The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board Because that's our custom

Texts From Texas Tech Game Day

November 9, 2015 by Mike Casazza

West Virginia’s performance may have had you sweating to some old issues at times Saturday, but the Mountaineers were good enough to win, to end a four-game losing streak and to position themselves to start a winning streak should they take care of matters as a touchdown favorite Saturday against wholly unpredictable Texas. Like, I don’t even know if the Longhorns’ll show up by plane, bus or hot air balloon.

Anyhow, our carefully rehearsed talking point last week was that Texas Tech was going to score and that meant WVU would have to match and, ideally, prevent scores. Well, WVU’s offense did well to answer scores. It didn’t match scores, but it followed three Texas Tech sores with points and succeeded a fourth with that long drive to end the game.

The Red Raiders were not who we thought they were offensively — unless you bought into the steep home/road splits, which I did — and they left with season-low totals for points, passing yardage and total yards. Jakeem Grant, who must have been looking forward to Christmas after seeing what Corey Coleman and Josh Doctson had just done to the Mountaineers, had a 10-yard touchdown on a scramble drill and then four other catches that netted minus-2 yards.

The defense played without a starting cornerback and a reserve safety who was going to have to play more because a reserve safety was starting at cornerback. It did well to slow Grant and the offense, and it can thank sleepy K.J. Dillon for his performance.

“I was up to maybe 1 or 2 in the morning watching him,” Dillon said. “That’s how explosive he was. But I think me doing that helped me get the edge on what he was doing. He wasn’t able to be a big part of the offense.”

Dillon finished with nine tackles, but just one after halftime. That, though, was because Grant did nothing in the second half and finished with five catches for eight yards. Grant was third in the Big 12 and in the top 11 nationally in receptions, receiving yards and receiving yards per game.

“We focused on it,” defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said. “K.J. Dillon, I thought, played a hell of a game from my perspective standing over on the sideline. K.J. drew him about 90 percent of the time.”

It’s as good a reason as any the Mountaineers (4-4 overall, 1-4 Big 12) ended a four-game losing streak. They’d allowed three 100-yard receivers in four conference games, and Baylor’s Corey Coleman and TCU’s Josh Doctson combined for 21 catches, 382 yards and five scores in the previous two games.

Grant had just set a career highs with 13 catches for 178 yards against Oklahoma State, but matched a season-low for receptions and established a career-low in receiving yardage.

“I wouldn’t have guessed those stats for him,” Mountaineers coach Dana Holorsen said. “That’s a tribute to our defense.”

Tell me who’s to say after all is done and you’re finally gone you won’t be back again. You can find a way to text today. You don’t have to wait to ’til then. My edits are in [brackets].

11:33:
Your wife’s traveling, my wife’s traveling….and we’re stuck watching a team that’s lost 4 straight. Thanks, Universe.

11:41:
I’m more hungover than Skip Carey after the 95 World Series.

12:03:
Crowd is super thin. Not a good look.

12:06:
Guy beside us just yelled “Go back to TAXAS!!!!” When they ran out. Now he’s cackling at the Matthew McConahey video. He and (my husband) are gonna be be

12:06:
st friends by half time.

12:07:
run silent, run deep, west virginia

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Sunday buffet: WVU 31, Texas Tech 26

November 8, 2015 by Mike Casazza

How about Dana Holgorsen admitting he goofed up the end of the first half last week and had that on his mind at the end of the first half Saturday?

Ah, yes. Today is a different day, and I know this not because WVU won but because we’re not circling a carcass. But how close were we to that flight pattern today? I could capably argue that the Mountaineers were fortunate to hold onto the ball for the final 16 plays and 6:47 yesterday — by both metrics, the longest drive of the season — and could have been forced to punt, kick a field goal or go for a first down on fourth down on three occasions.

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WVU v. Texas Tech: About face

November 7, 2015 by Mike Casazza

It’s times like these you learn to live again. It’s times like these you give and give again. It’s times like these you learn to love again. It’s times like these time and time again.

And it is games like these that can define a team, a season and so much more. It’s about saving face and presenting a new one for all the observers. It’s about turning things around to start back toward where you were headed. And, true, it could be about the complete opposite. Can we call this a must win? Will we? Why don’t we? Simply put, a loss today jeopardizes even the least ambitious goals for West Virginia’s 2015 season.

This is not, shall we say, lost on the Mountaineers. They’re well aware of the stability of the sky above them and the walls around them, and it is they who are in charge of what happens next. Specifically who is in charge is most interesting, though.

