Probably should have warned you to avert your eyes, but if you did take a look at that horror story, you’re ably prepared for what follows in today’s episode.

True story: I had an idea for a column last week in which I’d ask and explore whether West Virginia is any “good,” understanding “good” is extremely relative and open to presentation and interpretation. Without giving away too much, because I think it could work still this week and might actually have more flavor now, the thought was that there were some things and some Things about the Mountaineers that left you wondering. These are all variables we’ve talked about to some extent and with some length in the past, but I thought (I think?) the collage makes for an interesting picture.

Anyhow, I got caught up in signs and towels and lips and the like and wrote about something else, which meant I was bitter in the fourth quarter because, honestly, things I had intended to write about or raise questions about were very much what the game was about Saturday. So there I was telling anyone who would listen, “This feels like a 31-30 game, am I wrong?” with nothing to show for it. Nothing!

Hey, I think WVU is good. How “good” is yet unknown, and the performance against TCU invited that sort of suspicion. This is not a lost season or a season headed nowhere, but this season is at the intersection of certain fates Saturday night in Austin.

How did we get here? Let’s find out by taking a look at the Good and the Bad of WVU v. TCU.

Good: Health
Excellent.

Bad: Eyesight
This is among the worst things I’ve seen this season. (Side Bad: I wanted the split screen with Rick reacting to that play. That would have been amazing.) I honestly don’t know how multiple officials missed that. Watch it again. The umpire is staring right at it. The head linesman is on the left sideline basically even with the point where Josh Carraway tried so hard to become Washington Irving. Even the center judge who lines up behind the quarterback must have had a good view because you shouldn’t make eye contact with a guy running away from you. Just ridiculous. I won’t go so far as to say it cost WVU a touchdown. It would have moved the ball closer, but that by no means guarantees WVU scores a touchdown (I’ll get there.). So how much did it matter? Watch it again. Trickett’s head hits hard and he flounders around when he angrily fire up to his feet. He’s not plugged in. I wondered right there if he was OK. Was he?

Bad: I don’t know
I don’t know if he was. I do know he was not nearly as sharp throughout the game, and the trigger doesn’t matter as much as the truth. He was off and he made a number of plays that were just about wildly out of character. Let’s agree on one thing: This is why Dana Holgorsen doesn’t want Clint running.

Bad: Accurate descriptions
Interesting choice of words from Dana after the game in saying Trickett was “spooked.” To some, spooked meant afraid of something that doesn’t exist … like ghosts. Saturday night, what it meant to me was he was given reason to worry about inevitable hauntings. This action is not at all encouraging. Marquis Lucas gets bullied and Trickett can’t escape out the back because Adam Pankey and Wendell Smallwood are getting overwhelmed. This was a bad, bad omen and it was a regularly occurring event in the game. Those defensive ends had zero fear of WVU’s tackles. They were coming.

Bad: The shell game
Trickett has been so good this season watching and playing the safeties. So good. We’ve marveled and frankly laughed at how easy he and Kevin White and Mario Alford have made it look — and that includes the touchdown pass to Alford in the safety-less area on the opening possession —  and our reactions are tributes to how well he’s monitored and manipulated those situations. This was not one of those. It’s pretty clear the safety is going to be in White’s neighborhood. The throw is inside. It’s an easy turnover. I’m going to give Trickett the benefit of the doubt: He hurried this and needed more time to think it through. Time was not a commodity for him in that game.

Good: Wardrobe change
I better mix it up here soon. That interception was the last pass Trickett threw with the glove on his throwing hand.

Bad: Offensive line
This isn’t on Trickett, either. He’s making a check — watch Lucas pop up … he’s checking on the check — and Tyler Orlosky, for some reason, snapped the ball and turned it over for the fourth time. TCU scored after this one and very little could be relied upon on WVU’s sideline. This was not a good game for that group of five, and I think we’re starting to get a read on those tackles.

Bad: A lot
Here’s the play that had people booing and talking and wondering what in the world was happening. Let’s start at the end, which is Holgorsen explaining the apparent consternation after the play.

“Clint’s doing a great job of taking calls that we’re giving him and then taking the knowledge we gave him through the course of the week as far as looks, and when he gets a specific look doing his absolute best to get the right play,” Holgorsen said. “I saw something a little bit different than he did.

“I can’t explain the difference in what I’m looking at and him being in his shoes when he’s getting hit and knocked around and when he’s dealing with all the different things happening on the field. I think Clint does a great job dealing with the information we give him and putting himself in position to be successful. There’s no such thing as calling perfect plays, I assure you.”

