Saturday’s West Virginia-Texas Tech game had all of the makings of a barnburner.

 

Tech was bringing college football’s third-best offense to Morgantown, the Red Raiders having scored 50 or more points in a game five times, including twice in conference losses to TCU and Oklahoma State.

 

Tech was averaging 603.7 yards per game - of which 413 per game of those coming from the arm of dynamic sophomore quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

 

Texas Tech running back DeAndre Washington was averaging 103.6 yards per game on the ground and wide receiver Jakeem Grant has been one of the most explosive playmakers in the Big 12, averaging 189.6 all-purpose yards per outing.

 

Compounding matters, West Virginia has been having a miserable time of late stopping people and defensive coordinator Tony Gibson was running out of duct tape to hold together a defense that gave up nearly a mile’s worth of yardage in back-to-back blowout losses to Baylor and TCU.

 

Gibson is already without all-league safety Karl Joseph for the rest of the season and senior corner Terrell Chestnut has been battling a bad shoulder for more than a month now. The other three starters in the secondary were getting worn down, too.

 

In fact, Gibson was forced to use third-teamers and backup linebackers in the secondary to finish the TCU game.

 

He was noticeably down afterward and he looked like he needed a blood transfusion on Tuesday when he met with reporters prior to the Texas Tech game.

 

Turns out he was playing a little possum.

 

“(The last two weeks) were frustrating, but I was never like that around our kids,” he said following West Virginia’s 31-26 victory over Texas Tech on Saturday. “I told them, ‘I’ve been feeding the media all week - feel sorry for us and poor us’ but deep down inside I knew our kids were going to come out and play.”

 

Boy, did they ever.

 

Mahomes had a pretty decent day on Saturday, passing for 196 yards and three touchdowns and running 18 times for 73 yards, and Washington was also fairly effective rushing the ball with 102 yards on 21 carries, but those figures were a mere fraction of what these guys usually get against defenses.

 

Mahomes torched TCU’s secondary for 392 yards and two touchdowns, he lit up Baylor for 415 yards and three scores and he threw for 480 yards and four touchdowns against Oklahoma State – three pretty good football teams, by the way.

 

Washington, too, has been pretty impressive against those guys, rushing for 188 yards and four touchdowns against TCU and carrying the ball 22 times for 95 yards and a score against Oklahoma State.

 

Well, put two check marks next to the West Virginia defense for keeping a close eye on those two guys, and place a giant check next to KJ Dillon’s name for the way he handled Jakeem Grant in the slot.

 

Grant, who got 126 yards and a touchdown against TCU, 166 yards and two touchdowns against Iowa State and 178 yards and a TD against Oklahoma State, got almost nothing against Dillon.

 

He finished the afternoon with five catches for a paltry eight yards. That bears repeating – eight yards.

 

“We worked really hard on double covering him and taking away the underneath routes and all those things,” said Gibson. “I thought KJ Dillon played really well on him. When that kid has eight yards we win.”

 

In retrospect, Gibson’s guys also played pretty well against Mahomes, especially when he left the pocket to try and make plays downfield. He was able to get yardage with his feet but was unable to hit the home-run play downfield with his arm.

 

“We forced him to run a few times,” said Gibson. “We were aggressive early and what I wanted them to do was slow down, see where he’s coming out and then explode through.

 

“We were exploding through as soon as he would flash and then he would just cut away from us and we couldn’t change direction fast enough,” Gibson continued. “We adjusted a little bit to that and I thought we kept responding.”

 

Actually, everyone Gibson put out there on Saturday kept responding.

 

It might be the second-best performance for Gibson’s defense at WVU; the best, of course, coming in last year’s 41-27 victory over fourth-ranked Baylor.

 

And it took a little possum with the media from their coach to get them to play that way.

 

“It was extra motivation for our kids because everybody was talking about a shoot-out and what they were going to do to us,” he said. “I played all of that up.”

 

Hmm. By the way, Gibby, did you see what the Texas offense did to Kansas on Saturday?

 

How are your guys going to be able to stop that?