WVU made it back to Morgantown a little before sunrise Friday morning and had that day off. On Saturday, there was a senior meeting in which the team’s elders gathered and spoke amongst themselves and were moved by the words of Karl Joseph.

But the real eye-opener came a day later. Dana Holgorsen led a team meeting, as he does regularly, and then addressed the state of affairs not by demanding more of his players, but by opening the discussion up to them.

He asked the offense — his offense, the one he controls, the one he builds game plans and calls plays for — if the players were comfortable with everything. Did they like what he was asking them do to? Were there things they wanted changed, added or removed?

He was curious and sincere, but he was also bold. There was no way to know what was on the other end of his question.

“In the past we’ve had guys like, ‘What the hell are the coaches doing? What’s this call? What can they do? It’s not us, it’s on them,’ ” Barber said. “I think we’re taking ownership and we understand they might be coaching us and have calls that put us in position, but they’re not in between the lines. That’s us. They’re not playing. We’re playing.”

The players listened to Holgorsen’s questions and thought them over briefly, but they assured him he wasn’t the one who needed to change.

“Everyone said we like what we’re doing,” junior center Tyler Orlosky said. “We know what we’re doing is working — we’re just not executing it. We’re not finishing drives. We’re dropping passes. We’re missing blocks and reads with the quarterback and the running backs. These are fixable things holding us back from being the great offense we think we can be if we start executing.

“I think that was definitely a positive. Once the system starts failing and guys start questioning it, you’ve got to start from square one, and that’s not good. We’re far away from that point.”

This will depend on your side of the fence, but that sounds promising or pessimistic this morning. It’s times like these we make up our minds.

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Friday Feedback

November 6, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which always starts on the front foot. The same just cannot be said about West Virginia, and specifically its offense, in the past few weeks.

I had an idea for this week, and I would attempt to figure out how and why the Mountaineers just can’t get going early on in games. And then the formidable Bill West, who apparently saw what I saw, jumped on the idea. He asked Dana Holgorsen for his impressions of the running game at the start of recent games.

It’s not good. I didn’t like that last week. It was an emphasis to try and get the run game going, and for the last two weeks, we did a poor job of that in the first quarter. (Junior defensive tackle Andrew Billings) No. 75 for Baylor had something to do with that. That dude is a good player. With that said, we tried to get the run game going early. It wasn’t good in the first quarter. I thought we rebounded, and it was better in the second quarter and then it progressed in the second half. We have to keep doing some things whether it’s play calls, schemes or early motivation in order to play better up front in the run game. That definitely has to happen.

There we go. Understand Holgorsen doesn’t waste much time on plays and ideas during the week that he doesn’t think will work in the games. He obsesses over film and picks out, like eight plays, maybe 10 and I doubt a dozen, that he and his coaches believe in that week. That’s what the team works on throughout the week. It’s like my parents touring Italy for two weeks and packing only enough to fill a backpack.

So when it doesn’t work? Uhoh, right?

I then asked if the aforementioned sluggishness of the run game contributed to the offense not starting well. Whoops!

We scored against Baylor. That was a long pass, right? The running game against Oklahoma was decent early. I don’t want to sit here and point the finger at our o-line and running game for us not being where we need to be offensively or as a team right now. Last week, we just didn’t get it going. We missed a couple of passes that would have changed the outlook of quote on quote ‘not starting very well.’ We will keeping working at it.

Oh, man. He repeated what I said and used quote-unquote! But here’s the issue there. WVU did score early against Baylor, and that was a play that went bad in the Bears secondary. It still counts, but it’s an outlier, if only because it’s the only first-quarter touchdown in the past four games. WVU couldn’t run early last week and had to pass, and receivers couldn’t hang onto balls — and we can agree the deep ball is not WVU’s strength, right?

In those two first quarters, the Mountaineers have 60 combined yards rushing. But when did WVU look its most dangerous, when did it seem most capable of editing the script offensively in the past four games? The end of the first quarters against Oklahoma and Baylor, when the run was working and scoring drives bridged the first and second quarters. Those scores tied the Oklahoma game 7-7 and got WVU on the board down 17-7 against Baylor. The first quarters against Oklahoma State and TCU were hard to watch.

There’s a thread. In the first quarters in the losing streak, the Mountaineers have rushed for 140 yards and averaged 3.04 yards per carry. On 10 third-down runs, they’ve moved the chains just four times. They’re being outscored 48-7, and that’s as big a reason they haven’t led in Big 12 play. They’ve been tied for 3:29, and if you add the 0-0 ties to start the game, they’ve trailed for 212:49 of the past 240 minutes of football.

