Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
A Strange Brew in Waco on Saturday Night
October 22, 2017 02:05 PM | Football
Ten or 20 years from now, nobody will remember most of the details of Saturday night's 38-36 victory at Baylor, other than probably the score.
But since today is only about 12 hours removed from the actual happenings out in Waco, Texas, a lot of it is still fresh in our minds.
Maybe.
In the 25-plus years I've been traveling to different places around the country to watch and cover college football, there is no place quite like Waco.
Anywhere.
It's the Area 51 of college football, hands down.
There is a uniqueness to State College, Pennsylvania, for sure, and Blacksburg, Virginia, can be pretty daunting at night when "Enter Sandman" gets revved up on the public-address system.
Miami, too, was once a very intimidating place, particularly when the Hurricanes played in the Orange Bowl. You knew you were in the soup from the moment you left the hotel to drive through some of the places you had to drive through to get there. Then, once inside the old horseshoe in Little Havana, those great Hurricane players always made things doubly intimidating.
But Baylor, well, there is nothing quite like it anywhere I've ever been.
The campus is pretty; the people are always smiling, welcoming and pleasant, and the new stadium is one of the nicest you will find anywhere - not terribly big or loud like the Swamp or Death Valley - but wonderfully-constructed with a fantastic view of the Brazos River and the campus.
The people there should be very proud of it.
When the sun is shining and the students are all sprawled out in the grass beyond the end zone in the open end of the stadium it looks more like a giant outdoor church picnic or a Billy Graham revival than a college football game.
Then the sun goes down and a lady with a sweet voice gets on the public-address system and all 45,000 people stand up in unison to bow their heads in prayer before the national anthem is played. You feel obliged to stand, too, bowing your head to pray right along with them, although you're not quite sure exactly for what you're praying.
Should we pray for ourselves, you wonder?
Moments later, the Baylor football team runs out onto the field below a giant metal contraption spewing flames more than 50 feet into the air!
Then the two teams start playing football.
If you've ever watched the movie Apocalypse Now, think the weird concert scene at night and that's about the best way to describe it.
Therefore, for the 1 percent of the country who got the game in low definition on the alternate Fox Sports channel last night, what they witnessed on their TV screen doesn't come close to helping them understand what transpired over the course of the 3:41 it took to play last night's football game.
Nearly all of it was inexplicable - the low-scoring first half, which West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen termed "weird," to the big lead the Mountaineers built in the third quarter, to the sudden switch in momentum, to the mysterious and bizarre bounces of the ball that nearly enabled Baylor to come back from 25 points down to tie the game in regulation.
When Holgorsen said the first half was weird he was only partly correct - the whole game was weird.
Once again, to draw any conclusions from what you saw on television, or a video clip posted on social media or a screen capture of a questionable call is really pointless. You simply had to be here to fully appreciate it. Just don't confuse appreciate with understand, however.
Afterward, following the opening remarks to his press conference, Holgorsen said he would take only a couple of questions.
What else could he say?
He came close to revealing his true feelings when he was asked about trying to contain freshman quarterback Charlie Brewer, who came into the game late in the third quarter and looked like the second coming of Doug Flutie.
"I don't think we did a very good job of containing, getting off blocks and holds and all that stuff," Holgorsen said.
His defensive coordinator, Tony Gibson, was equally at a loss for words. He was asked if he received an adequate explanation on the delay of game penalty called on his defense right before Brewer's touchdown pass to Trestan Ebner that pulled the Bears to within two points of tying the game with 17 seconds left.
"I have no idea. I'm not getting into that," Gibson said, before getting into it. After all, when you've seen Bigfoot, you've got to tell somebody, right?
"We stem our front and we've done it all the years I've been the coordinator and it's never, ever been called, so …" he said. "We make our move call to stem our front and we've done it for four years and we did it earlier in the game and it wasn't called. Then all of the sudden he makes the call."
Again, it's pointless to go through all of this in any greater detail. Most of what took place last night against a winless team playing at home for the first time in about a month on its homecoming has no bearing on what is going to happen next weekend against Oklahoma State, other than the fact that the Mountaineers remain in a four-way logjam for second place in the Big 12 standings behind 4-0 TCU.
Sure, West Virginia must figure out a way to run the football better.
That's probably the single-most pressing item that came out of Saturday night's game. When you can't effectively run the ball you can't control the game, and that's the biggest reason why things came so close to getting out of control in the fourth quarter.
WVU managed to run it just enough in the fourth quarter last week to salt away its 46-35 come-from-behind victory over Texas Tech.
Last night, WVU couldn't move the sticks when it needed to and that gave Brewer and Co. an opportunity to make things much more interesting than they should have been.
Keep in mind, the three conference teams West Virginia has defeated so far this year - Kansas, Texas Tech and Baylor - are probably going to wind up being the bottom three teams in the league when the dust is settled.
That means these five remaining games against Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas State, Texas and Oklahoma are all going to be extremely difficult, starting with the Cowboys next Saturday at noon in Morgantown on ABC.
Will Grier's right arm has been golden, and the wide receivers have been terrific, but eventually they are going to need some more help from the running game if the team wants to have the kind of season it is expecting.
Gibson's young and undermanned defense is simply not at a point yet when it can consistently bail out the team at the end of games, although it performed admirably in the fourth quarter against Texas Tech and last night Xavier Preston's effort to sack Brewer on the two-point conversion play was fantastic.
But leading up to that, the D gave up way too many yards, way too many fourth-down conversions and let way too many Baylor receivers get wide open.
So all things considered, West Virginia can count its blessings by achieving its first-ever victory in Waco, Texas, after being beaten there by scores of 73-42 in 2013 and 62-38 in 2015. It's a very difficult place in which to get a win. Just ask Oklahoma.
