Radio sideline reporter Jed Drenning provides periodic commentary on the Mountaineer football program forWVUsports.com. Be sure to follow him on Twitter @TheSignalCaller.
It was a clear afternoon in the middle of October.
The temperature was in the 70s when the WVU team charter landed for the first time ever at Preston Smith International Airport just north of Lubbock. After stepping off the plane four years ago and crossing the tarmac toward the row of waiting buses, a number of players and support staff stopped to soak in the West Texas horizon. I was among them, smartphone in hand, snapping pictures like all the rest.
“What are y’all looking at?” a member of the ground crew asked, his curious gaze fixed toward the skyline. “There’s nothing out there.”
I don’t remember who replied, but the answer was spot on.
“Where we come from, ‘nothing’ is something you never see.”
True enough. Lubbock might be 2,300 feet higher than Morgantown from a sea-level perspective, but standing on that air strip you’d never guess it. While West Virginia is a varied land of peaks and valleys, Lubbock is a 140-year-old frontier town nestled neatly on the southern end of the High Plains and in the center of the South Plains. As a general rule, when you use the word “Plains” multiple times to describe a city you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you find its outskirts occupied by tumbleweed, cotton and cattle ranches.
Texas Tech is the Big 12’s westernmost, isolated outpost – perched farther from Ames, Iowa (925 miles) than even Morgantown is (871 miles) and located nearly three hours closer to Roswell, New Mexico than to Fort Worth and Austin, Texas, or Norman, Oklahoma. Recent history suggests it’s a formidable road trip for any team in the conference, regardless of pedigree or ranking. Quite simply, the Red Raiders drag you deep into the desert then unleash pass-happy hell.
Don’t let the perfectly manicured flower gardens you see as you traverse campus or the Spanish Renaissance architecture of Jones AT&T Stadium deceive you. What’s waiting inside the gates of that building is one of college football’s more underrated trials by fire.
When you step out of the visitor’s locker room you immediately encounter the Texas Rangers, standing sentry in their Cattleman-style cowboy hats. If you’re lucky enough you might even spot one with customized pistol grips on the Springfield .45 peeking out of the holster on their hips like the one I saw in 2014. Very cool.
You make your way past the Rangers and down the incline toward the field. A red glow fills the corridor as the sunlight filters through the translucent Texas Tech tarp stretched overhead. It has the aura of a Halloween haunted house entrance more than a locker room exit. At some point during the final 20 or so paces to the southeast corner of the playing surface you might, if only for a second or two, feel like you’re descending into that classic scene from “High Plains Drifter” in which Clint Eastwood’s character orders every building in town painted blood red.
What’s waiting for you outside is almost as unique. You emerge from the passageway to 55-to-60 thousand fans signaling “guns up” as they serenade you with the “Raider Power” chant. It was in this corner of the field back in 2012 that I ducked for cover during pregame when an empty, 55-gallon trash can was suddenly blown over my head like a Dixie cup by a gust of wind that came from nowhere. At Jones Stadium, it seems, even Mother Nature is out to collect the bounty on visitors.
Somewhere nearby, you’re sure to spot The Masked Rider, adorned in all black but for a scarlet cape blowing in that same wind, sitting atop a black horse. It’s a mascot that Texas Tech proudly boasts was the nation’s first to ride on horseback – long before Florida State’s Chief Osceola and Renegade and a quarter century before USC’s Traveler.
And then of course the infamous flour tortillas take wing. Spinning, sailing, gliding.
“That’s the biggest thing I remember,” WVU linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton said of his first trip to Tech two years ago. “As soon as they kicked off, tortillas went flying everywhere.”
Technically, the tortillas are banned from the building. Security staff actually check for them at the gates, especially at the student entrance. Despite the contraband status of these flatbread favorites, however, the sidelines are littered with them. They’re smuggled inside – one, two, three at a time -- to come hurtling toward the field from the hands of rebellious students, or just as often from the alumni section. Some rules, after all, are just begging to be broken.
This frenzied environment, coupled with Texas Tech’s perpetual ability to light up the scoreboard like a town hall Christmas tree, fosters a harrowing, all-hands-on-deck reality when opposing teams take the field at Jones Stadium.
