MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — With West Virginia’s running game in shambles, the offensive line struggling in pass protection and quarterback Austin Kendall having an uneasy performance, coach Neal Brown elected to kick a potential game-tying field goal with less than four minutes to go Thursday at Baylor.
On 4th and 2 from the 26-yard line, out trotted Casey Legg, who stepped in for an injured Evan Staley. It was Legg’s first career attempt, and as he lined up for the kick, the play clock was winding down. With all three timeouts, Brown did not call one as the clock hit 0 — a delay of game that pushed the attempt back from 43 yards to 48.
As the whistles blew, Legg kicked it anyway, and the ball split the uprights with plenty to spare. But asking a young kicker to do the same, five yards deeper on the road against a top 12 team, is asking a lot.
On Legg’s next attempt, Baylor’s Bravvion Roy pushed right through the line and blocked the kick, ultimately ending in a 3-point 17-14 loss for WVU, and ending what could have been Brown’s signature moment in his early tenure at West Virginia (3-5, 1-4 Big 12).
Instead, it was his biggest gaffe by not calling a timeout before the delay of game.
“That’s my fault,” Brown said. “We have people in charge of looking at the clock, but that’s my fault. I’m sitting here worried about how we’re going to use our timeouts and how we’re going to kickoff, and I didn’t see the clock. That’s on me. Bottom line, I’m the head coach. My fault.”
The Mountaineers were able to stop Baylor of the Bears’ next possession, but there were less than 50 seconds remaining and WVU ran out of time to get back within field goal range.
Defensive gem
The consensus by the West Virginia defense was that it played its best game of the season — Baylor (8-0, 5-0) averaged 39 points per game coming in and scored just 17. The Mountaineers also held the Bears 75 yards below their season average in yards per game (453).
Still, the effort came in a loss, and that’s something junior defensive lineman Darius Stills can’t shake.
“When you invest this much into this football game, it hurts a lot,” said Stills, who did his part with 10 tackles, including three sacks. “People should have seen the faces in the locker room — we work so hard and we just came up short.”
WVU finished with eight sacks, the most it’s had in a game since 2011 against Pitt, when the Mountaineers got to Tino Sunseri 10 times. Stills’ brother, Dante, had two sacks, while the other three were by Dylan Tonkery, Tykee Smith and Sean Mahone.
Dante got hurt late in the game, which forced shuffling across the board. In the first half, after finally getting the secondary healthy with the return of cornerback Keith Washington, safety Josh Norwood was ejected for targeting for the second time this season. True freshman Kerry Martin played admirably in Norwood’s place at free safety.
Tonkery slid over to “bandit” linebacker from “Mike” with Quondarius Qualls out with an injury. Shea Campbell started at Mike to replace Tonkery, while Exree Loe started at the other linebacker spot with Josh Chandler missing his first game since suffering a knee injury at Oklahoma on Oct. 19.
“It gets kind of crazy seeing guys out of their normal positions,” Darius said. “But us as a defense, coach Brown always emphasizes the next man standing no matter what the situation is.”
Putting together an entire game is something the defense wanted to do all season but couldn’t. Thursday’s game was finally the night it all clicked.
“We’ve shown drives, quarters, halves where we’ve been on top the world, and we’ve also had drives, quarters and halves where we’ve been on the bottom,” defensive end Reese Donahue said. “It’s all about coming together and playing for an hour like that instead of a drive or quarter, whatever. There’s no doubt that we’ve shown what we can do, so now it’s about stacking together, stringing games and practices, and continuing to do it by being consistent.”
