West Virginia football's defense is not quite fixed

It was easy enough after West Virginia's road win against Cincinnati on November 9th to have a bit of hope for the team's defense.

The Mountaineers forced three turnovers that resulted in 17 points -- including two defensive touchdowns -- against the Bearcats in the first outing as defensive coordinator for Jeff Koonz, who assumed the mantle after the mid-season firing of former defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley. Sure, the Mountaineers were outgained by Cincinnati and gave up 436 total yard and 24 first downs. It was clear not everything was fixed. But it appeared the defense might finally have a bit more fight and grit than they had demonstrated earlier in the season.

But then reality came crashing down as West Virginia played host to Baylor last Saturday. The Bears' scored 35 first-half points behind a 12-for-12 start from quarterback Sawyer Robertson as they cruised to a 49-35 win. Baylor racked up 512 total yards of offense, 26 first down conversions, and went 8-for-13 on 3rd down in the win despite losing the time of possession battle. WVU was also unable to force a single turnover.

"We just weren't really executing in the first half, and, you know, we made some minor adjustments at halftime and kind of just had to take a step back and assess what happened in the first half," said WVU linebacker Reid Carrico, who paced WVU's otherwise poor defense with 16 tackles.

"I think it's give and take. They did some good stuff, and we did some bad stuff. I don't want to take anything away from Baylor, they executed sometimes and we didn't."

As Carrico said, some credit does need to be given to Baylor for their approach -- they were able to develop a plan of action and execute effectively.

"They played really well last week, so we knew the situation coming into it with them. But we had our plan coming into it," said Robertson. "We just stuck to our plan, and we executed, and we did what we were coached to do."

Bears' Head Coach Dave Aranda spoke at length after the game about the detailed plan his staff put together to try to outmaneuver a defense that was showing sparks of life under a new coordinator.

"Early in the year for us, we saw nothing but man coverage. This was when our passing game was failing to take off," Aranda said. "Here these last three weeks, it's been really nothing but off zone -- you know, the opposite."

"So going into this one, this last game, West Virginia played some man pressure and did all that, wasn't really anticipating that in the beginning. We were anticipating off coverage, soft coverage, and that's what we got. That was the reason for the 12 [completions] in a row -- they're called advantage throws, if there's a run but a guy's off or if it's a run and there's space, you take that advantage. A lot of it was that."

Once the Bears got going with their scoring via exploitation of WVU's soft coverage, Aranda said it was easy enough to get them to overcorrect and that is when the run game came into play -- the Bears earned the majority of their yards passing, but also added 183 yards on the ground.

"It gets to be tight coverage and it gets to be pressure, and that's where we were able to catch them with some of the runs, because there wasn't a second level, it's up on the safety," Aranda said. "And that whole thing adjusts as it goes."

So it appears in many ways, WVU's talent was out-executed and WVU's staff was out-coached, and those are two flaws that are extremely difficult to make up for. And while it genuinely doesn't seem to be for a lack of effort on the staff's part, both Koonz and WVU Head Coach Neal Brown seems to be running out of ideas for a way to fix the problems.

"They went five out a lot on us and got the ball out -- a couple big balls in the first half where we just didn't play the ball very well, man. And that's been an issue, that's been an issue all year. We've tried a bunch of different things, we've just not played very well back there," Brown said after the game about the pass defense in particular.

"It was not a good enough job by me to get them prepared in this game, is the bottom line," Koonz told the press on Monday.

So while it's clear the defense still has a lot of work left to be done, there isn't much time left. The season is already a disappointment to many at 5-5, and there are just two regular season games and hopefully a bowl game left. But the Mountaineers also can't just give up yet defensively -- and if they want to make the postseason, it's more important than ever they finally find a fix.

We've got to do a better job of getting our guys in the right positions and giving them a chance to consistently execute," Koonz said. "That's really where the fault was there at the beginning."