Box Score MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Will Grier sure knows how to throw touchdown passes. The Heisman Trophy contender tossed five of them this afternoon in leading 12^th-ranked West Virginia to a 35-6 victory over Kansas State today at Milan Puskar Stadium.
 
It's the fifth time in 14 career games at WVU that Grier has thrown five TD passes or more in a single contest.
 
Today, he hooked up three times with David Sills V in the end zone, all of them 1-yard tosses, and he also fired a couple of long ones to Marcus Simms and Tevin Bush covering distances of 82 and 68 yards respectively.
 
With the exception of two interceptions, one in the second half leading to a meaningless Blake Lynch 38-yard field goal, Grier played nearly a flawless game operating Jake Spavital's West Virginia offense.
 
Lynch also booted a 25-yarder earlier in the quarter.
 
"The scary thing is you make a lot of mistakes and when you can beat a team like Kansas State, 35-6, that might mean we are on the verge of some big things here," West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen said afterward.
 
Last year, K-State played games with its defenders, moving the linebackers up to the line of scrimmage right before the ball was snapped on called runs or bailing the corners on pass plays, and it gave Grier some problems.
 
Today, it was Grier giving the Wildcats fits. He completed 25 of 35 pass attempts for 356 yards, 10 of those going to Sills V for 73 yards and five going to Simms for a season-high 136 yards.
 
Grier's final completion, an 18-yarder to Simms, came with six minutes remaining in the game, and he was soon replaced by backup Jack Allison.
 
Equally impressive was a Mountaineer defense that didn't allow K-State on the other side of the 50 in the first half and made a momentum-swinging play with 5 ½ minutes left in the second quarter when West Virginia was leading just 7-0.
 
Here, Kansas State (2-2) was faced with a fourth and inches at its own 43. Instead of running the ball up the middle, the Wildcats opted for an option pitch to tailback Alex Barnes, and he was thrown for a 4-yard loss by West Virginia's Dylan Tonkery.

"That was a key point," Holgorsen said. "Was it 7-0 at the time? (It was). We stopped them on fourth down, we scored, then we stopped them and then we had a two-minute drive down and scored again."
 
Seven plays after Tonkery's big play, three runs by Kennedy McKoy for 38 yards to the Kansas State, set up Grier's first 1-yard scoring toss to Sills V on a quick slant.
 
As Holgorsen mentioned, the defense got the football back into Grier's hands with 57 seconds left and it resting at the WVU 27.
 
At this point, Grier immediately went to work, completing four straight passes for 48 yards, taking it to the Wildcat 25 with the clocking winding down to 20 seconds. His next pass went for 23 yards to Sills V to the Wildcat 2, where he tried to put the ball across the pylon before he fell out of bounds.
 
A McKoy 1-yard run forced West Virginia to call timeout with six seconds left, setting up Grier's second short touchdown pass to Sills V and giving the Mountaineers a commanding 21-0 halftime lead.

That score wasn't without drama, however. WVU nearly ran out of time with the football resting at the Wildcat 1. Holgorsen bailed out the offense by running down and calling timeout before the play clock expired and the Mountaineers also experienced a high snap that nearly ended in disaster, but Grier was able to pick up the bounding ball and tried a pass to tight end Trevon Wesco that he dropped at the goal line.

On the next play, Grier flipped a fade to Sills V in the back corner of the end zone for the touchdown.

"I'd like to think we know how long it takes to execute a play," Holgorsen remarked. "It was either going to be caught for a touchdown or incomplete. (There was) probably going to be one second on the clock and I felt better when that thing went for six."

"I went into the locker room and accepted responsibility at halftime with our players because there were two touchdowns following that," Snyder said. "I can't coach a team that can't get six inches on a play."
 
Two more third quarter scores, one coming on a beautifully executed wheel route down the far sideline to Bush, turned it into a rare rout of Kansas State.
 
West Virginia (3-0) has won the last three times it has played the Wildcats, but both victories were by one and five points respectively and the 35 points scored today were the most the Mountaineers have put up against a Snyder-coached team.

"You have to take your hat off to West Virginia, they did a nice job against us," Snyder said.
 
After West Virginia expanded its lead to 35-3, the game turned into a penalty-plagued affair as both teams began using their backups.
 
West Virginia (3-0) also got a lift from McKoy, who led all rushers with 73 yards on just 12 attempts. The Mountaineers gained 108 yards on 28 attempts, with a good portion of that coming behind left tackle Yodny Cajuste.
 
Kansas State, meanwhile, had trouble sustaining drives all afternoon, and Snyder eventually switched to backup quarterback Alex Delton in the second half.

Starter Skyler Thompson completed 11 of 17 passes for 145 yards, but he struggled to decipher West Virginia's blitzes and multiple looks.
 
The Wildcats finished the game with 318 total yards, compared to West Virginia's 464.

"There are a lot of reasons why it could have been a far different ballgame, but that was on us - not them," Snyder said.

Today also marked the first time the Mountaineer defense held an opponent without a touchdown since keeping Iowa State out of the end zone in a 30-6 win on Nov. 28, 2015. That came a week after WVU posted a 49-0 win at Kansas.

"The key to beating a team like Kansas State is you've got to play together and our team is learning how to play together," Holgorsen noted.

An announced crowd of 59,245 watched today's game.
 
The Mountaineers are back on the road to play at Texas Tech next Saturday.

Postgame Sound