The meat grinder that the unbeaten 2012 Mountaineers ran into is hardly the only example of a visiting team getting ambushed in Lubbock in recent years. TCU was No. 7 in the country it visited Texas Tech last September, but the Frogs needed a miraculous, tipped-pass-touchdown in the final seconds to survive a 55-52 shootout. Until beating TTU in 2012, the Oklahoma Sooners had lost three straight in Lubbock; and before the annual Texas Tech-Baylor match-up was moved to a neutral site in 2010, the Bears had gone 20 years since their last road win over the Red Raiders.
The first challenge you face against Tech is trying to corral QB Patrick Mahomes II and an offense that, by an absurdly wide margin, leads the nation with 544 passing yards per game – 163 more than Washington State.
Last year in Morgantown, the West Virginia defense leveraged the football and Tony Gibson used a slick blend of zone coverage and well-timed pressure packages to keep Texas Tech off balance. The tactic was effective as the Mountaineers limited the Red Raiders to what has proven to be their lowest point total (26) in their last 21 games and the lowest total yardage (378) in their last 25 games while becoming the first defense since 2011 to hold Tech to less than 200 yards passing.
“Pick your poison. If you blitz him and he catches you in it, he has one-on-one matchups,” said Gibson. “Last year . . . we were probably 60-40, dropping out and 40 percent of the time we brought some kind of pressure.”
It worked.
Throw in the coach’s tape from last season and jump to a key sequence in the second quarter to see West Virginia’s defensive plan at its best when TTU faced a critical fourth down and six at the West Virginia 24-yard line. Operating from the shotgun, the Red Raiders offered trips open with three receivers to the wide side right and a single receiver to the boundary left. After dropping eight men into coverage on the previous play, Gibson went for broke on fourth down. WVU crept out of a disguise into a cover zero pressure package. Six defenders were sent with their crosshairs on Mahomes while the remaining five Mountaineers were locked up in man-to-man coverage.
Mahomes recognized the blitz before the snap and checked into a jailbreak screen to the trips side of the formation. It’s a good call against a cover zero blitz – agreat call, in fact. But that’s the funny thing about cover zero pressure packages . . . they create the kind of disorder that can sometimes turn a great call into a chaotic cage match.
On paper, these zero blitzes look like suicide. A sharp, offensive play caller can easily jump on the grease board and show you how to beat them with something quick and clever. But – on the actual field of play -- strange things often happen on the way to those quick and clever solutions.
In part that’s because nothing devised on a grease board can project how a quarterback -- even an elite quarterback like Mahomes – might react to unblocked defenders bearing down on him at high velocity. On a grease board you don’t see the flared nostrils or bulging eyes of a pass rusher. You don’t hear the crack of the pads as a blitzing linebacker overwhelms an undersized scat back and sends him tumbling at your feet.
A cover zero pressure package intensifies everything on both sides of the ball, especially behind center. If a quarterback’s footwork is a few inches off, or if it takes him half a beat longer to secure the threads on the football, the issue is abruptly in his face. His margin for error evaporates in a blur and his escape hatch is slammed shut. Any of a thousand tiny mistakes can derail him.
In the case of this particular fourth-down play, the blitz directly affected the outcome. Mahomes took the snap and shuffled quickly to his left. When he pivoted back around to make the wide throw to his right, three Mountaineers were in his face, preventing him from following through in his motion. The pressure junked up Mahomes’ mechanics, making him throw off of his back foot and consequently forcing the football to sail incomplete over the head of Keke Coutee, the intended target on the screen.
Unfortunately for the West Virginia defense, the success it enjoyed against Texas Tech last year doesn’t translate into a single stop this year – especially not in Lubbock. The Red Raiders have scored 50-plus points in each of their last nine games at Jones Stadium while averaging a preposterous 668 yards per contest in that stretch. Yikes.
But for all the challenges the West Virginia defense confronts this week, the game could indeed turn on the execution of the Mountaineer offense. The pressure to match the Red Raiders score for score can be extreme. When the defense does steal a possession, giving the offense an opportunity to change the tide of the game, it’s imperative that West Virginia makes the most of those chances.
Two years ago in Lubbock, when WVU fell behind by 14 points, Dana Holgorsen’s offense sharpened its focus and exerted its will. The Mountaineers averaged 5.8 yards per rush in the fourth quarter while Clint Trickett threw for 117 yards in the final 11 minutes, enabling West Virginia to score on each of its final three possessions (2 TDs, 1 FG) in a 37-34 thriller.
