WVU looks to play up to standards
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MORGANTOWN -- After two hours and 15 minutes of rummaging through the ashes of West Virginia University's football press conference on Monday that analyzed the Mountaineers' 34-12 season-opening loss to No. 8 Penn State, the realization arose that the same phrase was being uttered over and over.
"We did not play up to our standards."
Three players spoke.
Three coaches spoke. They praised Penn State, which certainly looked like the Top Ten team it is, but in the end that phrase, or some variation of it, was spoken.
"We didn't play up to our standards."
Take wide receiver Preston Fox, for example.
"Penn State played really well but we didn't play up to our standards. We left a lot out there," the Morgantown native said about a minute into his interview. He would use the phrase or a variation of it seven times throughout his 11-minute interview.
Others followed suit in an honest appraisal of what more than 62,000 in the stands and how many more saw on Fox, at least until the rains came and sent the teams into a two-hour, 20-minute halftime weather delay.
When asked the most disappointing aspect of the game, Fox -- the player, not the network, replied:
"For me, not playing to our standards. We're a better team than that. We didn't put out there what we should of put out there. We hold ourselves accountable and will show you all next week."
This, of course, leads to the overriding question that this team must answer as the season goes on and that is just what West Virginia's standards are and why they did not play to them in the opener.
Was it simply Penn State's superiority as a team? Was it the situation? Why could the Mountaineers not get it corrected?
Fox was asked that.
"I would just say we didn't play good enough on offense or defense. Our special teams were good. We had the ball on the ground a lot and that's a big problem, compared to Penn State, which did not drop the ball a lot. We need to be better in that situation.
"You make corrections against their defense, but we have to work more on ball security in practice, just getting to our standards like we have all camp."
The problem is you can't use as your standards what transpired last year when WVU won five of the final six games, including a bowl game, as the standards this year.
As experienced as this team is, it is a different team, facing different expectations. Sometimes it's harder to win when you are expected to than when you are sneaking up on people, as was the case in 2023.
Coach Neal Brown spent a lot of time this off-season trying to convince his team and the public that some of his players were being undervalued even this year, but now the onus is on them to prove him right.
Chances are you won't find that out this week as Albany, while a strong FCS team that went to the semifinal of the playoffs last season while winning 11 games, will be more overmatched than WVU was in Week 1 by Penn State.
It's usually that way when WVU plays lower level opponents. In Neal Brown's five years as Mountaineer coach they have beaten Duquesne, 56-17; Towson, 65-7; Long Island, 66-0; and Eastern Kentucky, 56-10.
Only in 2019, his first season as WVU coach and possessing a team that would finish 5-7, was WVU tested as a good James Madison team lost by just a touchdown, 20-13, to the Mountaineers.
"This is the best FCS team to come in here since James Madison," Brown said as a warning to his team not to take them lightly. "They've got our attention. We're an 0-1 football team until we do something about it."
WVU believes it can contend in the Big 12 this year and it would be insane to write them off after the opening loss to a traditional college football power that may be ready to make a run at the Big Ten title and a national championship.
This game against Albany is the Mountaineers' last chance to bring out the standards it hopes to reach because the competition stiffens after Albany.
First comes a trip to Pittsburgh for the Backyard Brawl, where the Mountaineers may be facing a team not as talented as Penn State but one that will take everything WVU has to beat.
And then it is into the Big 12 season with a pair of ranked opponents out of the gate in No. 19 Kansas coming to Morgantown and then a trip to No. 16 Oklahoma State.
New standards need to be set this week. The offense must find a way to run the ball, for if there is any established standard that carries over from a year ago it is that the running game is the central feature of the offense with running backs Jahiem White and CJ Donaldson and quarterback Garrett Greene.
You expect nearly 200 yards on the ground in any game this WVU team plays, but Penn State stuffed them all day, allowing only 85 rushing yards.
And Greene's established aerial standard was in the long passing game, which never really showed itself, while his promised improvement in accuracy on short, situational passes was non-existent.
Add to that a couple of messed up snaps, two sacks, four fumbles, of which two were lost, and it is safe to say WVU didn't set a standard on offense.
And defensively, while the team played a physical game, it offered no pass rush whatsoever and allowed quarterback Drew Allar to escape over and over when his receivers were covered, making it difficult to get the Nittany Lions off the field.
"We have to affect the quarterback more. We didn't do that," defensive tackle Fatorma Mulbah said. "Some alignment issues, we have to fix that. Overall we just have to get better."
"We weren't consistent enough," safety Jaheem Joseph, making his Mountaineer debut after transferring from Northwestern, said. "We had spurts in the game when we executed and spurts when we didn't. That showed when they had explosive plays."
It was, to be certain, a sub-standard defensive performance.
That leaves everyone groping to discover just what the standards are on this new edition of Mountaineer football and they need to apply them right away against Albany or the swagger they carried all through the off-season will slip away.