OK, so WVU throws three receivers to the left and one to the right. The Horned Frogs show their hand early when it looks like WVU will tempo … and then doesn’t. They’re going to double-team Alford and play man-to-man on the three receivers to the left. That’s behind two linebackers and four defensive linemen. If the left linebacker were to float over to his right to play man against a receiver and the safety were to drop back over top those three receivers, I bet Dana would live with a run against a really soft, five-player box. However, the linebackers and the defensive linemen stay in the middle and the safety on the three-receiver side steps in to play man-to-man. I bet Dana thought one of those three receivers could win man to man, and my guess is he likes Jordan Thompson against the safety, which worked well in the comeback against Texas Tech, or GAM outside. (Aside: On most days, I’d guess a screen was possible, except that WVU fell out of love with them early in the game.) Trickett, it seems, checked to a run and, oh, man, look at the spin move James McFarland puts on Lucas. That’s mean, man.

Bad: Update
Not a good day for MTEP. Trickett was 2-for-5 passing for 20 yards. He ran three times for 9 yards and was sacked once for a loss of 12 yards. For the season, he’s 14-for-36 for 193 yards and two interceptions, four sacks, a lost fumble, an intentional grounding penalty and a pass interference penalty, plus eight runs for 48 yards.

Good: #FREEMIUS
Dreamius Smith has WVU’s two longest runs this season and, like, nine other carries. On this play, watch Quinton Spain pull through on the right side and Mark Glowinski push up on the second level. That’s the power play and that’s how it’s supposed to work. TCU didn’t get beat too much by this staple and had a normal, though effective approach.

Good: TCU linebackers
The three main ones combined for 26 tackles. Paul Dawson, who didn’t start (?), had 12. They were solid against the run, and here’s what I was just talking about. On the power plays, the linebacker on the side the guard is headed to just takes on the block, and that is no fun. The other linebacker sweeps over and makes the play. Again, it’s pretty basic, but it worked and the other guard just couldn’t get to that level to keep it from happening. (Side Good: Dawson is a force. He had a sack and an interception and he just makes a ton of plays for that defense. TCU kept its safeties back because it trusted its linebackers. Dawson made that look pretty providential.)

Good: That guy again
Derrick Kindred made 11 tackles, 10 of which were by himself. He’s the free safety. I know we’ve been over this before: If you’re going to play WVU this way, you better have a safety who can hang on his own and run up and make plays. WVU has seen a bunch of them this season.

Bad: Repetition
Another entry from the “Previously on the Good and the Bad” file, this one coming from last week.

Oh, the 12 personnel. That’s one running back and two tight ends and that’s a Thing right now. Pictured above is an unbalanced set. OSU has one tight end on one side and another as the H-back. It chopped WVU up throughout the first half. OSU also played a bunch with a tight end on each side of the offensive line and was successful with that, as well. Explanation? Cale Gundy. He’s Mike Gundy’s brother, but he’s also Oklahoma’s running backs coach, and the Sooners threw a ton of 12 personnel at WVU with great results. Defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said OSU showed none of the unbalanced and two-tight end stuff on tape, but that he knew he’d see it Saturday because what’s good for one Gundy is good for another. The Mountaineers didn’t stop it despite having two tactics prepared to stop it. That’s a concern. TCU might not do a lot of it, but Texas and Kansas State can and probably will, and Gibson said as much afterward because the 12 packages are good ways to deter and thus discourage the pass rush the Mountaineers have showed so often and used so effectively.

Welp, TCU did a bunch of two-tight end and unbalanced stuff. It worked. Get ready for more of it. Texas got it’s ground game swagger back against Texas Tech, as one does against Texas Tech.

Good: Start
Say what you will of the way WVU closed the game and the way the two lines were less than their opposites, but this continues to be a team that signs its name in a very physical manner. This was a tone-setter, I thought, because we came into this game thinking it’d be a spread out drag race. Nope. Nope. In fact, this just felt like a game for Shell. One problem with that …

Bad: Running backs
Dana called them “very average,” and I guess in the broad view that’s true. I thought they were really effective early, and I thought Shell and Wendell Smallwood were behind that. But that pair lost fumbles in the second quarter and had three combined touches after them. Shell’s the starter. Smallwood’s the guy coaches say is the closer who can moved the ball and kill the clock late and who can be trusted not to fumble — and remember, that’s a role he had last season, too, up to and including his costly fumble against Iowa State. I do wonder if the ending might have been different if the two best running backs were used in the fourth quarter. (Side Bad: Lucas quit on this play. McFarland didn’t. Guess who won.)

Good: GAM!
At least we got one moment. And at least we got one more screen pass. It lost 3 yards. We never saw it again when it sure seemed like it was there. It either wasn’t called or Trickett didn’t switch to it or stick with it enough. It just seems weird to let the other team take away something you like to do with one play … one play that doesn’t quite negate the one play you made before that.