I don’t know that WVU is going to become Kansas State and do what the Wildcats attempted to do last night, but I know it’s possible to use the run to slow down an explosive opponent, and I do know that’s what the Mountaineers have tried to do the past two games. WVU’s offense is tethered, but it’s also 3-9 in Big 12 play when both teams score 30 or more points, and that includes a 1-9 record since beating Baylor and Texas to start the Big 12 experience in 2012.

“In this league, if you don’t learn how to win a shootout, you can’t win,” he said.

He’s right, and since joining the Big 12 for the 2012 season, WVU is 3-9 in conference games both teams score 30 points. That includes a 2-0 start against Baylor and Texas the first season.

The Mountaineers have been above 30 just once this season, and that was a 62-38 loss at Baylor that shrinks a little when you consider one score was late in the fourth quarter and another one followed that on a kickoff return touchdown.

And then the Mountaineers (3-4, 0-4 Big 12) scored 10 points in last week’s loss to TCU.

This is now the third straight week they’ve prepared for a Big 12 opponent and harped on matching scores, and though Texas Tech isn’t quite the overall outfit Baylor and TCU are because the defense is about as bad as it gets, the Red Raiders (5-4, 2-4) enter Saturday’s noon Fox Sports 1 game at Mountaineer Field with an offense every bit as dangerous.

They don’t have the same quality at quarterback, running back or receiver, but they have winning talent at every spot, and they can score. That ought to frighten WVU, which has tried these past two weeks to linger by being efficient and resilient on offense, which is to say making the most of its chances by doing what it does best when it matters most.

That means running the ball. This is the team’s strength. It’s how it moves down the field and picks up first downs and keeps the other offense on the sideline or on the back foot.

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, pick your spots.

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You’ll Never Talk Alone: S4E8

November 5, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Same as it ever was. We’ll kick off at 11 a.m. and go for four 15-minute quarters. Join me then or throw your questions in the queue now. If you can’t make it, catch up here afterward.

Live Blog You’ll Never Talk Alone: S4E8

The Good and the Bad of WVU v. TCU

November 4, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Picture. Thousand words. You know that line. I think this nails it from six nights ago, and this was TCU’s first drive of the game. Of course, it followed WVU’s opening drive in which one touchdown pass was dropped after an initial testing of the secondary fell incomplete inside TCU’s 5-yard line.

Those plays, or drops if you must, since the players certainly didn’t make the plays, can be put on a stage and debated. Should they make the plays? Is it expecting too much? On and on until someone’s too blue or red in the face to continue. Whatever the consensus there, we can agree on this: It didn’t come easy to WVU.

That picture? That’s a snapshot of easy. Just watch this and tell me what was so hard about it.

But here’s the impressive or troubling part of it, depending if you’re looking at this from the neutral/TCU side or the WVU side, of course. It’s not supposed to be this easy.

Dana Holgorsen talks a lot about the timing between his quarterback and his receivers. It’s hard to visualize his explanations … until now. Trevone Boykin is throwing this to Josh Doctson way before the ball is snapped. He knows the play. Doctson knows the play. Even the slot receiver knows the play. The three of them see the defense and they know the inside guy will do nothing to put his defender in the vicinity of the eventual throw and Doctson will get outside the cornerback and scoot up the rail and Boykin will arch one into a bucket. It’s exactly what happens.

Freeze it at :03. Boykin is pulling the trigger before Doctson has even engaged Terrell Chestnut, who even in a diminished state is a worthy adversary for a play like this. Boykin and Doctson take it out of Chestnut’s hands though. Hand. Whatever. The ball is in the air when Doctson and Chestnut are chicken fighting, but Doctson knows where he has to be and how to stride to that spot. He doesn’t panic or tip Chestnut, and by the time Chestnut turns for the ball like he’s supposed to, Doctson has him beat and legs out the rest of the route.

The best way to put it is to say this is a practice play executed during a game. WVU — this WVU, I should say, because we’ve seen this in gold and blue before — tries this and either doesn’t make the throw or complicates it on the back end of the action.

And this is also the best way to describe the biggest difference in Forth Worth. TCU’s good enough to do that. WVU isn’t. TCU’s receivers and one defensive back made the catches. WVU’s receivers and defensive backs did not. The Horned Frogs are better than the Mountaineers for a bunch of reasons, but we’re concerned with one game, and in that one game, it was as easy as that.