In last season’s win in Morgantown, the Red Raiders drove 81 yards to cut the WVU lead to five points on Mahomes’ TD pass with 6:47 left to play. That was the last time Texas Tech touched the football.
The Mountaineer offensive line took control. Tyler Orlosky and Co. helped WVU engineer a 16-play drive that included three third-down conversions, chewing up the final 407 seconds of the game and snuffing out any last threat of a Texas Tech comeback.
Fourth-quarter situations like those detailed above don’t happen by chance. They were the direct result of a worn-down Red Raiders front seven that had been pummeled for three quarters by a West Virginia running game that produced not one but two 100-yard rushers (Rushel Shell III and Wendell Smallwood) in each of the above mentioned match-ups.
Explosive offenses like Texas Tech’s and West Virginia’s feature a host of shiny objects that draw our focus to names like Pat Mahomes, Jonathan Giles, Skyler Howardand Shelton Gibson. But football games are still won and lost by big men with rolled up sleeves.
The window dressing in a showdown like this one might be different, with two of the nation’s Top 15 passing leaders (Mahomes and Howard) and a pair of up-tempo brand names like Holgorsen and Kliff Kingsbury pulling the strings. However, the formula for success is the same - win the war of attrition at the line of scrimmage and you can dictate tempo, punching the gas when you want while easing up at just the right intervals to accommodate your own defense – a unit that will be trying to contain a Texas Tech attack averaging 85 snaps per game.
“If we want to run the ball 60 times a game and keep them off the field, then by all means that’s what we’ll do,” Holgorsen said.
“You don’t know what you’re going to have to do until you’re in the game and you figure it out, and that’s what you have to be able to do. That’s why I like being balanced because we have the ability to do both.”
Last year West Virginia was licking its wounds from four straight losses when it tangled with the Red Raiders. This time around, Holgorsen’s Mountaineers have won five in a row and are ranked in the top 20 in both major polls while boasting the best record in the Big 12 Conference over the last 10 games.
The league race is more wide open than at any point since WVU entered in 2012. Ultimately, the team that wins that race will reflect on big moments
in games like this one.
On a clear afternoon in the middle of October.
I'll see you at the 50.
It was a clear afternoon in the middle of October.
The temperature was in the 70s when the WVU team charter landed for the first time ever at Preston Smith International Airport just north of Lubbock. After stepping off the plane four years ago and crossing the tarmac toward the row of waiting buses, a number of players and support staff stopped to soak in the West Texas horizon. I was among them, smartphone in hand, snapping pictures like all the rest.
“What are y’all looking at?” a member of the ground crew asked, his curious gaze fixed toward the skyline. “There’s nothing out there.”
I don’t remember who replied, but the answer was spot on.
“Where we come from, ‘nothing’ is something you never see.”
True enough. Lubbock might be 2,300 feet higher than Morgantown from a sea-level perspective, but standing on that air strip you’d never guess it. While West Virginia is a varied land of peaks and valleys, Lubbock is a 140-year-old frontier town nestled neatly on the southern end of the High Plains and in the center of the South Plains. As a general rule, when you use the word “Plains” multiple times to describe a city you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you find its outskirts occupied by tumbleweed, cotton and cattle ranches.
Texas Tech is the Big 12’s westernmost, isolated outpost – perched farther from Ames, Iowa (925 miles) than even Morgantown is (871 miles) and located nearly three hours closer to Roswell, New Mexico than to Fort Worth and Austin, Texas, or Norman, Oklahoma. Recent history suggests it’s a formidable road trip for any team in the conference, regardless of pedigree or ranking. Quite simply, the Red Raiders drag you deep into the desert then unleash pass-happy hell.
Don’t let the perfectly manicured flower gardens you see as you traverse campus or the Spanish Renaissance architecture of Jones AT&T Stadium deceive you. What’s waiting inside the gates of that building is one of college football’s more underrated trials by fire.
When you step out of the visitor’s locker room you immediately encounter the Texas Rangers, standing sentry in their Cattleman-style cowboy hats. If you’re lucky enough you might even spot one with customized pistol grips on the Springfield .45 peeking out of the holster on their hips like the one I saw in 2014. Very cool.
