West Virginia football closes strong, a good sign for the future
West Virginia could have easily packed things up early.
Sitting at 4-7 with a bowl game out of reach, the Mountaineers were on the road against a TCU team that was fighting to keep their season alive.
It had already been a long year for a number of reasons due to a mounting list of injuries and departures from the program mixed with some growing pains under a new head coach.
It’s for all of those reasons that the way this football team finished things gives a lot of momentum not only for this off-season, but the future of the program under Neal Brown.
The Mountaineers out-lasted the Horned Frogs 20-17 for their second consecutive road win to close the year. It wasn’t pretty for large stretches of time but they did what good teams do in these situations, they found a way to win. With only 244 offensive yards, the program turned a pair of turnovers into 10 points on the scoreboard and held the TCU offense out of the end zone in the second half.
On his most difficult day to date as the West Virginia quarterback Jarret Doege battled through three interceptions to place a perfect ball in the right corner of the end zone to Isaiah Esdale for a 35-yard go-ahead score in the waning moments. The defense followed that up with not one, but two different stops to close the door on any potential comeback attempt.
It was complementary football at its finest, a concept that hasn’t meshed for much of the year.
“It’s big for us in this first year for the stability of our program,” Brown said.
It certainly isn’t the type of year that’s going to earn any parades down High Street, but for the future of the program it could be a strong indication of what could come. That’s because while 22 seniors will be exiting, the bulk of this football team is going to return not only for next year but the following one.
The foundation for what Brown wants this program to be occurred in this first season and with how this football team switched gears and closed down the stretch winning two of three and being firmly in the Oklahoma State game until late in the fourth quarter.
“I think we played some of our best football the last three games, I think it’s some big momentum heading into next season,” said Doege, who will have two years left.
The fight was something that needed to be seen and this team was able to show it in bunches.
“All of those first year players are going to turn into second year players and those second year players will turn into third year players,” Brown said. “We’re not going to repeat those same mistakes. We’ll have more experience and we were able to overcome it today.”
It’s one thing to ask outsiders to trust the climb, it’s another to show the rewards for those that do. That’s what the Mountaineers did and in the process validated the plan that Brown and his coaches have in place not only this year but in the future. To put it simply, winning cures a lot of ills.
“It’s big for our fans as well. It’s going to be huge for recruiting,” Brown said. “Got a lot to sell with facility upgrades and a lot of young guys playing.”
He isn’t wrong. West Virginia will now be loaded not only with a coaching staff that genuinely connects with recruits, but now results to show for it. This team could point to being only a few pieces away from taking that next step and that could play well with prospects.
Still, trusting the climb has become a lot easier with the differences in how this team has looked down the stretch and that’s something that makes year one a special one.
“Trust the climb, man. And it will definitely be something big in the future,” Esdale said.
WATCH: Musings from the Mountains | West Virginia Mountaineers | Episode 47
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