MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Lunch has never witnessed such carefree parking as Saturday’s game at Kansas, where the ratio of fans to seats was a huge money-loser for Jayhawks athletics. This is not to deride the KU faithful for staying away, though, because expendable income and personal time are self-determined commodities, and after West Virginia put up seven touchdowns to the home team’s nil, methinks the no-shows felt justified.
West Virginia secured its first road win by the end of the first quarter, played darn near everyone who dressed and still registered the program’s first Big 12 shutout.
Concerning the guys on the short end, how about participation trophies for Jayhawks freshman Ryan Willis, whose number of pulled groins exactly matched his QB rating (2.0), and for linebacker Joe Dinee, who made 16 tackles in vain before lamenting that “on defense we’re supposed to be the firefighters and we didn’t put out the momentum today.”
Let’s take stock of how the Mountaineers played, something we do every Monday—even those Mondays after a bag-jamming guy broke the overhead bin on our flight out of K.C., which led to United calling maintenance, which led to missed connections, which led to a 10-hour layover. (Travel tip for Thanksgiving travelers: Be gentle with those overheads, lest you incur a plane full of impatient peers giving you the stink eye.)