MORGANTOWN — West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen is no fan of fans storming the field.
Holgorsen voiced his displeasure with the fact thousands of Iowa State fans streaming onto the field at Jack Trice Stadium following the Cyclones 30-14 upset of the then-No. 6 Mountaineers on Saturday night.
“It was very unprofessional,” Holgorsen said during Monday’s Big 12 coaches teleconference. “Our job is to keep student-athletes in a safe place. When you’ve got thousands of people coming at you, it’s not easy. We didn’t have time to get them off the field. That’s not good.”
Holgorsen said that to his knowledge, no one was hurt in the mass celebration. But getting back to the locker room proved to be a hairy situation.
“It was dicey there for a while,” Holgorsen said. “We rushed the main guys off and the rest got off on their own. Luckily we got out of there [with no one getting hurt].”
Iowa State coach Matt Campbell avoided a war of words over whether the field-storming was “unprofessional,” but said that his staff did the best it could to make sure no one was hurt.
“I really thought that our administration handled it very well,” Campbell said. “Instead of celebrating, a couple of our staff made sure the West Virginia team got off the field safely.”
There is no concrete Big 12 policy against rushing the field or basketball courts, though each incident can be reviewed at the commissioner’s discretion. In January, Texas Tech was fined $25,000 when fans stormed the court against West Virginia and Mountaineers player Wesley Harris slugged one of them.
The picture is far clearer in the SEC. The league office fined LSU $100,000 on Monday for its second field-storming since 2014. The Tigers upset No. 2 Georgia 36-16 on Saturday.
No passing the buck
There was a more practical way for Holgorsen to avoid the problem of getting his players off the field on Saturday – by not letting Iowa State win in the first place.
Holgorsen said everyone will be held accountable after West Virginia gained just 152 yards against the Cyclones, which was the program’s lowest offensive output since 1995.
“I didn’t have them ready to go,” Holgorsen said.
He also defended quarterback Will Grier’s performance. Grier finished 11 of 15 for 115 yards with a touchdown and an interception while taking seven sacks, some of which could have been avoided by throwing the ball away.
“It’s not fair to point the finger 100 percent at him,” Holgorsen said. “The expectations nationally can be unrealistic at times. We need to do a better job blocking up front. A better job running the ball. We have to do a much better job running routes and getting open. We have to do better here.”
West Virginia is off this week before hosting Baylor next Thursday night.
Another week, another Big 12 coordinator change
The Big 12 has witnessed two mid-season coordinator changes this year. Oklahoma fired defensive coordinator Mike Stoops following a 48-45 loss to Texas, and Kansas followed suit by axing offensive coordinator Doug Meacham during its open week. The Jayhawks haven’t played since their 38-22 loss to West Virginia.
Kansas head coach David Beaty will call his own plays the rest of the way.
“Ideally you would never want to make a change at this time of season,” Beaty said. “I asked myself two questions to get to this point: ‘Are we putting our players in the right position to succeed?’ The other was, ‘Have we made the progress we’re capable of?’
The answers led me to clearly make the decision I made.”
Beaty said the biggest issue was that Kansas leads the nation in takeaways, but has only produced 35 points off of those 15 turnovers on which the defense didn’t score by itself.
What, Mike worry?
You might think Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy is down in the dumps after the Cowboys have fallen out of the Big 12 race with three losses in four games. Not so.
“I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had in my life as a football coach,” Gundy said of this season. “I just have a good time being myself. I don’t see changing myself for anyone else.”
Though the Cowboys were unimpressive in a 31-12 loss at Kansas State, Gundy said it didn’t appear anyone on his team was giving up.
“In the fourth quarter I started watching for guys that might not be playing hard and didn’t find any,” Gundy said. “We’ve been very lucky. Our team is not as good as we were at this time last year and that’s obvious, but our players are giving us really good effort.”