That was a long time ago, and we’ve all had time to think about where things are, where they must go, so on and so forth. I don’t know about the latter, but I think I’ve got the former figured out now. Ready?

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Dana Holgorsen: Texas Tech week

November 3, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Big news coming for one unit, though exactly what we’ll see is yet unknown.

Tuesday Taboo: The return of Knoblauch

by Mike Casazza

Unrelated, but not insignificant (and I suppose that’s entirely subjective, come to think of it): Gordon Gee on 3-4, 0-4.

Texts From TCU Game Day

November 2, 2015 by Mike Casazza
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One of the pratfalls of a Thursday night game is that it rankles the schedule here. Having a weekend to myself — Halloween, no less — is nice, but we’ve spent plenty of air and space already talking about 40-10. Those two extra days are great for the coaches and the players, but not for the four letters that make this place go ’round.

So let’s jump into TFGD, which had a volatile pulse for the better part of three quarters and then flattened out toward the end. (You better believe there’s a comparison to the 2015 season somewhere in there.) October is now over, and perhaps you’d do well to heed the advice of one former football coach here. October is in the past, and November is better merely because it is not October. You’d also do well to remember the proclamation of another former football coach here about the final month of the season.

I say all of that because I want you to think about the current football coach here and, quickly, quiz yourself on what he’s best known for after three Big 12 years. Some of you will answer right away and some of you will need more time, but I think everyone would agree that Dana Holgorsen’s Novembers have been forgettable.

He’s 3-9 in the 11th month, and though I know you know it’s not my style get into what a coach has to do to stay or go, it goes without saying a fourth straight 1-3 November won’t cut it. This is set up to be his easiest November yet, but nothing is going to come easy given the state of his offense and Tony Gibson’s defense.

“What everyone’s forgetting is Texas Tech has the third-best offense in the country,” defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said, correctly highlighting where the Red Raiders rank in total offense.

WVU follows that with a home game against Texas, which handed Oklahoma its only loss of the season, and then goes on the road to play Kansas. The Mountaineers finish their home schedule against Iowa State, which beat Texas 24-0 Saturday, and then finishes at Kansas State.

“It’s not like the gauntlet is over for us,” Gibson said.

The Red Raiders figure to be friendlier because they have one of the worst defenses in the nation, ranking No. 127 out of 128 in total defense (572.7 yards per game) and No. 122 in scoring defense (42.4 points per game). They’ve allowed 40 or more points 15 times in coach Kliff Kingsbury’s 34 games, including Saturday’s 70-53 loss to Oklahoma State.

They led 17-0 in the first quarter, which is where the Mountaineers have been outscored 48-7 in their losing streak. But WVU’s offense has sputtered in most places in Big 12 play with just 11 offensive touchdowns in 16 quarters. Seven are after halftime, but just two are in the fourth quarter, which is the major concern if it has to again match a prolific offense.

“They’re going to score points and move the ball,” Gibson said. “We’ve got to come up with a way to get some stops. We’re just … I don’t know. I can’t put my thumb on it right now. We’re beat up. We’ve been through a rough stretch. But nobody’s going to feel sorry for us.”

Hit the strip club, we be letting bands go. Everybody’s hating, we just call them fans, though. In love with the texts, I ain’t ever letting go. My edits are in [brackets].

(Also, please engage the ambitious and impressionable minds in my JRL493 class. They’re working on columns, and part of that exercise involves engaging the audience, presenting angles and accepting feedback. Do the kids a favor, please, and give them a full-on blog comment experience. There are separate staffs. You can find them here and here.)

7:28:
Shout out to my 6 year old son’s youth football coach for running a practice past 7:30 tonight. Clearly you know your football.

7:31:
Uh…#LawOfGus in effect tonight?

7:33:
Gus just teased to break calling this “World War Four”…..

7:34:
Hoping the bus wreck won’t be a metaphor for this game tonight

7:39:
Shelton and Jovon gotta stretch it out and catch those balls!

7:39:
Howard’s pass dressed as a duck for Halloween

7:40:
If that ball hangs in the air .0001 second less we would have had ourselves an epic Gusgasm there.

7:40:
[Gus did] damn it.

7:40:
I don’t normally defend skyler but those were two perfect passes

7:41:
WVU dropping balls like I dropped third period French

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I continue to be a fan of the Ahmads

November 1, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Teams, coaches and players are, for some stupid reason, prohibited by NCAA rules from talking about scrimmages. Ibby Ahmad is Esa Ahmad’s dad and he is a good man for sharing this.