Post by cviller on Oct 4, 2007 8:50:14 GMT -5
By Dave Hickman
Staff writer
MORGANTOWN — A college football center is a lot like a referee or a child in church.
The best ones are those you seldom notice.
But then they’ll blow a call or cry out during the sermon and all of a sudden they’re in the eye of the storm.
Mike Dent blew a call Friday night at South Florida. Then he cried out during a sermon. And a few times he even did both at once.
And suddenly everyone notices him.
That’s grossly unfair, of course, to West Virginia’s first-year starter at center. Few gave the guy much love at all during the first four games of the season when the Mountaineers’ offense was generally clicking, instead just assuming that consensus All-America Dan Mozes had been capably replaced and going on to the real important issues that fans and, yes, the media obsess about.
Like how many carries is the freshman backup tailback going to get this week?
Now, to infer that Dent’s problems snapping the football last week at South Florida were minor would be wrong, just as it would be wrong to take for granted the largely terrific way he performed the same task until that night.
This is a tough job, perhaps the second-hardest on this team, right behind the running, throwing, decision-making, hit-absorbing task of playing quarterback. The center not only has to make those testy shotgun snaps, he has to do it knowing a large, angry man is going to try to pulverize him the instant his hand twitches on the ball, and just after he has had to survey the defense, make the line call, duck his head down to make sure there’s a quarterback back there and then look up to see what might have changed while he did.
“The job Mike has done so far has been amazing,’’ said Greg Isdaner, who has seen it intimately from his guard spot a few feet left of Dent. “But no one remembers that, do they?’’
No, not after Dent either rolled, sailed or dribbled maybe a half-dozen or so snaps (out of 86, by the way) at South Florida. Those half-dozen were significant, of course, particularly the one near the end of the first half of the USF game that went over the head of 6-foot-4 quarterback Jarrett Brown and turned third-and-goal at the 2-yard line into fourth-and-goal all the way back at the 19.
But it’s not as if the guy has suddenly become Steve Blass (or Rick Ankiel, for the younger crowd) and mysteriously lost his control.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,’’ Dent said this week. “I just rushed a lot trying to get into my sets and I rushed my snaps. They jumped the ball one or two times and I basically started rushing.
“But it’s in the past. We’ve just got to learn from our mistakes and build on it.’’
Indeed, there is a “we’’ element to the problems West Virginia had at South Florida that go beyond bad snaps by one now very visible center. It’s not as if the line as a whole was especially effective, allowing three sacks and 57 yards in losses of various types.
“I don’t want to say we panicked up front, because our guys have some experience,’’ West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez said. “We just didn’t play as well and I think we pressed at times, forgot some fundamentals on some plays. One of the turnovers was the result of their front four, but the others were just poor fundamentals or poor decisions.’’
And that’s obviously not all on Dent.
“He had a few bad snaps and he wasn’t getting a whole lot of help sometimes from guards,’’ Rodriguez said. “Mike’s played pretty well. The last game he didn’t have his best game, but that was a tough environment and I think it snowballed. He had one bad snap and then he had another one. But it wasn’t like every snap was bad.’’
West Virginia plays at Syracuse Saturday in another difficult environment (indoors) and against a defensive front that isn’t as active or athletic as South Florida’s, but is big and tends to change looks even more than the Bulls. The Orange have begun to use a lot of West Virginia’s 3-3-5 look on defense, but even in a more traditional four-man front you can bet there will almost always be a nose tackle on the ball, trying to disrupt Dent.
But it won’t be anything Dent hasn’t seen before. West Virginia has run 362 plays this season. Dent has snapped the ball on almost all of them and, statistically speaking, his success rate is about 99 percent.
If he keeps that up, perhaps eventually someone will notice him for that.
To contact staff writer Dave Hickman, call 348-1734 or send e-mail to dphickman1@aol.com.
