MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Believe it or not, the secret formula for West Virginia to upset touchdown-favorite Oklahoma State this Saturday and remain in the Big 12 Championship game hunt might have been delivered out in Kansas City yesterday.
 
And it came from one of all-time winningest coaches in NCAA history, Bob Huggins.

That's right, men's basketball coach Bob Huggins.
 
The assembled media there asked Huggs a relatively benign question about rules changes and how that was going to affect his full-court pressure defense that has been so successful the last three years. He answered it with a story about a team he once coached at Walsh College that lost because the other team shot 52 free throws.
 
The next day his dad, a highly successful high school basketball coach, called him and asked what happened.
 
"They shot 52 free throws, that's what happened," Huggins said.
 
"Well, you didn't do a very good job then," his dad answered.
 
"What was I supposed to do? I didn't foul 'em," Huggins said.
 
"You know," his dad replied, "there is a game within the game."
 
Playing the game within the game is exactly what West Virginia didn't do during last Saturday's chaotic, last-second, 38-36 victory at Baylor.
 
A couple of seemingly insignificant decisions late in the third quarter when the Mountaineers had things well in hand ultimately triggered the avalanche of points Baylor scored in the fourth quarter.
 
It happened right after Kennedy McKoy ripped off West Virginia's best run of the night, a 20-yard burst up the middle that was one tackler away from being a touchdown.
 
The Mountaineers had a first and 10 at the 42, the clock was moving and West Virginia was bleeding the Bears to death. On first down, quarterback Will Grier completed a screen pass to Ka'Raun White for no gain, making it second and long.
 
The clock was still moving, so no problem.
 
Second down, Grier called another pass and again it was incomplete to Marcus Simms running a vertical down the far sideline. What Grier saw was the right look and the proper read but at the wrong time. The clock stopped with the incomplete pass and West Virginia was now facing a third and long at the 42.
 
The Mountaineers' third play was another throw, a quick slant to Ka'Raun White into double coverage that was broken up by the Baylor secondary. The clock stopped; WVU was forced to punt and Baylor got the football back with time left in the third quarter and an entire fourth quarter with which to work.
 
Offensive coordinator Jake Spavital admitted Tuesday that he would have liked to have taken a mulligan on that series of plays.
 
"There is a lot of give and take with Will," he said. "I give Will a lot of freedom where he can throw the ball and check to certain looks where when you're up 25 points like we were during the last drive of the third quarter we hit Kennedy McKoy on the 20-yard run and I wanted to emphasize the run a little bit more and hand it back to Kennedy.
 
"But Will got it on the perimeter a couple of times - which there is nothing wrong with what Will is doing - he just needs to be more aware of the situation and I need to communicate that more clearly to him to run a little more clock there."
 
It's hard to fault Grier in that situation because three of the five touchdown passes he threw to help build West Virginia's big 25-point lead came on run calls he checked into passes, according Spavital.
 
But the game within the game at that point dictated possessing the football, and protecting the defense becomes far more valuable to the team than taking another shot down the field to try and make the score 45-13.
 
The defense, which played tremendously for three quarters by holding the Bears to just six yards rushing, was soon put in a position of drinking water out of a fire hose.
 
A quick touchdown to begin the fourth quarter, and then an onside kick that turned into another touchdown got the ball rolling for Baylor.
 
It only stopped rolling when Xavier Preston sacked Charlie Brewer on his two-point conversion pass to try and tie the game with 17 seconds left.
 
"We played as good as we can play for three quarters and then in the fourth quarter we got gassed because we had to defend 36 snaps," defensive coordinator Tony Gibson explained. "When you defend 36 snaps in one quarter you are going to give up yards and points. Nobody in the country can defend that many snaps and shut people out."
 
The fourth quarter for West Virginia saw the Mountaineers run only eight plays before taking a knee to end the game, six of those being runs netting just 18 yards.
 
By this time, with momentum completely shifted to the other sideline, just about everything West Virginia had done so successfully before had become a fading memory.
 
Since the TCU game, coach Dana Holgorsen has been preaching about the need to run the football more consistently, not only as a means of taking some pressure off of the passing game, but also to help Gibson's defense a little bit.
 
When you can run the football you can control the clock, and when you can control the clock and keep the ball you have a better opportunity to control games.
 
And anybody with a resting heart rate lower than 80 knows these last two wins against Texas Tech and Baylor have been far from being under control.
 
"When we get into a rhythm, I think the running game pops more; that's just how we are," Spavital said. "We hit those big, explosive runs when we get those first downs and start moving the chains and getting them off-guard, but a lot of times, too, they're loading the box up and they're playing press-man. There is going to be an added hitter where you are telling the running back, hey, you've just got to make the free hitter miss."
 


Of course, that's on the running back to make the free defender miss, but it's also on the offensive line to help him get to the second level. Spavital said there are a combination of things that have to happen in order to get the running game back to where it was at the beginning of the season.
 
"I think there are times when the O-line does their jobs and the backs don't hit the hole and there are times when the O-line doesn't do their jobs and the backs have to make it work sometimes," he said.
 
It's clear this Saturday, with West Virginia facing one of the most explosive offenses in the country in Oklahoma State, that the fewer plays the defense must defend the better.
 
The recipe Texas had for slowing down the Cowboys last Saturday is not necessarily in Gibson's cookbook this weekend.
 
"That Texas has got some cats now," Gibson said. "Up front they're pretty good. They were able to do it with three down and have eight guys see the ball."
 
West Virginia uses three down, but they need to bring extra guys up in the box to help support the run. Texas was able to control Oklahoma State's run game without bringing extra defenders in the box, enabling it to play most of the game using a two-high safety look. That made it much tougher for quarterback Mason Rudolph to get his downfield passing game going.
 
"Guess what, we don't have two high safeties in our defense," Gibson said. "We play single high safety. I wish we did. They play a lot of cover two and we do that on third down, but we don't have two high safeties."
 
What Gibson sees when he puts on the Oklahoma State tape is an entirely different animal than anything his defense has faced so far this year.
 
That includes fourth-ranked TCU.
 
"Justice Hill can beat you. Obviously, everybody in the country knows what James Washington can do," he said. "The quarterback is really good and the guy that hurt us worse than all of them last year was (Jalen) McCleskey. So, pick your poison."
 
Or, better yet, limit your poison by controlling the game a little bit better and doing a better job of managing the game within the game.
 
In the meantime, it might not hurt to score a bunch of touchdowns while doing so.
 
Kickoff is set for noon and the game will be televised nationally on ABC (Joe Tessitore, Todd Blackledge and Holly Rowe).
 
It's also Mountaineer Week and a True Blue Game, presented by the West Virginia Lottery, with Mountaineer fans encouraged to wear blue to the stadium on Saturday afternoon. The WVU dance team and WVU cheerleaders will be handing out 60,000 blue shakers at the gates as you enter the stadium.
 
Be sure to stay in your seats at the end of the first quarter as West Virginia University is planning to recognize the 10th anniversary of the 2008 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl team. During the break, a gigapixel panoramic picture of the stadium will be taken by Blakeway Panorama and later fans will be able to tag themselves in the photo posted online.
 
The Mountaineer Sports Network from IMG's pregame coverage begins with the Go-Mart Mountaineer Tailgate show at 8:30 a.m. leading into regular game coverage with Tony Caridi, Dwight Wallace and Jed Drenning at 11 a.m. on stations throughout West Virginia, online through WVUsports.com as well as the popular mobile app TuneIn.
 
There are still tickets available and those can be purchased online through WVUGAME.com or by calling the Mountaineer Ticket Office toll-free at 1-800-WVU GAME.