“We’re in a bad three game losing streak.” WVU quarterback Geno Smith, following Saturday’s 39-38 double-overtime loss to TCU.
That makes it official.
A single loss is a disappointment, an explainable event where coaches, players and fans can point to a few plays or an odd bounce of the ball. Even great teams lose occasionally. It’s just a momentary interruption of the inevitable path forward.
Good teams survive two consecutive losses. There is, after all, the quality of the opponents to consider. Goals, although somewhat lowered, remain within reach. Problems persist, but are correctable.
Three losses in a row move teams into a different category, as the 2012 West Virginia University Mountaineers are finding out. This is a streak, a series of losses that suggests deeper problems. The wording changes from “losing a game” to simply “losing.”
This is not the team that won nine games in row, including the extraordinary Orange Bowl. In fact, in a culture that demands immediate returns on investment of time and money, that victory over Clemson in Miami seems much farther off on the horizon.
Losing streaks are dangerous things in sports. They carry their own sense of inevitability. All streaks end, but that’s hard to see when you’re in the midst of one. It’s like searching for a port in heavy fog; you know it’s out there, but how do you find it?
In his postgame press conference, Coach Dana Holgorsen seemed stunned, sullen and agitated.
“It falls on me,” Holgorsen said, as he called his team’s offensive performance “totally unacceptable.”
While West Virginia’s much-maligned defense showed significant improvement (save the game-changing 94-yard touchdown pass from TCU’s Trevone Boykin to Josh Boyce), the offense was ineffective. With West Virginia ahead 24-14, the offense netted just 42 yards in its next six possessions.
“We had plenty of opportunities to win the game and failed to do so on all three sides of the ball, players and coaches included,” Holgorsen said.
High-level sports today are notoriously void of middle ground. There is no acceptable comfort zone where effort trumps outcome. Big time college football is, for better or worse, only a short distance from the professional ranks. Success is measured only in wins and losses as college programs compete in an ever-expanding arms race.
There are two ways to fall into the wake of irrelevance; refuse to be a part of the high risk, high reward competition or lose consistently.
West Virginia’s three-game skid is not a program changer. WVU’s entry into the Big 12 signals its commitment to be part of major college sports going forward. But it is a sobering reminder of how quickly a team’s fortunes can change when facing talented competition each week.
Coaches are, by nature, optimists. How else could they prepare if they did not believe in their ability to assert their will over an unpredictable game?
“(The) season’s not over,” Holgorsen said Saturday. “(We’ll) go back to work tomorrow just like every other team that loses… you go back to work.”
No doubt the coaches and players are working hard correct the problems. As they like to remind reporters and fans, no one hates losing more than they do.
Still, the losing streak looms, heavy and jagged. The weight of it seems greater because of the velocity and distance of the fall over the past month. The only way to alter the trajectory is, as Geno Smith said, “to win.”