The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board

You are looking live at the site of the Big 12 Game of the Year of the Week! No. 11 Oklahoma State won 31-6 today even though it was a six-point underdog at TCU. But the Cowboys are 9-2 overall and 7-1 in the Big 12, and they’ll play for the conference championship Dec. 3.

One of the teams in tonight’s game could, as well.

For 10th-ranked West Virginia, it can’t lose tonight, Saturday at Iowa State — which suddenly looks dicey — or at home Dec. 3 against Baylor — which ran out the clock down 42-21 with four minutes left today and has lost four in a row. Should the Mountaineers do all of that, they then need No. 8 Oklahoma to beat the Cowboys in Bedlam in Norman.

For the Sooners, if they win tonight and beat Oklahoma State, they have the conference title.

It’s very simple, even if the Big 12 is as weird as ever.

Tonight, though, answers a lot of questions for the Mountaineers, the folks involved and the people in charge. The person asking some of these questions? That’d be the athletic director, Shane Lyons, who’s having a pretty good time watching this all unfold.

“They’ve played hard, and we’ve had the ball bounce our way a couple times when probably the last few years we haven’t had the ball bounce our way,” Lyons told me. “Good football teams, those things happen. But what I really like about this team is the different units have stepped up at some point when they were needed and made a difference in the game.”

As many of you have noted, Lyons is around the program as a matter of routine. He travels. He’s in the locker room. He’s in press conferences. This is not new. He did this last season. His presence may seem more noticeable now because his role is more significant now. This season began with Dana Holgorsen, at the minimum, in limbo. Sooner or later, he needs to acknowledge The Holgorsen Situation, and while the outcome may seem different now than it did in, say, September, his work is not.

“I don’t think you can ever evaluate a program if you’re not around it,” he said. “I’ve been asked about this, even before now, even last year, because I think it was kind of an anomaly that I was around. My philosophy as A.D. is if you’re going to have the pulse of the athletic department, the programs and the student-athletes, you better be around to develop relationships with them and develop deeper relationships with the coaching staff.

“The way I look at it, we’re one big team, win or lose. To properly evaluate what the needs are or what direction we’re heading, I think I have to be around. I just can’t come to a game, in my opinion, as a general fan and watch a game and go home. I’ve got to be at practices. I’ve got to be in the locker rooms. I’ve got to be around the team and travel with them and everything else just to get the full experience as best as I can.”

As you might imagine, Lyons approves of what Holgorsen & Co. have done this season, and he’s looking ahead to how to sustain and enhance success in the manners in which a program and its infrastructure do. He said the training room — the place WVU oftentimes doesn’t take recruits — needs up dated in the next year. The locker room and the position meeting rooms “need some touch-ups.” Costs are a concern. Fundraising is a focus.

“Facilities, I think, are a very important ingredient to success,” he said. “I go back and look at the men’s basketball practice facility, which I think is one of the best in the country, if not the best in the country. I think we’re starting to reap the benefits of that. We bring kids in here on recruiting visits, and all of a sudden they think, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t expect this.’ They see obviously a first-class coaching staff, a first-class training facility. We’re upgrading the playing facility. You throw it all together and it correlates to the success of the program across the board.

“Look at our women’s soccer program. Again, great facility, great coach who’s been here, and she’s having success. Coach Huggins. Great facility, great coach, he’s having success. Football continues to be upgraded, and we’re getting back on the right track to success.”

And there’s our segue. Lyons isn’t commenting on what is or is not happening with regard to Holgorsen and his contract. But given that quote in our conversation, I wondered if it might be fair to consider Nikki Izzo-Brown and Bob Huggins and the way WVU has invested in both of their programs and to project Holgorsen several years in the future with improved facilities.

“I think there are a number of ingredients that go into that,” Lyons said. “Going back to Nikki, she was a one-time coach who’s been around the head coaching job 20-plus years now. Coach Huggins, 30-something years. You look at Dana, he’s been the coach for five or six years. I think as coaches grow, as they learn and as they see more things, they know what it takes to win. With a football program, you’re taking about putting your staff together. You’re taking about your needs with student-athletes in certain positions. What’s going to work? What’s not going to work? I think all of that is a cycle you have to go through, and that’s what’s happening in the football program.”

I don’t know where to begin with this game. It was amazingly eventful, as one might expect from an athletic competition featuring five touchdowns and seven turnovers, but it featured as many points as Oklahoma scores on its own. Wheee! Let’s begin at the end and with the final play, which we should remember in perpetuity because the official who has the essential function of counting to 11 on every down simply did not. He instead saw a ghost and had to investigate.

