The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board

You are looking live at the dance team’s rehearsal for tonight’s football game. The gals, pictured wearing pink, because it’s October, are going to do Thriller tonight, also because it’s October. My longstanding belief is everything TCU does is pretty cool — marketing, media guides, uniforms, helmets with frogs shooting blood out of their eyes, formations (!), so on and so forth — so hopes are high, even though my head will be down and I’ll be writing and it’s possible I miss it.

But it’s Thriller. Thriller.

Also, it’a blackout tonight, which is not to be confused with Game 1 of the World Series.

https://twitter.com/TCU_Athletics/status/658646400364859392

Hopes are also high among the viewers that this will be a close, competitive and ideally offensive game tonight and the Fox Sports 1 audience will be entertained by another WVU-TCU meeting. I don’t know if that happens, but I do know this: You need to score points to win this one.

Trenchant.

In 20 Big 12 games this season, 18 have had a team score at least 30 points and six have seen both teams score 30 or more. WVU has hit 30 just once in three Big 12 games and allow me pin the * next to the final score at Baylor. The only two games without either team scoring 30 points involved Texas, which beat Oklahoma and Kansas State.

WVU’s averaging 29.6 points per game in Big 12 play — sixth place among the 10 teams, 9.9 points behind fifth-place Oklahoma State and 21.2 points behind second-place TCU — and that’s inflated by the Hefty Cinch Sak scores against the Bears. They count, and yet the Mountaineers are still under 30 points per game, and that’s a terrible place to be in the Big 12 and territory WVU was just not supposed to occupy in the past.

Since 2001, when West Virginia hired the offensive coordinator from Clemson and Rich Rodriguez accelerated heartbeats with promises of offenses that didn’t huddle and instead set hair on fire, the Mountaineers are 91-13 when they score at least 30 points.

He can take credit for much of that success, winning the first 33 times his offense scored 30 points and finishing 47-1 during such games in his seven seasons.

That sort of stuff began to matter, and his successor was Bill Stewart, who reached 30 points five times in his first season and then in the first five games in 2009. He stockpiled substance with 18 wins and a bowl victory his first two seasons, but the style was in short supply.

There were no more 30-point games to finish the 2009 season, and the athletic director decided to make a change in the middle of the 2010 schedule. The Mountaineers hit 30 points three times in the first five games that year before a stretch of 20, 14 and 13 points had Oliver Luck informing Stewart his days were numbered.

Stewart’s successor was another offensive coordinator with a flashy reputation, and though Dana Holgorsen’s first season was not without some offensive pitfalls, the Mountaineers did set all kinds of scoring records when they beat Clemson 70-33 in the Orange Bowl. That and an 8-1 record with 30 or more points plotted a promising future in the Big 12, where teams need a potent offense as much as they need a football.

Sure enough, WVU went for at least 30 points in seven of nine Big 12 games in 2012, but that was only good enough for a 4-5 conference record. In the 21 conference games since, the Mountaineers have but 13 30-point games and a 6-7 record in those contests. WVU reached 30 points in overtime of two games and in meaningless moments of two one-sided losses to Baylor.

After the most-recent lopsided defeat against the Bears on Oct. 17, Holgorsen admitted this offense wasn’t advanced enough to keep up with an offense as sophisticated as Baylor’s. Tonight’s opponent is No. 5 TCU, and the fifth-ranked Horned Frogs welcome the Mountaineers to Amon G. Carter Stadium for the 7:30 p.m. Fox Sports 1 game.

The Horned Frogs will greet West Virginia with a Big 12 offense that is second only to Baylor in scoring (50.1 points) and total offense (616.3 per game).

The Mountaineers, quite simply, have to keep pace.

“I would like to get to a point where we can,” Holgorsen said. “I’ve been involved in some games where it’s been fairly high-scoring games. We just haven’t been there yet.”

Oh, hey. I’m open. Hit me in the post.

This all feels very weird today. I’m a day behind. I’ve got basketball in my head. And I honestly can’t give you a whole lot that distinguishes itself from many other things you saw, heard or read to explain the loss or to add to that which you believe or were made to believe after the loss.

And I sort of warned you in TFGD, albeit in jest, that a bunch of what I’d say here could boil down to “That’s Baylor!” Granted, that’s not a very good explanation, and I think in Year 4 of the Big 12 experience and a season after beating the Bears, that ought not apply or be applied quite so frequently. I also think there were occasions West Virginia had to and could have been better — Shelton Gibson dropping a certain touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, for example — and the justifications for why the Mountaineers were not simply do not cut it. So I’ll try not to bow to the Bears, but there will be things I can’t resist because this is G&B and there were some bad men doing Good things Saturday. It made West Virginia look Bad, but there were some instances in which I thought the Mountaineers could do very little about that.

I mean, that trips formation with the bunch to the short side of the field and a 1-on-1 on the wide side? Good luck. I really don’t know how you defend that unless, as Tony Gibson proposed, you’re allowed to use 14 players.

But here’s my lede today: Baylor’s playing fast break football. The offense is just nuts. It’s frenetic and efficient all at once. The space is potent and the players make it lethal. Players are hitting all their marks in multiple aspects. I’ve just never seen an offense affect the other offense quite like this. Baylor’s played this offense before, but Baylor’s never played offense like this before. I hope that makes sense. Watch this in the future: Offensive players on the other team perform with a pending doom resting atop their shoulder pads. I don’t care what those players say. It’s true. You know every incomplete pass, every negative-yardage run, every time you leave yardage to go for a first down, every field goal is potentially damning. That’s certainly not reality, but it does feel real.

What I hadn’t really paid much attention to is that Baylor’s defense is in a hurry to put the offense back on the field. The Bears are aggressive. They blitz a lot. They hit you. They swarm. (They look a lot like WVU looked against Baylor last season, I thought.) They’re trying to force errors or punts, and if they get beat in the form of a touchdown or a long gain that precedes a touchdown, fine, just let Seth Russell & Co. handle that.

The whole experience is a bit frightening. You know it going in, and when you start to feel it, that can be very hard to manage.

I said this in the chat last Thursday, but I suspected the game might get away from WVU in the first half. The Mountaineers were enduring slow starts. Skyler Howard’s first halves were costly. If there were some punts or stumbles or field goals, they could pay with quick Baylor strikes. That did not happen, and I thought Dana Holgorsen, the offense and the defense were pretty good in the first half.

But that game was over at halftime.

Baylor created a few openings. There were dropped passes. There was an early fourth down attempt. There were two punts. WVU hit some big plays (against a passive defense) and drove to the red zone. But the results? WVU gave up a first down on the fourth down and then a touchdown a play later. After the two punts, the Mountaineers managed three points, and that was on one of the red zone possessions. Those three points were negated by a WVU punt and a Baylor field goal. Another red zone possession ended with a missed field goal, and a healthy Wendell Smallwood probably scores on that 52-yard run, and that takes the specter of a field goal out of the equation.

The Mountaineers had 17 points at halftime, which is a pretty good half for them lately, and they were down 10. Not only that, but they knew they had their chances and gave them away with punts, missed and made field goals and an interception in the end zone. They had some looks and looked the other way. The first drive of the second half then became enormously important. WVU punted, Baylor put on a hellacious stretch with 28 points in 24 plays, and that was that.

The Bears are not perfect, but they cover for a lot because opponents know they’re so damn close.

So there’s my conclusion. How did we get here? Let’s find out, by taking a look at the God and the Bad of WVU v. Baylor.

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

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

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Swag.

The Good and the Bad of WVU v. Baylor

Smart man, that Texas coach

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