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On Call
Posted by John Antonik on Thursday, November 5, 2009
(4:37 pm)
Junior middle linebacker Anthony Leonard has been West Virginia’s man on call. With Reed Williams nursing toe and shoulder ailments, Leonard is now in the position of having to be ready to go on a moment’s notice. Such was the case last Friday night at South Florida.
“I approach it like I’m the starter,” Leonard said of reliever status. “That’s how I go about it as far as preparation. I double my film watching and I just try and take as many reps as I can.”
Leonard and Williams are two completely different players. Williams is much more experienced and adept at diagnosing plays, especially in pass coverage. Leonard is a bigger and more physical player better suited to take on guards and centers between the tackles in the run game.
“Have you seen his arms?” asked Williams. “The next time you look at him look at the length of his arms. The ability to be able to press and get off linemen at this level is huge and that’s something Anthony can really take advantage of.”
Leonard admits that he still needs to work on reading his keys more quickly. He says that is what makes Williams such an effective middle linebacker.
“I know overall Reed is the better linebacker because he’s got the feel for where the ball is going to be and I know that’s what I’m missing,” Leonard said. “He’s got a knack for the ball. I still don’t see the whole picture yet and that’s what Coach (Jeff) Casteel gets on me about. Overall, I’m still learning.”
Williams said earlier this week that he feels great and plans on playing a full game on Saturday against Louisville.
“I’m going to play as much as I can,” he said.
If not, then Anthony Leonard will be ready to go just in case. After all, he’s West Virginia’s man on call.
Weekly Word
West Virginia University assistant equipment manager Steven Bierer passed along an interesting note to me yesterday.
On the ESPN Radio Show Mike & Mike in the Morning, Mike Greenburg was talking about the possibility of Chase Utley winning the most valuable player award for the losing team in the World Series (since won by Hideki Matsui).
It was brought up that of the three major sports only one player each has been named MVP while playing on a losing team in a championship series.
Bobby Richardson did it for the Yankees against the Pirates in the 1960 World Series. Jerry West did it for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1969 NBA finals and Chuck Howley did it for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1971 Super Bowl.
Did you notice that two of them were WVU guys? Pretty cool, huh?
With Milwaukee announcing earlier this week that it was not going to pick up the second-year option on Joe Alexander’s contract, what exactly does that mean for Alexander’s NBA career? Naturally Alexander is likely headed somewhere else after this season but it’s going to be hard for him to audition for other suitors because he is not in the Bucks’ future plans.
Therefore, Alexander, sidelined until January with a hamstring injury, is probably looking at a lost year in 2010 before starting all over again in 2011.
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Bob Huggins
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Bob Huggins is expecting a stern challenge from Mountain State on Sunday afternoon at the Coliseum in the team’s first exhibition game of the year.
“They’ve been national champions, they’ve been national runner-up, they’re Top 5 in the country all of the time in NAIA. They’ve given us really good games the last two years,” said Huggins. “I think it’s a great game for us and I think it gives our young guys a chance to play in front of hopefully a packed house and just get used to the environment.”
Personnel wise, Mountain State has some exceptional players.
“They’re leading scorer was all-conference at Western Carolina. They’ve got Alvin Mitchell from Cincinnati,” said Huggins. “They’ve got Division I caliber players and they play really hard.”
Sunday’s exhibition will be available online on MountaineerTV beginning at 12:50 pm.
Huggins said center Deniz Kilicli will be able to play in Sunday’s exhibition game. “All the experience he gets will certainly help him playing in front of people,” Huggins said. “He probably hasn’t played in an environment like this.”
A decision by Marcus Jordan to wear his father Michael’s Nike Air Jordans yesterday has likely cost Central Florida its exclusive $3 million shoe contract with adidas. The timing couldn’t be worse. Just last June the school announced a 20 percent decrease in fundraising had forced the athletic department to make budgetary cuts.
Perhaps, Nike will come to the rescue.
Women’s basketball fans wanting to follow Mike Carey’s program can do so now on Facebook. You can sign up to be a fan by going to http://www.facebook.com/wvuwomensbasketball
Launched two days ago, the site already has nearly 300 fans.
I wouldn’t read too much into Syracuse’s exhibition loss to LeMoyne earlier this week. It seems like every year Syracuse and Louisville have an early season stumble or two before eventually getting things ironed out.
