West Virginia has a problem.

A problem with dropping the football. Through five games the Mountaineers have dropped 18 passes at the wide receiver position many of which have effective killed rhythm or ended drives altogether.

Never was that more on display against Texas Tech when there were at least seven drops.

“Our drops hurt us again,” head coach Neal Brown said.

It was something that reared its head on the first drive of the game, as quarterback Jarret Doege delivered a ball on-time across the middle to Sean Ryan on what would have been a big chunk of yards. Instead the ball clanked off his hands and fell harmlessly to the turf.

“I don’t really have anything to say about the drops. I just tell them I’m coming right back to them and I love them up. I had my fair share of missed reads so that’s like a drop for me. I have to clean up some things before I talk about other people,” quarterback Jarret Doege said.

Almost every wide receiver that was thrown a pass was a victim. It’s an obvious problem and one that Brown, and the rest of the Mountaineers coaches are certainly aware of. But the question now becomes, how do you go about fixing it?

“Disappointing. I’m not happy, you can probably tell that. That’s where we’re at,” Brown said.

West Virginia has put the wide receivers in game-like situations in practice to help simulate what they would be seeing. The result was one of the better catch percentages that the group has had during a game week in the two years since Brown has taken over in Morgantown.

But for whatever reason, it did not translate on Saturday. Concentration was again an issue as the Mountaineers struggled to corral the ball on routine or difficult plays.

“We work a lot on it a lot after practice, before practice, after meetings, and before meetings. It’s the little things, not having your hands at the right point of the brick, losing your eyes, just the little things, but I think we’ll bounce back,” sophomore Winston Wright said.

You can point to certain culprits, but this issue has been up and down the roster at the position with players taking turns not holding onto the football. Brown admits that if he had an answer spring loaded, it would have already been taken care of before it got to this point.

Now, the challenge becomes figuring out exactly what the answer is.

“We’re going to have to go and evaluate it,” he said. “It’s an issue.”

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