Every week is a playoff game.
Holgorsen says Copeland will be starting this week.
That’s the mantra of college football, but players don’t always take it to heart, especially when they’ve had great success – something that seems to have plagued the Mountaineers last weekend in a blowout loss to Texas Tech.
“I had a lot of guys that wanted it to be easy,” said head coach Dana Holgorsen. “[We] had a whole bunch of people on that airplane going out there that wanted it to be easy. That’s not reality in the Big 12. That’s not reality in college football.”
Holgorsen says he and the staff, most of whom have extensive experience in West Virginia’s new conference, relayed that message to their players.
“We watched them on tape and we said, ‘look these guys are pretty dang good, you better get ready to play,’” said Holgorsen. “[But] we didn’t have enough guys that bought into that.”
Naturally, as the man in charge, Holgorsen took the blame.
“It’s 100% my fault,” he said.
Now that he words did not work, Holgorsen hopes another method will do the trick.
“I would think that motivation is indicative of playing time,” he said. “If you like your current situation, you better do what you got to do to make sure that you keep that current situation or that situation is going to change.”
“If anybody thinks that they are comfortable in their situation and not doing what they got to do to get extremely good at it, then they’re sadly mistaken.”
Obviously, Holgorsen is referring to players losing their job for not doing what they’re asked to do. The first beneficiary of that looks to be true freshman, Travares Copeland.
“He’ll start this week. You guys can go ahead and write that one down,” Holgorsen said during his weekly press conference. “[We] got him in the game because we didn’t like what we were looking at, so we made the decision to play him, put him in.”
As for who Copeland will replace, Holgorsen says that’s still in flux.
“Depends on how the receivers do [this week],” he said. “One of them is not going to start.”
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Copeland almost wasn’t the only true freshman receiver to burn his redshirt on Saturday.
“I almost made the decision to put Devonte Robinson in there,” said Holgorsen. “Probably wish I would have.”
Robinson is a 6-foot-2, 184-pound wideout from Village Academy (FL) who was ranked as a three-star, 84-rated prospect. He averaged over 30 yards a catch his senior season.
- Chris Anderson
- WVU & BC Insider - 247Sports