Kansas St. hands WVU second straight loss
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MORGANTOWN -- Remember back there in those dog days of August, when the sun was beating down on you as you tried to hit a 3-wood off a barren fairway screaming for water.
Remember it was 94 or 95 or 98 degrees. Not that day. Every day.
Remember how you would get to the 19th hole, had them pour you a cold beer, and you and your foursome sat there and talked about how you couldn't wait for fall to come.
Fall. A break from the heat.
And Mountaineer football.
You remember how excited you were thinking about sitting in the stands at Milan Puskar Stadium watching Garrett Greene run and throw the football; watching Jahiem White run around tackles and CJ Donaldson run over them.
Remember how you smiled when you saw the "Garrett Greene for Heisman Trophy" posts on social media and how you were figuring just how high tackle Wyatt Milum would go in the draft. Remember how Neal Brown was talking about going to Dallas to play in the Big 12 championship game and how you began researching hotel rooms and airfare.
Well, maybe come Monday morning, you might want to call Delta Airlines and cancel those reservations you made, thinking fine, I'll just put the money away and save it for March when you could go see the Mountaineers in the Final Four.
Do you realize now that it's just a never-ending cycle of frustration?
After all, that WVU football team that went into this season with such high hopes, now stands at 3-4 and it has the blood of a dismal 45-18 loss to No. 17 Kansas State on Saturday all over it. With there being no mercy rule in football, the game ended with the Wildcats showing some mercy as they took a knee with the ball a half yard away from the end zone, allowing WVU to avoid putting a 52-18 loss in their record book.
Not that this was a surprise. After all, Kansas State is a ranked team and now, in the rapidly deteriorating Neal Brown era of WVU football, they now stand 3-17 against ranked teams.
His fan base has tired of the regularity with which they are losing, as has he, but now he has to face the music again.
And he didn't do a real good job last week when they lost to No. 9 Iowa State he let his tongue slip over his eye teeth as he tried to offer up an explanation of his and the fans frustration.
"I get that they [the fans] want to win," Brown said. "But what I would say is -- did they have a good time? Did they enjoy it? It was a pretty good atmosphere. I'm assuming they had a pretty good time tailgating, so if they're in the deal for enjoyment then I would come back … We need 'em to provide a home-field advantage. We need 'em.
"I get they're frustrated that we didn't win," Brown continued. "We've played a tough schedule. Everybody that's beat us hasn't lost. But that's no excuse, that's just the truth, and the games in our league are going to come down to the fourth quarter, and I don't think this one on Saturday is going to be any different. We need 'em to help us."
That was not well accepted. And now, surely, it won't evaporate into cyberspace.
The thing is, in many ways, the Mountaineers did some of things they set out to do and the way the game played out could not ever have been foreseen. If Kansas State was going to beat WVU, they would do it running the ball as they entered the game averaging 261 yards per game to lead the conference and in DJ Giddens they had the nation's No. 4 rusher.
WVU stuffed him all night except for one breakaway 18-yard run.
What's more, if WVU was going to win the game, it would be running the ball but who expected them to rush the way they did against the second stingiest rush defense in the nation giving up 71 yards a game?
So WVU rushed for 151 yards and, amazingly, they did it despite the fact that Garrett Greene, the leading rusher at quarterback; Jahiem White, the leading rusher on the season, Wyatt Milum, the All-American tackle, all missed the second half of the game with injuries. They played not a play over the final 30 minutes.
"I don't think I ever coached a game and had so many injuries in the first half," Brown would say, noting that he had four players go out with head injuries. He was not sure yet the state of those injuries.
"It was a weird game," Brown went on, saying that he never would have imagined rushing for 151 yards while holding K-State to 114 yards that they would lose the game.
But that happened, as did the rash of injuries, to say nothing of being hit with another 60-yard touchdown pass down the seam for one early touchdown, just like in the Iowa State game, and Greene throwing an interception that would be run back for a touchdown.
But, in the end, it came down to the idea that they couldn't get a single yard on the goal line just before the half, throwing an incomplete pass rather than kicking a field goal with the score 17-10.
"We were going to be aggressive going in," Brown said. "They are a good team and knew we would have to score touchdowns to win. We felt we had a good play, a TD play but we didn't execute it."
As it was, with the injuries, it probably wouldn't have mattered, as Brown said.
"If we tie that up I'm not sure we got enough in the second half," he said, referring to the injuries. "They really took it to us. "They are the best team in the conference that I've seen."