahoma,” he mentioned. “I’d signal something, and the middle linebacker would yell ‘618!’ which was actually what we called. He’d shout ‘Stick’ or ‘Flat’ or ‘Double Slant,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, it’s going to be a long night tonight.’ When they’re calling out your plays in your terminology, it’s going to be a long night, boys!”
With his quarterback slumping and the crew having misplaced 4 of its previous 5 video games, WVU wants one thing to interrupt the negativity that’s constructing across the program. Harrell says this week they’ll get away a extra up-tempo, “entertaining” offense.
Perhaps he must steal a web page out of Leach’s playbook, to not discover performs that work however to return up with some gimmick to vary the environment. There’s a video of Leach flipping closed a row of folding chairs his gamers sat in on the sideline towards Mississippi State.
It doesn’t shock Harrell.
“We didn’t have chairs,” Harrell mentioned, “but he would have flipped the benches over on the sideline. He did some crazy stuff back in the day. One year at Oregon, I hear on the headset, ‘OK, OK, circle up, circle up.’ I’m not paying much attention, but I look up and he has guys doing up/downs over on the sideline.”
Normally you sit, relaxation and talk about changes, not do workouts … however issues had been going dangerous, so …
“We came back and won that game, so that was like the magic trick that year,” Harrell mentioned. “Every time we would do something stupid, he’d have us doing up/downs. A couple of weeks later, we’re playing in Pullman, Washington, and came back to win that game after we did up/downs. That made it the ‘magic trick’ for the year.”
Maybe Brown wants a brand new place on his teaching workers, hiring David Copperfield as magician assistant.
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