Cummings and Goings: The WVSports.com: 3-2-1

1—Brown gets a signature win. West Virginia had been close, but unless you’re playing horseshoes or hand grenades almost doesn’t cut it in the win column. The Mountaineers had battled and show improvement for almost all of the games on the schedule but had lost five straight. Now the program was heading into a difficult environment on the road at Kansas State on the heels of the worst performance of the season against Texas Tech the week before. Well, football has a way of surprising and that certainly was the case here as West Virginia fought, fought and fought some more in a scrappy 24-20 win over the home-standing Wildcats to earn the first win over a ranked team in a calendar year.

If the Baylor game was the appetizer of what this team could accomplish in that narrow defeat, this was the main course as the Mountaineers overcame and recorded the first win since September. The Wildcats had won three of their last four and were playing their best football of the season, but none of that mattered as a young West Virginia team simply out-toughed and gutted out a road win.

All season Brown and his coaches have called for those inside and outside the program to ‘trust the climb’ and for the most part the general masses understood that year one was going to be difficult given what they lost in the off-season and the injuries on the roster. Still, this is a game that both the West Virginia fan base and Brown to a larger degree needed to help reinforce that while it’s a rebuilding phase, this football team isn’t going to quit and is going to be competitive in the Big 12 long term.