There stands Dana Holgorsen Saturday night and the offensive innovator is visible and obviously frustrated. His Frankenstein can suddenly no longer function. You’d have to say this is a slump, right? The numbers that side of the ball produces remain shocking, though for an altogether different reason.

I mean, this was a group that was doing everything right 16 days ago and winning in spite of the detrimental defense. How can it be explained? There are many reasons, including better opponents with good defenses and able offenses. The impact the combination levels against a WVU team that can be stopped by and cannot stop anyone is significant and obvious.

Yet the Mountaineers are involved in this, too.

The run and pass blocking isn’t good and it’s being addressed in the form of personnel changes along the line. Running backs tread lightly and sure look like they lack the confidence they once had, when they’d almost blindly zip through creases.

Buie and Garrison just haven’t been very tough or physical  and haven’t used those traits to break tackles … and they’re not making opponents miss tackles. Shawne Alston is missed most right here.

Receivers have dropped passes and haven’t handled route responsibility as well as before — and Stedman Bailey wasn’t right Saturday night.

The combination is right there for you to see. Texas Tech was going to challenge WVU to win with the run, but was content playing the run with four or five defenders and daring WVU to pass the ball against six or seven defenders.

Kansas State was similar, using parts of its front seven to stop the run and trusting everyone else to defend the pass.

The Mountaineers aren’t doing much after contact or after the catch. They’re not packing defenses in or backing them off. They’re not making big gains. They just aren’t discouraging game plans, which is unlike them. Honestly, save one seam route by Tavon early against Texas Tech to set up a touchdown, I can’t remember a deep completion — and only a few deep passes — since the Baylor game.

So understand that what’s happened the past two games it is not a blueprint.

“They were so different schematically,” Dawson said. “Texas Tech played a lot of man. Kansas State played a lot of zone. I don’t see any similarities in what either team did defensively, other than both teams tackled well.”

The problems are mostly WVU’s. The defense isn’t helping the offense and has allowed 16 scores and forced two punts in 21 possessions the past two games.

Kansas State had a field goal and seven touchdowns in its first eight drives.

“We can choose not to fall behind if we want to,” Dawson said. “We can choose to go out there and answer them, if we want to. Every time they score or punt, we get the ball and we can choose our own destiny.”

WVU has punted a lot and run into fourth downs a lot, but even in the past two games has converted half of its third downs … which is pretty good. But those third downs have been long downs where defenses, the ones that already don’t regard the run too much, can better guess and defend the pass.

Twenty of the first-down plays the past two games have either lost yardage or gained no yards. That’s 20 second-and-10 or mores, which will baffle many offenses.

Truthfully, a lot of this reverts to simple stuff — block better, be more accurate with the pass, run stronger with the ball, run better routes, don’t panic.

There is some reason to feel reassured. WVU is not an awful football team. It’s not. Now, it’s not as magnificent as it once was and it’s been humbled, perhaps even all the way to reality, but it’s better than this.

Even if this is the bottom, as Geno Smith said Saturday night, and if WVU has been dragged there by the defense and a punctured buoy once known as the third-ranked offense in the country, it remains unlikely to stay there.  The Mountaineers just don’t do a lot on offense. There aren’t many moving parts and machinations, so the thinking is it wouldn’t take as long to identify the problem parts and fix it.

In short, yep, this is a slump. This is sliders on the plate, tee shots sprayed right, 3-pointers off the front of the rim, misspelled words, so on and so forth. The Mountaineers have been made to realize they’re not as good as they once thought — or that opponents won’t allow that so easily — and need to realize they’re the only ones that can change that.