The season certainly hasn’t gone to plan for West Virginia.
The Mountaineers now sit at 3-4 on the season after back-to-back home losses to ranked teams in Iowa State and Kansas State to leave the season at a crossroads with a trip out west to Arizona on deck and then a bye week after that.
West Virginia struggled massively in the second half of the 45-18 loss to Kansas State over the weekend and a beat up football team now has to try to regroup in a hurry before hitting the road to the west coast against another team that has had their own struggles in Arizona.
But despite the struggles to date, West Virginia understands that there is still opportunity for this team to finish the season strong starting with this coming weekend.
“Do I believe we’ll have an issue getting them back up to play? No, that’s never been the case, and I don’t believe it’s the case now. We have really good character and good buy in, and we just didn’t play very well,” Brown said.
Senior offensive lineman Ja’Quay Hubbard said that while nobody in the locker room is happy with the current situation this team finds themselves, there are still a lot of positive vibes in the locker room given the fact that there is so much experience across the board.
This isn’t where anybody expected to be at this stage, but it’s more important for ever to focus as if it's the beginning of the season and prepare each game as if it’s their first. Execution and effort will be critical moving forward for West Virginia to turn this around.
“Being accountable and looking at things we need to work on,” Hubbard said.
This team has shown the ability to turn things around in the past and will now need to do it again.
“Pretty simply nobody is happy where we’re at right now. A lot of positive vibes in our locker room. We still love each other and we work hard,” Hubbard said. “If one opportunity doesn’t go our way we’re not going to tuck our tails. We’re looking to get a win and put the last two games behind us.
That starts with each player looking in the mirror and discovering what has gone wrong and what has gone right through the first seven games and then building from there. This is a close knit team and being able to overcome adversity on the football field is difficult, but certainly not impossible.
That makes relying on the leadership in each room paramount moving forward. And it makes things easier with the fact that the closeness of this team means that there aren’t any of those people that could cause issues like the Mountaineers have dealt with in the past. Hubbard has referred to them as “energy vampires,” but this group is void of those types of attitudes.
“Leadership is huge right now. We have a lot of great leaders. Every position room has at least one player. Lean on the older guys and take the challenge ahead,” Hubbard said.
Players also have to take ownership of what went wrong before by watching film and understand what went wrong on certain plays, correcting what happened and then ensuring it isn't repeated.
"After its fixed you have to keep it fixed this is all about don’t make the same mistake twice," linebacker Reid Carrico said.
West Virginia and Arizona will meet in a game of two teams that haven’t met preseason expectations but it presents a golden opportunity for either to try to turn their years around. That’s if one of them can take advantage of it and Hubbard is hoping that it’s them.
“We’re clearly not where we want to be. We feel we’re way more talented than our record and we know we are,” Hubbard said.
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