2021 West Virginia Football: Touch Tracker Week 2

A quick change to the tracker this week - we’re going to start including return opportunities and make this more of an all-purpose deal going forward. The reasoning is that I felt like we were doing Winston Wright’s explosiveness in the return game a disservice by not capturing it here. Anyways, off we go:

Leddie

RB1 is still pacing the team in touches, but his productivity isn’t trending the way we’d expect after playing a team like Long Island. Much of the blame here is correctly being shouldered by our offensive line, but I think Leddie needs to take some responsibility, as well. According to ProFootballFocus he’s currently ranked 140th nationally in elusive rating among backs with at least 15 carries and has forced just 8 missed tackles on 38 touches (6 on runs, 2 on receptions). We definitely need more from the line, but Leddie has given us reason to expect more from him, as well.

Winston

The Jet wasted literally no time getting the party started against Long Island by taking the opening kickoff to the house after coming close twice against Maryland. I’m still a bit perplexed by his lack of usage in the running game considering how explosive he is, but I guess there’s a lot of season left for that.

Garrett Greene

Greene’s 98 rushing yards were the most by a WVU quarterback since Skyler Howard in 2015. The redshirt freshman is a dangerous combination of slippery and explosive and has definitely earned some situational playing time going forward.

BFW

That Bryce has caught just 6 of his 14 targets is a bit disappointing, even considering the fact that many of his opportunities are 50/50 balls. He’s almost certainly going to have a size advantage on every single person he matches up against this year, so it would be nice to see him start asserting himself physically and winning those contested catches a bit more frequently.

Sam James/Sean Ryan

James dropped a ball against LIU, but for the most part these two guys have been rock solid and seem to have well-defined roles within the offense.

Kaden Prather

Prather is a guy who probably needs to have more a role going forward, especially if Ford-Wheaton continues to struggle winning 1v1s down the field. Everything he does just oozes talent.

Justin Johnson/Tony Mathis

The backup brigade likely won’t get anything approaching the volume of touches they saw against LIU for the rest of the season, but it was nice to get eyes on them and confirm that they can help us all the same. I was particularly impressed by Johnson, but may have been swayed there because I was sitting a row or two behind his very excited family.

Sam Brown

We found him gang! There’s no way for us to know what’s going on behind the scenes but Brown continues to impress me every time he gets on the field. He hauled in both of this targets against LIU and made a great block to spring Garrett Greene on his second touchdown run.