Watch the play. See if you can find Casper. Here’s a hint.

Our man is at the top of the screen, first on the 25-yard line and then frantically waved out of the way by freshman linebacker David Long. The linebacker at the bottom of the screen, senior Justin Arndt, is waving for somebody to come over his way, because it’s definitely not supposed do be 2-on-1 up top and 1-on-3 at the bottom.

Jarrod Harper, a very good and very smart player, is on the wrong side of the field.

Then you can see defensive coordinator Tony Gibson, in his yellow top, and safeties coach Matt Caponi, to Gibson’s right, panic. Two players in one spot is a bad, bad sign. “I didn’t know if we had nine or 12 or 15,” Gibson said. Their instinctual reaction is that the Mountaineers have 12 on the field, and since Harper is where Gibson knows Long is supposed to be, Gibson and Caponi suspect Harper is the 12th man and beg Harper to come off the field. So Harper, who is telling the coaches the count is actually 11, does what many of us would do in that situation. He listens to his coaches … and runs off the field after the snap.

The No. 11 team in the country defends the final play of the game at Texas with 10 players.

Imagine if that play goes sideways for WVU. Yikes. (Aside: Remember when we had sad conversations about how unlucky the Mountaineers were for myriad reasons? I think we can stack and stow those. They’ve lived a good life this season, injuries aside.) Similarly, imagine if Texas quarterback Shane Buechele thought he had a free play and a 12-men-on-the-field penalty coming his way. Then it’s a great plan by Gibson! (Another aside: If this ball doesn’t get tipped backward and instead goes forward, No. 13 for Texas, erstwhile quarterback Jerrod Heard, has a touchdown.)

Anyhow, the sight of a player getting yanked off the field should sound an alarm for someone, and the officials decide to review it, never mind that one of the eight is in charge of counting to 11 and throwing a flag if he goes over. I was near the some of the officials at this point, and they were telling some WVU players that it was all going to be OK, but it was kind of surreal to see those same officials in the moment. They weren’t quite sure, were they? They wouldn’t have been there if they were. I suppose I’m OK with the review, but it’s indicative of the cloud that lingers above this conference. The gentleman who lorded over this NFL situation? The name should be familiar. He’s the head of the Big 12’s officiating.

Now, it’s not completely fair to tie all of that together — Walt Anderson was nowhere near Saturday’s game — but you get the idea. There’s a state of affairs, and it bothers people, people like Dana Holgorsen, who I can only remember ever acting the way he did Saturday one other time. He called a timeout that day solely to rip the referee.

Did Holgorsen call a timeout Saturday? Interesting question, and it was a key part of the game.

I tracked Holgorsen throughout this, because he was already angry about the officials not calling intentional grounding, calling it and then picking up the flag. He followed the head linesman and was talking to him between plays. Watch him at the top of the screen on the 47 with the H to his right. H has just scooted Holgorsen to the side so he can be on the line of scrimmage. Holgorsen leans in and says something, and H calls the timeout. There is no visual indication Holgorsen called a timeout … and consider the point and the tenor of the game and that Holgorsen likely wishes no less than food poisoning upon H. He’s not leaning in to whisper timeout. A timeout call would have been exaggerated and obvious. At the minimum, it would have been perceptible. I’m confident that Holgorsen reminded the guy that he had to stay close to H in case he needed to call a timeout becau–

Timeout!

Holgorsen has a litter of kittens. That is not the reaction of a person who made a mistake. That’s a person who was wronged and is fed up with it all. He’s clearly ~~saying~~ screaming, “I did not call that timeout.” Later, he says, “I was standing right there,” before his mouth disappears from our sight. It returns, and he says, “… if I wanted to call a timeout. And he said — ” Then he motions to the right, his head disappears and reappears, and you see him say, “… get away from me.” As in, the H told him, “get away from me.”

Finally, “And I said, ‘I am not calling a timeout.’ ” It gets so bad that linebacker Sean Walters, who once got a personal foul penalty in a game he didn’t even play in, intervenes and escorts Holgorsen from the scene.

What’s the big deal, you ask? WVU didn’t have a timeout 27 seconds later when Caponi, Gibson and Harper got confused. What we’re about to discover is that everything matters.

But today, all that matters is WVU is ranked No. 14 by the College Football Playoff with an 8-1 record overall and a 5-1 mark in the Big 12 before an enormous game Saturday at home against No. 9 Oklahoma. How did we get here? Let’s find out by taking a look a The Good and the Bad of WVU v. Texas.

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