WVU came into the home game against Kansas with a 5-4 record, and had just given a 12th ranked Texas Tech team all they could handle the week before racking up 48 points in process. I wrote following that game that this season was starting to feel like a season of “what ifs.”
What if DJ Epps hadn’t fumbled on that final drive against Iowa State?
What if our defense showed up against Oklahoma State?
What if our defense hadn’t given up 24 points in the first half against Texas Tech?
There was good reason
to look back at the majority of our losses and think that we were just a few key plays or defensive stops from being 7-2 maybe 8-1 if your optimistic.
A loss like today’s 37-14 beat down from Kansas can challenge any optimistic view of past games and forces you to look at them through a different lens. I would still say this is a season of “what ifs” but instead of looking at losses that could have been wins, I’m looking at the wins now and how close we came to losses.
What if Prince Strachan doesn’t make the circus catch against Cincinnati?
What if we don’t get the strip sack against TCU?
We are a few key plays and lucky breaks away from being 3-6 overall and winless in the Big 12 in Rich Rod’s 2nd year.
As weird and frustrating as this season has been, the offense at least gave us hope. The car was smoking bad and making a lot of weird noises, but the offense was the engine that kept it moving forward event though it wasn’t pretty. Even that failed us today. We only rushed for 35 yards today. Total. All game. Nothing looked good on either side of the ball for the vast majority of the game. Seeing both sides of the ball play so poorly against a 3-6 Kansas team feels like we just saw the wheels fall off the car in real time.
So here we are still at 5 wins. Bowl eligibility is now unlikely. We will be underdogs to both Houston and Utah in our final 2 games. Is it possible that we win 1 or both of these games? Yes. It’s much more likely that we lose both of them, and this means we would be looking at a 5-7 record and no bowl game in Rich Rod’s 2nd year.
I’m not going to go anymore into the future than that right now. We all know what this means and how it looks. We will have plenty of time to discuss this in the offseason. Let’s see how the team finishes the season. Are they going to quit on Rich? Will we start seeing players make “business decisions”? Was the offense just have a bad game or will this continue for the rest of the season?
