COMMENTARY
FORT WORTH, Texas — In the town “Where the West Begins,” the Mountaineers were grateful to see October end.
During Thursday night’s 40-10 loss, a familiar road refrain repeated itself: West Virginia unable to match No. 5 TCU and unable to stop the month-long hemorrhaging. Through four losses against the Big 12’s top teams, the Mountaineers were outscored 179-98.
The fact these guys spent a week in the actual Top 25 stands as irrefutable proof that polls and coin flips are first cousins.
Wendell Smallwood reflected on the 33-day drought since West Virginia last won a football game: “I couldn’t have imagined this.” More candidly, he couldn’t have imagined putting up only 10 points against a vulnerable TCU defense that yielded 52 to Texas Tech, 45 at K-State and 37 to SMU.
“This one hurts me a lot,” the running back said. “I thought this was the one we could’ve had out of any of them. Teams just scoring on (TCU) and them barely getting away. We thought we were going to be the best offense they faced so far, but we didn’t come out and make it happen.”
Smallwood ran for 113 yards, yet West Virginia scored its third-fewest points of the Dana Holgorsen era because receivers squandered at least four huge-gainers on catchable deep balls—three of which would have gone for touchdowns. Jovon Durante had two potential scores in his grasp. A 51-yarder was knocked loose by a trailing cornerback, while another 55-yarder simply slipped through the freshman’s fingers.
Putting Skyler Howard’s 16-of-39 passing night in context: His receivers caught 160 yards’ worth of passes while dropping 191.
When Howard didn’t speak with the media, it marked the second time he hasn’t fielded questions after a loss. In this case, though, he was playing in his hometown and word was he rushed out to spend a few minutes with family members before the team bus departed. In the quarterback’s absence, Smallwood discussed Howard showing a moment’s agitation after Durante’s second drop.
“It’s frustrating because he believes in them guys, he believes in all the receivers,” Smallwood said. “But then going out there and having dropped balls, I think it started getting to him.”
Holgorsen added, “You’ve got to make those plays,” coming to the quarterback’s defense. But who will defend the coach now that West Virginia has lost seven of its last eight conference games? Nothing about that stretch typifies a program on the rise, and the frequent blowouts create concern of a backslide afoot. (At the risk of Holgorsen’s hot-seat debate hijacking this column, rewind momentarily to when he took over at West Virginia in 2011. Would Mountaineer Nation have been appeased by a five-year projection that shows West Virginia lagging this far behind Baylor and TCU?)
After TCU put up 616 yards and reeled off the game’s final 23 points, Holgorsen lamented: “We lost to a really good football team. I’m tired of saying it, but it’s true.”
It could have been his eulogy for all of October.
There aren’t any really good teams left on West Virginia’s schedule, which means the competition is precisely on West Virginia’s level.