All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
15
6-6 , 5-4
52
Winner
8-4 , 6-3
6-6 , 5-4
15
52
Winner
| Team | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | F |
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3 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 |
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6 | 29 | 7 | 10 | 52 |
Game Recap: Football | | John Antonik
Senior Tahj Brooks rushed for 188 yards and three touchdowns in Texas Tech’s 52-15 victory over West Virginia today at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas.
Brooks, the Red Raiders’ all-time leading rusher, concluded the regular season having rushed for more than 100 yards in every game he’s played this year. Brooks’ afternoon ended on his 23rd carry with 5:57 remaining.
Quarterback Behren Morton completed 28 of his 41 pass attempts for 359 yards and two touchdowns before giving way to backup Will Hammond midway through the fourth quarter.
Josh Kelly’s nine catches for 150 yards counted toward Tech’s 568-yard total offensive performance.
“We just didn’t play too well,” West Virginia coach Neal Brown said. “The second half, we competed, but the first half wasn’t in character with our season, but just not good enough.”
The Red Raiders scored on all six of their first-half possessions to take a commanding 35-3 lead at intermission.
Brooks got into the end zone three times in the opening half on runs of 2, 37 and 2 yards. Tight end Mason Tharp, who nearly made a spectacular, one-handed touchdown catch on Tech’s opening possession of the game, caught a 1-yard touchdown pass and Gino Garcia booted field goals of 32 and 23 yards.
Sandwiched between those field goals was Michael Hayes II’s career-long 52-yard field goal with 3:47 left in the first quarter. That capped an eight-play, 41-yard drive that consumed 4:40 of the clock.
Both of Tech’s late touchdowns in the first half came in a span of just 1:43, and both followed West Virginia turnovers.
CJ Blankenship wrestled Garrett Greene’s pass out of the arms of Hudson Clement over the middle before the two fell to the ground at midfield. That set up Brooks’ 37-yard jaunt that included some poor open-field tackling by the Mountaineers.
The other also came via a Greene miscue, this time a fumble at the WVU 35.
Texas Tech (8-4 overall and 6-3 in Big 12 play) sacked Greene three times in the first half, continuing a recent trend for the Mountaineers. West Virginia allowed three sacks in last week’s home win against UCF and four a week prior in a home loss to Baylor.
Tech outscored West Virginia 29-0 and outgained the Mountaineers 232 to 40 in the second quarter alone.
And unfortunately for WVU, the third quarter was just a continuation of the second. It took the Red Raiders only 2:12 to return to the end zone with Morton completing the drive with a 31-yard touchdown pass to Caleb Douglas.
West Virginia’s answer was another empty possession that ended at the Red Raider 43 when Greene was hauled down 3 yards short of the marker on his fourth-and-8 scramble.
The Mountaineer defense finally got its first stop of the afternoon on Texas Tech’s eighth possession when safety Anthony Wilson Jr. intercepted Morton’s deep pass down the middle that was intended for Jalin Conyers at the WVU 10.
Here, West Virginia’s offense finally came to life.
WVU marched almost the length of the field in 12 plays, Greene completing passes of 3, 8, 16, 15 and 11 yards before hooking up with Rodney Gallagher III for a 15-yard score.
The two-point conversion pass to offensive tackle Wyatt Milum ended up short of the end zone, but the play wouldn’t have been good anyway because Milum was ruled an ineligible receiver.
That made the score 42-9, Red Raiders, and it remained that way at the conclusion of the third quarter.
Tech added three more on a 22-yard field goal from Garcia with 12:17 left. The Red Raider march got to the Mountaineer 3, but a false start penalty and an incomplete pass to the far sideline on third and goal required Garcia to kick his third field goal.
West Virginia tallied six more on White’s 21-yard touchdown run with 8:38 remaining. The sophomore also got 27 yards during the drive on a run that required more than half of the Red Raider defense to eventually bring him down at the Tech 48.
Green’s conversion pass intended for Justin Robinson fell incomplete, making the score 45-15, Texas Tech.
With mostly backups now in the game, Hammond scored his second rushing touchdown of the season from the 4 with 3:36 showing on the clock, ending an 11-play, 64-yard march.
West Virginia finished the afternoon with 405 yards, 265 of those coming through the air from Greene, while White had his second-best rushing performance of the year with 124 yards on 14 carries.
Running back CJ Donaldson Jr. led all WVU receivers with 73 yards and seven receptions.
With today’s loss, West Virginia concludes its regular season with a 6-6 overall record and a 5-4 mark in Big 12 play.
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