You make your way past the Rangers and down the incline toward the field. A red glow fills the corridor as the sunlight filters through the translucent Texas Tech tarp stretched overhead. It has the aura of a Halloween haunted house entrance more than a locker room exit. At some point during the final 20 or so paces to the southeast corner of the playing surface you might, if only for a second or two, feel like you’re descending into that classic scene from “High Plains Drifter” in which Clint Eastwood’s character orders every building in town painted blood red.
What’s waiting for you outside is almost as unique. You emerge from the passageway to 55-to-60 thousand fans signaling “guns up” as they serenade you with the “Raider Power” chant. It was in this corner of the field back in 2012 that I ducked for cover during pregame when an empty, 55-gallon trash can was suddenly blown over my head like a Dixie cup by a gust of wind that came from nowhere. At Jones Stadium, it seems, even Mother Nature is out to collect the bounty on visitors.
Somewhere nearby, you’re sure to spot The Masked Rider, adorned in all black but for a scarlet cape blowing in that same wind, sitting atop a black horse. It’s a mascot that Texas Tech proudly boasts was the nation’s first to ride on horseback – long before Florida State’s Chief Osceola and Renegade and a quarter century before USC’s Traveler.
And then of course the infamous flour tortillas take wing. Spinning, sailing, gliding.
“That’s the biggest thing I remember,” WVU linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton said of his first trip to Tech two years ago. “As soon as they kicked off, tortillas went flying everywhere.”
Technically, the tortillas are banned from the building. Security staff actually check for them at the gates, especially at the student entrance. Despite the contraband status of these flatbread favorites, however, the sidelines are littered with them. They’re smuggled inside – one, two, three at a time -- to come hurtling toward the field from the hands of rebellious students, or just as often from the alumni section. Some rules, after all, are just begging to be broken.
This frenzied environment, coupled with Texas Tech’s perpetual ability to light up the scoreboard like a town hall Christmas tree, fosters a harrowing, all-hands-on-deck reality when opposing teams take the field at Jones Stadium.
The meat grinder that the unbeaten 2012 Mountaineers ran into is hardly the only example of a visiting team getting ambushed in Lubbock in recent years. TCU was No. 7 in the country it visited Texas Tech last September, but the Frogs needed a miraculous, tipped-pass-touchdown in the final seconds to survive a 55-52 shootout. Until beating TTU in 2012, the Oklahoma Sooners had lost three straight in Lubbock; and before the annual Texas Tech-Baylor match-up was moved to a neutral site in 2010, the Bears had gone 20 years since their last road win over the Red Raiders.
The first challenge you face against Tech is trying to corral QB Patrick Mahomes II and an offense that, by an absurdly wide margin, leads the nation with 544 passing yards per game – 163 more than Washington State.
Last year in Morgantown, the West Virginia defense leveraged the football and Tony Gibson used a slick blend of zone coverage and well-timed pressure packages to keep Texas Tech off balance. The tactic was effective as the Mountaineers limited the Red Raiders to what has proven to be their lowest point total (26) in their last 21 games and the lowest total yardage (378) in their last 25 games while becoming the first defense since 2011 to hold Tech to less than 200 yards passing.
“Pick your poison. If you blitz him and he catches you in it, he has one-on-one matchups,” said Gibson. “Last year . . . we were probably 60-40, dropping out and 40 percent of the time we brought some kind of pressure.”
It worked.
Throw in the coach’s tape from last season and jump to a key sequence in the second quarter to see West Virginia’s defensive plan at its best when TTU faced a critical fourth down and six at the West Virginia 24-yard line. Operating from the shotgun, the Red Raiders offered trips open with three receivers to the wide side right and a single receiver to the boundary left. After dropping eight men into coverage on the previous play, Gibson went for broke on fourth down. WVU crept out of a disguise into a cover zero pressure package. Six defenders were sent with their crosshairs on Mahomes while the remaining five Mountaineers were locked up in man-to-man coverage.
Mahomes recognized the blitz before the snap and checked into a jailbreak screen to the trips side of the formation. It’s a good call against a cover zero blitz – agreat call, in fact. But that’s the funny thing about cover zero pressure packages . . . they create the kind of disorder that can sometimes turn a great call into a chaotic cage match.
On paper, these zero blitzes look like suicide. A sharp, offensive play caller can easily jump on the grease board and show you how to beat them with something quick and clever. But – on the actual field of play -- strange things often happen on the way to those quick and clever solutions.
