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04 May 2010
MORGANTOWN - It's hard to characterize West Virginia's spring drills as anything but a rousing success, at least based on the finish.
Talk about your feel-good endings - one of the largest crowds in the history of the Gold-Blue game watching the best of the Mountaineers rough up the rest of the Mountaineers by a tidy 38-0 count.
Here's the qualifier, though. In the grand scheme of things, that Friday night exhibition was clearly the most meaningless of West Virginia's 15 spring practices. Shoot, most coaches would prefer not even fooling with a spring game and instead have another practice where things are actually taught and worked on.
Granted, it is valuable in a way - this one particularly so. Given the crowd and the atmosphere, it really was about as close to a game-like situation as this team can get. And it's always nice to see how players respond in game situations. Coach Bill Stewart made that point beforehand when he said he was anxious to see how some players reacted when the lights were on. Literally.
Still, what happens in a public spring scrimmage has little to do with the goal of spring football. This isn't at all like August, when a team works four weeks toward the goal of being the best it can be at the end. It's entirely about setting the table for August and beyond. It's about experimentation and development and finding out who can play and who can't.
It's about establishing where a team is, where it can go and what needs to be done to get there.
So where is this West Virginia football team? Well, glad you asked.
Stewart and his staff will spend the next three months figuring that out. They will watch tape of every player and every drill from the spring. They will try to resign what they can do with what they are capable of doing. By August they will have come to most of the conclusions.
