It wasn’t the worst day at the office, but it certainly wasn’t the best either.

West Virginia allowed 342 yards and only 20 points considering that one of the Oklahoma State touchdowns came directly off a turnover but it left some things to be desired. Tackling as a whole was much better with only six charted missed tackles in the game.

But it was the execution in key situations which ultimately was the undoing of the unit. The Mountaineers allowed several chunk plays on the ground simply because defenders were in the wrong gap and misfit run plays. That was the case on both of the Oklahoma State rushing touchdowns, including the 66-yard scamper by LD Brown for the first score of the game.

The Mountaineers purposefully played a light box to try to limit any explosive plays on the outside. The goal was to limit those shot plays to Tylan Wallace, the Biletnikoff talent out wide for the Cowboys. But that strategy presented some problems in several instances according to head coach Neal Brown.

“We played a little bit gap down sometimes in the box against them but where we got in trouble is our fitters were late a couple times and at least four occasions we got out of our gap,” Brown said.

With a true freshman quarterback in Shane Illingworth, the Cowboys tried to protect their signal caller with six and seven-man chip protections. That limited what the Mountaineers could do when it came to getting to the quarterback. Still defensive line coach Jordan Lesley dialed up a blitz on 15 of 26 total drop backs in the game in order to try to put pressure on the young quarterback.

“We didn’t do as much as we normally did and that was by design based on who was standing out there at receiver and based on what we were trying to do against the run with those certain fronts. It had to tie together,” Lesley said. “We knew once we got a beat on how they were going to protect us we could have twisted all day and I don’t know if it would have mattered.”

Those misfits in the run game were critical errors, but ones that ultimately Lesley points the finger back at himself and the rest of the coaching staff. In order to prevent those, the responsibility is on the coaching staff to find a way to get what you’re trying to do across to the players.

Communication is another aspect that has to improve to prevent those mistakes.

“Communication has to happen sideline to the field and the field to the guys that communicate the signal and formations to the players that aren’t necessarily responsible for seeing that formation,” he said. “It all works together.”

Still, the improvement in effort is something that the coaches can point to moving forward. But the Mountaineers will be challenged once again this weekend by a Baylor team with experience on that side of the ball and is expected to use tempo to keep the unit off balance.

The challenge will be for the Mountaineers to eliminate those miscues and take the next step.

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