Bad: GAM!
Sacrilege? Yeah, I agree. How about this? Something was wrong with what happened Saturday. He had no catches and was targeted just four times in the final 46 minutes (once in the second half). No drag routes across the middle. No screens to him outside or in the slot. Just some deep throws and some plays where he and Trickett were not connected. There’s something noble about winning the way WVU did at Oklahoma State, when White had basically the same day against the same concept. There’s something meager about losing the way WVU did against TCU, when TCU saw a blueprint and built a castle. I know the point: Double White, deal with the run. But here’s the question: Is he a talent who deserves three catches? You’ve got to find a way to get him involved. These last two games are really misleading: Seven touchdowns. One to White, two to Alford, two by the defense, one on a throwaway run by Smith. I feel like this is getting overlooked.

Bad: Recession in Bolivia
WVU ran 11 plays in the red zone. WVU called 10 runs and one pass — and Trickett never threw on that down. I felt like the fade was there on occasion, and here are two occasions. On the first one, White is inside the numbers and the Other Kevin White is taking away the inside. That’s screaming ¡Lanza la pelota a la esquina! The box is heavy and Dreamius gets tripped up, and on the second, WVU is in a hurry and catches itself off tackle guard.

Good: Fun with formations
I’m on the record with this, but everything TCU does is cool. Media guides, uniforms, helmets, campus projects, Trent Johnson, so on and so forth. I think part of the move to this offense the Horned Frogs run was to make Gary Patterson seem a little more hip and to help the team relate better to the extremely fertile Metroplex recruiting territory. And they had some fun with formations, didn’t they? Ultimately, they didn’t really matter. None of them were repeated to set and spring traps. They just look cool for kids. Here are a few.

Look at the offensive line split and, specifically, how far away the left tackle is from the left guard and how close he is to the twins to his left. The defense naturally looks that way and the throw goes right, but it’s an ordinary play run from an altered formation and the alteration has nothing to do with the play. But it looked cool.

Same deal here. The tackles line up as, well, as tackles, but with the twins on either side. Basically the same as the previous play, but from a pretty rare look.

Finally, this one is a little more conventional, though four receivers to one side is weird. One more thing I know we’ve been over: The lone receiver on the opposite side is almost never the primary receiver, except he is here, which is probably the point on third-and-2. Daryl Worley plays it smart and safe and Nick Kwiatkoski does a nice job to read Boykin and give the receiver something else to think about on a play that’s supposed to happen fast.

Watch all three of those plays. WVU wasn’t shocked by any of them.

Good: Cheeky
Tip your cap. That’s all you can do there. (Side Good: TCU’s team speed. Not Tyreek Hill! But not bad.)

Good: Special teams
This happened, which was sort of expected since it’s a punt but also disappointing because 1) Vernon Davis Jr. has been smarter than that and 2) nobody on the return team does much to help Davis. But the kickoffs were again effective and the return team was solid, to the point it actually created a turnover when Dayron Wilson recovered the pooch kick (Aside: How did he not block this punt in the third quarter?) Nick O’Toole did what he could with and against the wind. And Andrew Buie put the shoe on the other foot!

Good: ESPN!
I said last week I missed Fox Sports 1 because of the timing ESPN failed to exhibit on myriad occasions, but ESPN has some pretty sweet camera concepts. This was perfect. Go ahead, watch it a few times. I’m not going anywhere.

Good: …what is this sorcery?
Nine games in, WVU recovered a fumble. (Wilson’s pooch recovery doesn’t count because TCU never touched it and thus never fumbled it.) And not only that, but Terrell Chestnut, who was very good, returned it for a touchdown. And Chris Fowler said “Scoop & Score” a bunch. And this game was over, unless the Mountaineers were to do some really dumb stuff and bring TCU back into the game. Don’t get mad. You know that’s true.

Bad: Spooked
I mean, hard to blame Trickett for feeling like the walls are collapsing when he sees 78 in gold flying back at him. But it’s third-and-8. Take a deep breath and wear one. Take a knee. Throw it to your dad. Just make sure your team gets to punt, you know, with the wind. It’s a wonderfully aware play by Dawson, who could not have possibly been expecting a pass, but this was also a panicky play by Trickett and emblematic of a total lack of presence. The only way the Horned Frogs were getting back into the game was with help.

Bad: Knoblauch
(I did not expect that to catch on.) Daryl Worley and Karl Joseph have done this three times now: Stephon Diggs’ touchdown at Maryland, Devin Lauderdale’s touchdown at Texas Tech and Kolby Listenbee’s 40-yard catch at the worst time imaginable. Boykin was 0-for-7 on throws beyond 15 yards before this. Now, credit him for noting the clear confusion. He saw it coming. K.J. Dillon swats Joseph out of his spot. Joseph is looking so hard at the sideline for the signal that he bumps into the referee. Tony Gibson said he didn’t see it, and I have to believe that. But Joseph knew it was doomed and a few of his teammates did, too. I wonder how much time was spent Sunday talking about why one of the players didn’t call a timeout. I think the choice to kick into the wind mattered. I think the timeouting was weird. I think the play calls could have been better. You can’t debate this: None of those things matter if WVU just communicates and executes a play it communicates and executes all the time.