"It beats the hell out of the last two times we were here, I know that," Gibson concluded.
That's for sure.
But since today is only about 12 hours removed from the actual happenings out in Waco, Texas, a lot of it is still fresh in our minds.
Maybe.
In the 25-plus years I've been traveling to different places around the country to watch and cover college football, there is no place quite like Waco.
Anywhere.
It's the Area 51 of college football, hands down.
There is a uniqueness to State College, Pennsylvania, for sure, and Blacksburg, Virginia, can be pretty daunting at night when "Enter Sandman" gets revved up on the public-address system.
Miami, too, was once a very intimidating place, particularly when the Hurricanes played in the Orange Bowl. You knew you were in the soup from the moment you left the hotel to drive through some of the places you had to drive through to get there. Then, once inside the old horseshoe in Little Havana, those great Hurricane players always made things doubly intimidating.
But Baylor, well, there is nothing quite like it anywhere I've ever been.
The campus is pretty; the people are always smiling, welcoming and pleasant, and the new stadium is one of the nicest you will find anywhere - not terribly big or loud like the Swamp or Death Valley - but wonderfully-constructed with a fantastic view of the Brazos River and the campus.
The people there should be very proud of it.
When the sun is shining and the students are all sprawled out in the grass beyond the end zone in the open end of the stadium it looks more like a giant outdoor church picnic or a Billy Graham revival than a college football game.
Then the sun goes down and a lady with a sweet voice gets on the public-address system and all 45,000 people stand up in unison to bow their heads in prayer before the national anthem is played. You feel obliged to stand, too, bowing your head to pray right along with them, although you're not quite sure exactly for what you're praying.
Should we pray for ourselves, you wonder?
Moments later, the Baylor football team runs out onto the field below a giant metal contraption spewing flames more than 50 feet into the air!
Then the two teams start playing football.
If you've ever watched the movie Apocalypse Now, think the weird concert scene at night and that's about the best way to describe it.
Therefore, for the 1 percent of the country who got the game in low definition on the alternate Fox Sports channel last night, what they witnessed on their TV screen doesn't come close to helping them understand what transpired over the course of the 3:41 it took to play last night's football game.
Nearly all of it was inexplicable - the low-scoring first half, which West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen termed "weird," to the big lead the Mountaineers built in the third quarter, to the sudden switch in momentum, to the mysterious and bizarre bounces of the ball that nearly enabled Baylor to come back from 25 points down to tie the game in regulation.
When Holgorsen said the first half was weird he was only partly correct - the whole game was weird.
Once again, to draw any conclusions from what you saw on television, or a video clip posted on social media or a screen capture of a questionable call is really pointless. You simply had to be here to fully appreciate it. Just don't confuse appreciate with understand, however.
Afterward, following the opening remarks to his press conference, Holgorsen said he would take only a couple of questions.
What else could he say?
He came close to revealing his true feelings when he was asked about trying to contain freshman quarterback Charlie Brewer, who came into the game late in the third quarter and looked like the second coming of Doug Flutie.
"I don't think we did a very good job of containing, getting off blocks and holds and all that stuff," Holgorsen said.
His defensive coordinator, Tony Gibson, was equally at a loss for words. He was asked if he received an adequate explanation on the delay of game penalty called on his defense right before Brewer's touchdown pass to Trestan Ebner that pulled the Bears to within two points of tying the game with 17 seconds left.
"I have no idea. I'm not getting into that," Gibson said, before getting into it. After all, when you've seen Bigfoot, you've got to tell somebody, right?
"We stem our front and we've done it all the years I've been the coordinator and it's never, ever been called, so …" he said. "We make our move call to stem our front and we've done it for four years and we did it earlier in the game and it wasn't called. Then all of the sudden he makes the call."
Again, it's pointless to go through all of this in any greater detail. Most of what took place last night against a winless team playing at home for the first time in about a month on its homecoming has no bearing on what is going to happen next weekend against Oklahoma State, other than the fact that the Mountaineers remain in a four-way logjam for second place in the Big 12 standings behind 4-0 TCU.
Sure, West Virginia must figure out a way to run the football better.
That's probably the single-most pressing item that came out of Saturday night's game. When you can't effectively run the ball you can't control the game, and that's the biggest reason why things came so close to getting out of control in the fourth quarter.
WVU managed to run it just enough in the fourth quarter last week to salt away its 46-35 come-from-behind victory over Texas Tech.
Last night, WVU couldn't move the sticks when it needed to and that gave Brewer and Co. an opportunity to make things much more interesting than they should have been.
Keep in mind, the three conference teams West Virginia has defeated so far this year - Kansas, Texas Tech and Baylor - are probably going to wind up being the bottom three teams in the league when the dust is settled.
That means these five remaining games against Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas State, Texas and Oklahoma are all going to be extremely difficult, starting with the Cowboys next Saturday at noon in Morgantown on ABC.
Will Grier's right arm has been golden, and the wide receivers have been terrific, but eventually they are going to need some more help from the running game if the team wants to have the kind of season it is expecting.
Gibson's young and undermanned defense is simply not at a point yet when it can consistently bail out the team at the end of games, although it performed admirably in the fourth quarter against Texas Tech and last night Xavier Preston's effort to sack Brewer on the two-point conversion play was fantastic.
But leading up to that, the D gave up way too many yards, way too many fourth-down conversions and let way too many Baylor receivers get wide open.
So all things considered, West Virginia can count its blessings by achieving its first-ever victory in Waco, Texas, after being beaten there by scores of 73-42 in 2013 and 62-38 in 2015. It's a very difficult place in which to get a win. Just ask Oklahoma.
"It beats the hell out of the last two times we were here, I know that," Gibson concluded.
That's for sure.
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