Passing game on both sides of ball needs fixing for WVU
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MORGANTOWN -- Even though the forward pass has been with us since the 1906 season, Saint Louis University's Bradbury Robinson being credited by many sources with having thrown the first legal pass in the college game -- an incompletion, by the way -- it's 118 years later and West Virginia University can't seem to quite get the hang of the thing.
Now it's true that their history shows some pretty strong passers and receivers, the likes of Marc Bulger, Geno Smith, Will Grier, Major Harris, Pat White and Co., but word about the way the pass is supposed to be executed on offense and defended against on defense hasn't sank in with this year's team.
That was a part of what Coach Neal Brown took out of Saturday night's 45-18 loss to No. 17 Kansas State, a loss in which more than just Mountaineer pride was hurt.
While falling to 3-4 in a season born while filled with optimism, a rash of injuries were suffered and how Brown is going to be able to gerrymander a team this week when they play at 7 p.m. Saturday in Arizona is anyone's guess.
No fewer than four head injuries were suffered with nothing in common other than the resulting headache, all of them coming in different ways, a couple being the result of the way a player's head struck the ground.
But this Saturday WVU may be without All-American offensive tackle Wyatt Milum, quarterback Garrett Greene and running back Jahiem White as well as a number of key defenders such as safety Aubrey Burks and tackle TJ Tucker.
Brown hasn't ruled them out just yet, but the way he spoke of them it seems like the odds on them playing Saturday are greater than the odds on the Mountaineers winning the Big 12 Conference championship.
But before beginning to look ahead to Arizona, a team with its own struggles in its first Big 12 season, Brown and his players had to look back at the Kansas State game, a weird and wacky affair in which the Mountaineers played their best defense against the run all season and actually ran the ball quite well into the teeth of what came into the game as the nation's No. 2 run defense.
But that danged forward pass thing gave WVU trouble right from the start this season, with Penn State scoring seven seconds into the second quarter of the opening game on a 50-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Drew Allar, one of three he would throw in that night.
After Saturday's performance, in which Kansas State threw for 298 yards on Avery Johnson's 19 for 29 passing game for three touchdowns, the Mountaineers found their season-long pass defense efficiency standing at 126 out of 133 FBS schools.
And, on the other side of the equation, the passing offense efficiency was 91st in the country after Garrett Greene completed 9 of 19 for just 85 yards, a touchdown and two interceptions and his backup, Nicco Marchiol, completed 6 of 13 for 58 yards and a touchdown.
"We were not good enough on pass coverage," Brown said early in his media session.
It was an understatement.
So how do you put the pieces back together?
"It doesn't change," Brown said. "This sounds like a planned out answer but it's really how I feel. Every Monday, regardless of what happened on Saturday, you come in, we go over our mistakes, then put it to bed and get ready for the next game.
"We did that today. It's always important for coaches to own it as much as players and the second half just wasn't good enough. We got some really good excuses. We had a bunch of people hurt, but truly nobody cares. The truth is, we got our butt kicked in the second half."
At the end of the half Brown, trailing 17-10, had four cracks at scoring and was stopped, bypassing a chance at a field goal that could have given them something going into the locker room.
"It was right there and there were two major plays in the game. We should have scored on second and third down before the half … and we should have scored on fourth down. We didn't score a touchdown that would have got it to 17-17," Brown said.
"Then, we got them into a fourth-and-5 and there was a clear holding call that they didn't call while Johnson scrambled around and made a play. Two plays later, they scored. After that, we laid an egg for the entire second half offensively.
"Touchdown, we get a holding call and it's a different game. I'm not saying we win because I don't know if we are good enough. But they played really well and we played poorly."
So what was his message to the team, and to the media?
"What you do is tell guys we got to sustain certain things for the rest of the year. We do that and we can be really good. If we play special teams like we did on Saturday against a really good special teams crew, man. We were really good, but no one wants to talk about that because we got our tails kicked," Brown said.
"Our run defense against the No. 1 run offense in the Big 12 and a Top Ten rushing offense in the nation and they got 112 yards. Our D-line in the run game really affected them. We played really well in the run game. We have to sustain that, but offensively we have to get some semblance of a pass game.
"That was awful. We have to be better in the pass game and defend the pass at a much better rate because if you give up passing yards like we did, no one needs to run. Right?"
Right he was.