West Virginia will be back home for the first time in almost a month and the Mountaineers are hoping to play much better than the last time they took the field in Morgantown.
The Mountaineers have lost consecutive home games in a 28-16 loss to Iowa State and then a 45-18 defeat to Kansas State to fall to 3-4 on the season at the time.
Since that point the program has won consecutive games sandwiched between a bye week by knocking off Arizona 31-26 and Cincinnati 31-24 to put West Virginia on the plus side of .500 with three games remaining.
Those three games are going to decide the fate of the season and having two at home is critical for the program to attempt to close the year on the right note according to head coach Neal Brown.
“It’s going to be almost three, four weeks since we’ve played at home. A much better football team than the last time we walked off the field a beat-up group versus Kansas State,” Brown said.
West Virginia has found success away from home with the team feeding off the energy from the crowd as well as simply the focus required in those situations. Overall, the Mountaineers are 3-0 in the Big 12 away from Morgantown and are just 1-2 at home in the league.
“Just being locked in on going on the road. It’s hard to go on the road and win,” defensive lineman Fatorma Mulbah said. “So just being locked in and knowing that you’re going to enemy territory and trying to be 1-0. I love playing road games.”
But the trick is for the Mountaineers to bottle up that same energy at home and translate that onto the product that the program is putting out on the field.
“Just have that same energy on the sideline,” Mulbah said.
One way to find success is for West Virginia to do a better job of eliminating distractions, even those that aren’t necessarily negative such as dealing with people coming to town and the things that surround a game when you play at home. It also doesn’t help matters that the Mountaineers have played a pair of ranked teams in their past two home games compared to the road wins.
“We're glad that we got two games in a row at home. And our plan is to put a much better product on the field than it was last time we were out there,” Brown said.
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