In part that’s because nothing devised on a grease board can project how a quarterback -- even an elite quarterback like Mahomes – might react to unblocked defenders bearing down on him at high velocity. On a grease board you don’t see the flared nostrils or bulging eyes of a pass rusher. You don’t hear the crack of the pads as a blitzing linebacker overwhelms an undersized scat back and sends him tumbling at your feet.
A cover zero pressure package intensifies everything on both sides of the ball, especially behind center. If a quarterback’s footwork is a few inches off, or if it takes him half a beat longer to secure the threads on the football, the issue is abruptly in his face. His margin for error evaporates in a blur and his escape hatch is slammed shut. Any of a thousand tiny mistakes can derail him.
In the case of this particular fourth-down play, the blitz directly affected the outcome. Mahomes took the snap and shuffled quickly to his left. When he pivoted back around to make the wide throw to his right, three Mountaineers were in his face, preventing him from following through in his motion. The pressure junked up Mahomes’ mechanics, making him throw off of his back foot and consequently forcing the football to sail incomplete over the head of Keke Coutee, the intended target on the screen.
Unfortunately for the West Virginia defense, the success it enjoyed against Texas Tech last year doesn’t translate into a single stop this year – especially not in Lubbock. The Red Raiders have scored 50-plus points in each of their last nine games at Jones Stadium while averaging a preposterous 668 yards per contest in that stretch. Yikes.
But for all the challenges the West Virginia defense confronts this week, the game could indeed turn on the execution of the Mountaineer offense. The pressure to match the Red Raiders score for score can be extreme. When the defense does steal a possession, giving the offense an opportunity to change the tide of the game, it’s imperative that West Virginia makes the most of those chances.
Two years ago in Lubbock, when WVU fell behind by 14 points, Dana Holgorsen’s offense sharpened its focus and exerted its will. The Mountaineers averaged 5.8 yards per rush in the fourth quarter while Clint Trickett threw for 117 yards in the final 11 minutes, enabling West Virginia to score on each of its final three possessions (2 TDs, 1 FG) in a 37-34 thriller.
In last season’s win in Morgantown, the Red Raiders drove 81 yards to cut the WVU lead to five points on Mahomes’ TD pass with 6:47 left to play. That was the last time Texas Tech touched the football.
The Mountaineer offensive line took control. Tyler Orlosky and Co. helped WVU engineer a 16-play drive that included three third-down conversions, chewing up the final 407 seconds of the game and snuffing out any last threat of a Texas Tech comeback.
Fourth-quarter situations like those detailed above don’t happen by chance. They were the direct result of a worn-down Red Raiders front seven that had been pummeled for three quarters by a West Virginia running game that produced not one but two 100-yard rushers (Rushel Shell III and Wendell Smallwood) in each of the above mentioned match-ups.
Explosive offenses like Texas Tech’s and West Virginia’s feature a host of shiny objects that draw our focus to names like Pat Mahomes, Jonathan Giles, Skyler Howardand Shelton Gibson. But football games are still won and lost by big men with rolled up sleeves.
The window dressing in a showdown like this one might be different, with two of the nation’s Top 15 passing leaders (Mahomes and Howard) and a pair of up-tempo brand names like Holgorsen and Kliff Kingsbury pulling the strings. However, the formula for success is the same - win the war of attrition at the line of scrimmage and you can dictate tempo, punching the gas when you want while easing up at just the right intervals to accommodate your own defense – a unit that will be trying to contain a Texas Tech attack averaging 85 snaps per game.
“If we want to run the ball 60 times a game and keep them off the field, then by all means that’s what we’ll do,” Holgorsen said.
“You don’t know what you’re going to have to do until you’re in the game and you figure it out, and that’s what you have to be able to do. That’s why I like being balanced because we have the ability to do both.”
Last year West Virginia was licking its wounds from four straight losses when it tangled with the Red Raiders. This time around, Holgorsen’s Mountaineers have won five in a row and are ranked in the top 20 in both major polls while boasting the best record in the Big 12 Conference over the last 10 games.
The league race is more wide open than at any point since WVU entered in 2012. Ultimately, the team that wins that race will reflect on big moments
in games like this one.
On a clear afternoon in the middle of October.
I'll see you at the 50.
