Neal Brown knew well before the West Virginia Mountaineers arrived at Jones AT&T Stadium that the Texas Tech football team would be a problem for his team. The head coach just hoped his team’s offense would have enough firepower to keep up with the Red Raiders‘ speed.
Didn’t quite work out that way.
The Red Raiders (8-4, 6-3) scored on each of their first seven possessions of Saturday’s game, the last five all being touchdowns, and Texas Tech dominated the Mountaineers for a 52-15 thumping.
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Brown said the turning point for the Mountaineers was a missed fourth-down conversion in the first quarter when Hudson Clement couldn’t reel in the short pass from Garrett Greene.
“That would’ve been a big play,” Brown said. “I don’t know if we win, but it’s definitely not the ass-whooping it ended up being.”
Tech used that failed conversion to add a second Gino Garcia field goal, making it a 6-3 advantage the Red Raiders would stretch to 42-3 early in the third quarter.
West Virginia had no answers in slowing down the Texas Tech offense, which Brown knew was a likely scenario. Between a career game from Tahj Brooks (188 yards, three touchdowns) and Josh Kelly (nine catches, 150 yards), the Red Raiders amassed 569 yards of total offense, their second-highest output of the year.
“Defensively this is just a bad matchup,” Brown said. “I can get up here and talk about it for a while, but they got us in space and we had several injuries in the game. That’s not an excuse, that’s just the truth. … They were just better than us in space. We missed a lot of tackles. They got the ball out of their hands. We didn’t play as well up front as we have this year.”
Linebacker Trey Lathan didn’t argue with his coach’s assessment either.
“He’s exactly right,” Lathan said of Tech presenting a mismatch on offense. “They sped up on us, got us tired, took our d-line out of the game. Those quick, easy access throws and stacks, inside zones took us out of the game.”
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The end result was a humiliating loss for the Mountaineers that Brown said simply “wasn’t good enough.”
“Some of it is they’re just better than us in space,” Brown said. “We can coach them and we can encourage them, but there’s just some times when they get the ball in space, they’ve got some talented guys and that was going to be a struggle for us.
“We didn’t have any illusions that this was going to be a game that was going to be won in the 20s, but we weren’t up to the task offensively. We knew we were going to have to be up in the 30s or 40s to win and we just didn’t do that.”
