Published: October 01, 2008 11:57 pm      

COLUMN: Devine’s gifts hard to define, harder to stop

MORGANTOWN — Coaches put in a lot of time and effort into designing plays that they believe will work against a certain team on a given down and distance.

If they feel they can beat an aggressive interior defensive lineman, they may devise a series of trap plays intended to take advantage of his aggressiveness. If they feel they can make a cornerback bite on a double-move route, they’ll throw those plays into the game plan.

Then along comes a player like West Virginia University’s Noel Devine.

No, make that “then along comes Noel Devine.”

There are no players like him.

Coaches design plays for him and, somehow, in practice those plays seem to come off as written on the chalk boards in the meeting rooms.

Then comes Saturday and the coaches don’t have enough chalk to diagram what some of those plays turn out to be.

“Nintendo runs,” coach Bill Stewart calls them.

The statistics from last Saturday’s victory over Marshall show that Devine gained 125 yards.

While that is accurate, what it doesn’t say is that he ran about 250 yards to gain that.

Let’s explain:

In this past game, WVU felt it could run wide sweeps with Devine, getting him to the perimeter, getting a block for him and then watching him take off through the hole.

On three occasions, he followed instructions perfectly, right up until he got to where the hole was supposed to be.

Then, if it wasn’t there, he would reverse field, give ground, run back across the field slipping tackles along the way. It was, as Stewart put it, not like any human being you ever saw but more like something improvised on a computerized game like Madden or NCAA 2008.

Stewart likens the play to a surfer trying to stay on the wave until it breaks, the runner having patience enough to wait until the block is thrown and the hole springs open.

“It’s just like a wave and he sees a crack and he jumps at it,” Stewart said.

If you can think back to when Rich Rodriguez first took over at West Virginia, Avon Cobourne had a problem early in his first season getting untracked, not because he wasn’t among the greatest running backs ever to play in the Big East, but because the style required in running some of his plays was one of waiting until the hole opened before exploding through.

“The biggest thing Steve Slaton and Quincy Wilson and Avon Cobourne did here was that they had patience to the hole, speed through the hole. Patience to the hole, speed through the hole. I want to see the wave crest and then he can take off. He did a good job, but sometimes you have to ride the crest.”

Devine, however, has this gift to do things other people can’t do.

Offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen calls him “a gifted child.”

And that presents something of a dilemma. What do you do when a player is liable to break a long touchdown run by improvising?

With a Devine, the last thing you want to do is put any restrictions on him, limit his ability to make that big play out of one that may have gone sour.

Still, as Mullen notes, “there’s times when a 2-yard gain is good.”

Indeed, first and second down Mullen would prefer Devine not try anything too risky, get thrown for a 7-yard loss and leave the team in second-and-long and third-and-long.

But on third down, if the play looks like it’s wasted, Devine is on his own.

“If he loses yards, we have to punt anyway,” Mullen said.

Whatever, when Devine does stray from the playbook version of the play, it is undoubtedly the most exciting part of any game. His balance is incredible; his strength unbelievable. He’s able to make sharp cuts, run through tackles and has a seventh sense that evolves out of an ability to see the whole field not as it is, but as it will be a second or two in the future.

Just what does Devine see on those occasions?

“I’m just trying to make something happen,” he explained. “I’m trying to make something out of nothing. I make my reads, do my progressions and then, if there’s nobody to the back side, that’s when I make my move.”

Think, however, what this ability does for his blockers, who never can be really sure what he’s going to do next. They block the play, then normally have to scramble to get back in front of him to make another block.

“On one play last week, I cut two guys,” offensive tackle Ryan Stanchek said. “I try to do my assignment first, then sense where he is going next. I know I’d never have the guts to tell someone with vision like that not to improvise.”

Devine now has strung together consecutive 100-yard rushing games, and with WVU looking to continue relying on the run as it did last year, you might see him do it quite a few more times. This is especially true if they decide to really pressure defenses by putting him in the package with both quarterbacks Patrick White and Jarrett Brown on the field.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.