Neal Brown stressed to his football team that it was never too late to start playing quality football.
It seems West Virginia heard the message loud and clear. A week after the Mountaineers essentially played a major role in beating themselves on the road at Kansas State, it was a much different effort in a 31-23 win against Texas that put the program on the cusp of bowl eligibility.
West Virginia had 87 snaps and didn’t turn the football over, while only being flagged for 19 penalty yards and converting on 12-20 third down attempts. The Mountaineers simply lined up and did the opposite of exactly what the program struggled with the week before.
“It was clean football and that’s the thing that was really disappointing to me a week ago. We just didn’t play clean football and Kansas State did. This was a clean football game by us,” Brown said.
Time was running thin for West Virginia to do that, but it’s something that Brown believed that his team possessed. The goal was to focus on the preparation leading into the game and the results will take care of themselves and to accomplish this the coaches ironed out a plan.
That meant determining expectations in all three phases and building on the confidence of the team.
“We really did things that allowed us to be successful,” he said.
The important piece in this is simply the fact that West Virginia responded after their backs were against the wall to push their record to 5-6 with one contest remaining. The Mountaineers had to find a way to win to keep alive their bowl hopes and they were able to do that while ending those for Texas.
“Keeps us alive for another week and puts extra meaning on that game when we travel to Lawrence next Saturday,” Brown said.
That’s an important game for obvious reasons when it comes to bowl eligibility but the challenge for West Virginia is going to be if they can repeat what they did on the field against Kansas. It seems easy enough, but consistency has been one of the biggest hurdles this team has failed to clear.
Simply playing good football will go a long way toward meeting that goal and that comes through consistency in all three phases. West Virginia took a step Saturday, but the work isn’t done.
“We know we have one more and the job’s not finished,” senior quarterback Jarret Doege said.
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