By the way, Huggins said he saw no reason to bring up the Syracuse-LeMoyne game with his team.
Yesterday, Fox Sports college basketball writer Jeff Goodman picked West Virginia as one of his preseason Elite Eight teams:
http://msn.foxsports.com/cbk/story/10317352/Huggins-has-West-Virginia-poised-to-contend
West Virginia has experienced a steady increase in men’s basketball season ticket sales since 2003 when former coach John Beilein took over the program. The Mountaineers first cracked the 6,000 mark in total season ticket sales in 2006 with sales spiking considerably since Bob Huggins’ arrival in 2007.
During the last two years, West Virginia has topped 7,000 in total season ticket sales with this year’s number recently passing the 7,500 mark. That’s almost a doubling of the number of basketball season tickets sold since Beilein’s first year at WVU in 2003.
“You factor the students in and that’s 10,000,” Huggins said. “I’ve said for a long time that the people of West Virginia ought to come and see us play. They shouldn’t come because we’re playing Connecticut or Syracuse or whoever.
“It’s been 50 years I think since we’ve been ranked Top 10 in the preseason and it would be great to fill the arena and watch us play,” Huggins said.
Last week, the Gator Bowl announced that starting in 2010 the SEC’s No. 6 team will face the No. 4/5 team from the Big Ten Conference. That means with the addition of the Gator Bowl, the SEC will have three bowl spots on New Year’s Day, 2011.
If the Gator was picking sixth from the SEC this year it would likely have a choice between Georgia, Tennessee or Auburn. From the Big Ten the Gator would be looking at Wisconsin, Michigan State or Minnesota.
After taking a bath on the ACC championship game, the Gator Bowl has obviously had to recalibrate its approach and go after teams from conferences strong in fan support and the two best are the SEC and the Big Ten. Getting lower-tier teams from those two conferences was something the Gator Bowl was willing to do.
The Gator Bowl and the Big East Conference parted ways earlier this year.
I was talking to a former Mountaineer football player a few months ago who used to be a frequent visitor to the message boards as a way of keeping up with what was going on with the program. But after a while he said he quit reading them because of all of the foolish comments being posted.
“I just couldn’t take reading that stuff anymore so I let my subscription end,” he said. “Some of the stuff the fans were putting on there was just crazy.”
I only bring this up because I got a number of bizarre comments from fans upset with last Saturday’s loss to South Florida. I understand a lot of it was just blowing off steam and that’s understandable. But some of the observations being thrown out there were just downright absurd.
Among other things, a common theme, which I am paraphrasing, goes something like this: I don’t want us to go back to the Don Nehlen years.
What exactly does that mean?
Does that mean 1981 when Nehlen upset Florida to win the Gator Bowl? Does that mean 1982 when West Virginia went out to Norman and beat Oklahoma? Does that mean 1983 when Nehlen snapped Pitt’s seven-game winning streak?
Does that mean 1984 when Nehlen beat Boston College and Penn State in back-to-back weeks to get the Mountaineers into the Top 10?
Does that mean the 1988 season when Nehlen led West Virginia to its ONLY appearance in the national championship game?
Or does that mean 1993 when West Virginia ran the table for the second time in five years to play Florida in the Gator Bowl?
Sometimes you can stumble on to some good information even when 10-15 microphones are stuck in a player’s face. Such was the case Tuesday night with Reed Williams.
The senior was talking about the headaches he sometimes receives while butting heads with West Virginia’s scout team offensive line.
“We’ve got some big scout team linemen,” Williams complained. “Back in high school it used to be fun beating on the scout team. Here they are much bigger and it’s not so much fun.”
Williams believes this young group of linemen could be pretty special down the road if they can all stick together.
“We’ve got a lot of guys up front that are basically grouping together,” he explained. “We’ve got five scholarship offensive linemen working together for us right now and it’s going to be great for us down the road.”
Williams also sees progress being made with West Virginia’s freshmen defensive linemen Will Clarke, Dominik Davenport and Curtis Feigt.
“We’ve got the pit bull in Baby D (Davenport). He’s going to be tough in that middle and then you’ve got big Curt on the end and then Will is an athletic guy,” said Williams. “We have a lot of guys that are growing up.”
Have a great weekend!
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