MORGANTOWN — The Texas Tech offense played to form Saturday afternoon. Much to the West Virginia football team’s chagrin, so did the Mountaineer defense. And the Mountaineer offense couldn’t make up for that.
The Red Raiders shredded WVU’s embattled defensive unit in the two teams’ regular season finale, rolling up 569 yards, while West Virginia’s offense had no answers for one of the nation’s worst defenses, in a 52-15 win over the Mountaineers at Jones AT&T Stadium. The Mountaineers have another game to play, as they already are bowl eligible, but they’ll go into that to-be-determined game following their most lopsided loss of the season.
The previous low point was a 27-point loss to Kansas State, a game riddled with WVU injuries. The Mountaineers (6-6, 5-4 Big 12) needed a pair of touchdowns with the game out of reach to finish Saturday with a 37-point deficit.
The finish was sealed by halftime, with WVU trailing 35-3 and unable to slow down Texas Tech’s (8-4, 6-3 Big 12) lightspeed, high-powered offense.
“We were just not good enough in the first half, guys,” WVU coach Neal Brown said after the game. “I thought our guys competed in the first half, but just all three phases in the first half were very poor.
“In winning time in the first half, we just did not compete,” he added.
West Virginia was able to bend, but not break defensively on the Red Raiders’ first two drives. TTU barreled into WVU’s red zone on those drives, but only got field goals out of them.
A career-long 52-yard field goal from Michael Hayes kept WVU in the hunt at that point, as the Mountaineers trailed just 6-3 after the first quarter. Yet after Texas Tech scored its first touchdown with 10:32 left in the second quarter, the touchdowns just kept coming.
The Red Raiders scored 29 second-quarter points. Three of the four touchdowns in that quarter were Tahj Brooks runs of 2, 37 and 2 yards, but quarterback Behren Morton was the engine of the offense. He finished the first half with 242 yards and a touchdown on 20-of-28 passing and a 1-yard touchdown to Mason Tharp.
Texas Tech scored three touchdowns in the final five minutes of the first half. Then it opened the second half with a nine-play, 75-yard touchdown drive, with Morton hitting Caleb Douglas for a 31-yard touchdown that made it 42-3.
After a solid game against UCF, WVU’s defense fell back into old, bad habits. The numbers told the same story as they had for most of the season. One of the worst pass defenses in the country gave up 359 yards through the air and 12.8 yards per completion to Texas Tech. One of the worst defenses in the country in opponents’ third-down conversions allowed the Red Raiders to convert nine of 12. The Mountaineers recorded a rare interception, but couldn’t come up with a sack.
And while West Virginia had been effective against the run much of this season, Brooks carved up the Mountaineers for 188 yards and three touchdowns on 23 carries. The 569 yards and 52 points were the most WVU allowed since giving up 644 yards and 59 points to Oklahoma last season.
“This is just a bad matchup,” Brown said. “I can get up here and talk about it for a while. They got us in space. We had several injuries in the game, too … that’s not an excuse, that’s just the truth. We had some injuries early in the second quarter and they’re just better than us in space. We missed a lot of tackles.”
Meanwhile, the Mountaineers had an opportunity against a Texas Tech defense that was statistically worse than theirs this year. Yet they couldn’t take advantage. Quarterback Garrett Greene threw for 265 yards and a touchdown, but also threw two interceptions. He also wasn’t able to connect on a fourth and 5 pass to Hudson Clement, throwing it a bit behind Clement with the receiver not able to reel it in.
WVU went 9 of 16 on third down and just 1 of 3 on fourth down and also gave up four sacks. Jahiem White rushed for 124 yards and a touchdown on 14 carries, but the Mountaineers made a bad defense look better.
“They had good answers for us on third downs with a lot of pressure looks that I didn’t get the O-line slid in the right direction,” Greene said.
Texas Tech entered Saturday’s game giving up 36.3 points per game. WVU couldn’t score half that, and Brown said the team knew it needed to score in order to compete.
“We didn’t have any illusions that this game was going to be won in the 20s,” Brown said. “We weren’t up for the task offensively. We knew we had to get into the upper 30s, low 40s in order to win. We just didn’t do that.”
Now the Mountaineers sit and wait for its postseason future. They’ll find out where their bowl destination will be on Dec. 8. Brown said the team will need some time to rest before it gets back to work and attempts to end the season with a win.
“The positive is that’s not going to be the end,” Brown said. “We have another game. We can always finish well in a bowl game. Our guys will bounce back.”
— Story by Derek Redd
