The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board

Teammates and coaches were very impressed by what Geno Smith did in the second half Saturday. He made great reads. He threw accurate passes. He shrunk the time between snaps and added an accelerated pace the team needed and the team fed off of as it erupted in the third quarter.

This was turning point kind of stuff, some whispered, because to that point WVU hadn’t understood how to play fast, but had suddenly seen what that speed could do in that system.

That system, Smith knew, had been very good at three previous schools. Through parts of two games, it wasn’t all that good at WVU. So Smith said what was on his mind. He burned ears and opened eyes and facilitated what happened after halftime.

This wasn’t the generic sort of halftime lecture about playing harder and wanting it more in the second half. This was personal.

Coach Dana Holgorsen’s prodigious offense that had worked through the years at Texas Tech and Houston and Oklahoma State wasn’t working with WVU and Smith told the players they were the reason why.

“The one thing that he said that stuck out most to everyone was when he said this system has been successful for 10 years and we’re the team that is not being successful,” McCartney said.

“We have the same system, so it’s not the system. It’s us. We looked at it like if this system has been successful for 10 years, then we need to make the changes and make the system successful.”

The Mountaineers scored on their first seven drives in the second half before running out the clock on the eighth. They managed five touchdowns in 20 plays in the third and fourth quarters and needed just 6 minutes, 47 seconds off the clock to do it.

“The truth hurts,” McCartney said, “but we needed to hear it to get past what happened in the first half.”

This is why we do Texts From Game Day. We covered almost 12 hours of game day with more than 100 texts and they ride the wave of pregame thoughts, nonsensical observations before and afterward, the stunning lows and anticipated highs within the game and all sorts of story lines that weren’t necessarily related to the game. There’s even an eye patch!

Do me a favor: Don’t throw a flag at these antics. Record-setting Norfolk State Coach Pete Adrian might explode,

The Spartans, from the Football Championship Subdivision, set three Milan Puskar Stadium records in Saturday’s 55-12 loss to No. 19 WVU and were a party to two others. NSU was flagged 19 times for 177 yards and gave the West Virginia offense eight first downs by penalty.

“Don’t get me started,” said Spartans Coach Pete Adrian, a WVU lineman and linebacker of the late 1960s.

The two teams also combined for nine first downs by penalties and 262 penalty yards, 10 more than what WVU and Miami combined for in 1994.

Miami owned the previous record for penalties with 17 in that game. The Mountaineers had a record 158 yards in penalties against Temple in 1983. A team gave its opponent five first downs by penalty six times in field history, most recently by WVU against USF in 2008, but the Spartans beat that by three and that alone matched the combined record totals of WVU and Louisville in 2007 and WVU and Cincinnati in 1980, the first game at the stadium.

“If we are that stupid as players, then that’s the way it is,” Adrian said. “I’ll have to watch the film, but the officials are saying they did their job. We have to stop that if we are doing that.”

Excuse my charisma, vodka with a spritzer. Swagger down pat, call my texts Patricia.

My edits are in [brackets].