Early angle for this week is not that WVU has handled adversity well this season or that WVU has not, but that WVU has handled lots of adversity in seven games. A startling amount, even for a team that was 5-1 before it got outadversityhandled  by Syracuse.

Really, every game has had its moments for the Mountaineers, either brief, lasting or agonizingly long.

The replies have been different. There have been times when WVU rose above it and times when WVU shrunk from it. That doesn’t matter, though, as much as this: The Mountaineers haven’t really had an uneventful game, not one that had them in their locker room afterward saying, “You know what, I think we really figured things out and strung it together for four quarters today.”

There’s always been a ” … yeah, but … ” in every game and that, in hindsight, seems meaningful now, particularly when Dana Holgorsen continues to say he and his team knew what they were getting into and he again had to show his team on tape what went wrong.

Now, that’s probably not unusual, not even for a team that seemed to have been doing as well relative to those obstacles, but it would also seem WVU wasn’t aware of imminent peril. Good teams learn from mistakes. Great teams need no lessons. What kind of team welcomes them?

As SU offensive tackle Justin Pugh boiled it down: “We took a look at the LSU film and (the Tigers) kind of punched them in the mouth. They had the kind of mentality we had last year. We just wanted to go out there and make sure we were physical up front.”

West Virginia needs to forget how it got to 5-2 and figure out how it can get to 10-2.

“You don’t want to think it, but maybe we needed this to happen,” WVU senior defensive lineman Julian Miller said after the lopsided loss. “We can’t keep playing the way we have been and expect to get through the rest of the season, especially on the defensive side … We have to learn from this loss.”