In other circumstances, I might have made a joke along the lines of, “If West Virginia protected the quarterback during the game as well as Dana Holgorsen protected his quarterback afterward, this would be a different story,” except that the man in charge said pass rush wasn’t a problem.

I’ll leave that up to you here, and we can bicker over this and that, but I think we’ll agree on this: Holgorsen was a bit different in that postgame. Not his normal self, not even by the standards set by a loss.

I thought he tried to manage the conversation and the headlines afterward. Given the conversation and the headlines before the game, I understand that. When a team that’s yet to indisputably prove its worth in six games loses the seventh, the reactions can be swift and forceful. I thought he was actively not going to contribute to that. (I also thought the intentional praise of Oklahoma State’s facilities was interesting, too.)

But!

Let’s be honest with one another, too. He’s not altogether wrong. Oklahoma State’s defensive line didn’t win the game. A pressured passer didn’t lose it. The WVU offensive line was good enough in the run game to crater the same defensive line that did harass Skyler Howard. The pass to Ka’Raun White was behind him, but this isn’t your backyard. White needs to help his quarterback. But Howard’s long been guilty of holding onto the ball too long, and that jumped up and bit him on the fumble. Then again, that also happened because “a guy got beat.”

Imagine the discussion today if Holgorsen put that on his quarterback’s shoulders when all he really did was try to escape, which is something he’s done so any other times his season with a greater level of success. What would that do to what people believe to be true about Howard? I don’t know, do we still have to revisit the Howard trajectory?

The big difference, it seemed, was WVU’s first reaction to being forced outside its comfort zone. We’ve talked about this, and we’ve wondered how it would go when it happened. It did not go well, and Holgorsen confessed as much when he said he was “scared to death” of the pass rush on third down.

The Mountaineers were encouraged out of character and then acted even more out of character. In the formative part of the game, they couldn’t run the ball too effectively on first and/or second down. That created long third downs, and Oklahoma State dared WVU to run with a four-man box. WVU will and did run there and had some good and bad results. But WVU’s game is picking up first downs on second down and standing over the ball on third-and-3 with a full array of possibilities in its hands and on the opponent’s mind.

I don’t ever know if I conveyed that point as well as I wanted to, but fortunately for me, the Mountaineers illustrated it quite clearly.

Anyhow, there’s 450 words on why the Mountaineers didn’t win, and it evades the principle reason while piggybacking on another. WVU turned the ball over too much, which yanked them out of their lane. And rather than play the game it wanted to play, WVU played into Oklahoma State’s hands.

“They’re as good as anybody at taking advantage of turnovers and converting them into points,” Holgorsen said of the opponent, which hasn’t committed a turnover in the past four games, leads the conference with a plus-10 turnover margin and 19 forced turnovers and has outscored opponents 96-35 in points off turnovers.

Result? There’s really no arguing this. There’s no use saying he worked the room and manipulated the reviews. This is the truth.

“This is a pretty simple one,” WVU coach Dana Holgorsen said. “Two pretty evenly matched teams. They made three plays in the game that flat-out affected the game. Simple as that. They forced three turnovers and took all three of them down into the red zone. We basically gave them 17 points. They win by 17 points. That’s the difference in the game.”

He could have defended anyone and everything in his news conference and looked slightly to wholly foolish, and it wouldn’t matter because those are the facts. Seventeen points off turnovers as well as a touchdown after Mike Molina missed another field goal, and that has to be a worry now compounded by the reality the only fix is to keep running the same guy out there and hope he straightens out whatever’s gone sideways.

WVU had no recourse. The offense couldn’t punch back, and the defense couldn’t take the ball back for the first time this season. No forced turnovers for the first time in seven games and the second time in 13 games. And really, the Mountaineers weren’t close. “We usually drop one or two interceptions,” defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said. “We didn’t even have that opportunity.” There wasn’t a tipped pass or a ball on the ground or a jarring sack, but that’s what the Cowboys do. They steered into there lane and stayed there all day.

The funny part about all this — let me use a better word … — the odd part about all this is that Oklahoma State did something weird to make the Mountaineers act weird. The Cowboys played fast and applied tempo to the WVU defense, which wasn’t expecting that and didn’t deal with it the right way. The offense struck a blow to the defense, and the defense wasn’t the same.

“They weren’t a big tempo team coming in, and they got us,” Gibson said. “They tempoed us a lot, and we couldn’t really get in a groove. We couldn’t get things called. We had to [cancel] some calls and go back to some basic stuff. Nothing clicked.”

WVU practices against tempo and played two of the fastest teams in the Big 12 the previous two weeks. Yet the Cowboys sprung the tactic early to boost their offense and to keep the Mountaineers from subbing for critical downs or playing too exotic with an extra defensive back in the secondary.

There were even occasions when the Mountaineers couldn’t lineup before the snap.

“The tempo got us on our heels a little bit,” safety Jeremy Tyler said. “We weren’t expecting them to run it, and we were on our heels a little bit. We could have gotten lined up quicker and read our keys a lot better.”

So, what now? It would appear WVU and the rest of the Big 12 are out of the College Football Playoff before the first CFP ranking is even unveiled. The argument against that is that, yes, we haven’t seen the first CFP ranking, which means we’ve got a lot of football left to play. That’s no doubt good for the Mountaineers, who should be 7-1 a week from today and still have home games left against Oklahoma and Baylor to affect the Big 12 title race.