Holgorsen Tired Of Hearing About Tech
WVU focused on stopping run, playing with energy
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MORGANTOWN -- Dana Holgorsen is tired of hearing about last week's second half collapse in No. 9 West Virginia's 42-34 victory over Texas Tech.
"It has been addressed, it's already been addressed," Holgorsen said during Tuesday's press conference. "I'm not going to keep harping on it. I don't think it's a reoccurring problem. It didn't happen in the other three games, so I don't think it's a reoccurring problem.
"They know it. We came in here on Sunday, and we watched the video. All you have to do is watch the video. The first half, it looks really good. The second half, it looks like crap. So, they know, and we have to go out, and we have to do better. I expect us to have a good week of practice just like we did last week and then go in to the game and have the mentality that we better play well, we better play hard, we better be excited about it if we want to beat Kanas, period."
And, if watching last week's film against the Red Raiders, all Holgorsen, who could tie the legendary Art 'Pappy' Lewis for No. 3 on the Mountaineers' all-time win list with a victory against the Jayhawks, then he could pull out last year's less-than-spectacular win over KU.
"I said this on the radio show to Tony (Caridi) last night," Holgorsen said. "If Mike (Montoro) brings that up to me, I throw him out of my office.
"Now, I couldn't throw Tony off the radio show last night, and I can't throw you out of the media room right now. But we would prefer to talk about the team aspect of everything. It's an honor to be here, period, and I'm sure, at some point, we'll look back at it and maybe throw a party about it or something like that, but right now, I do not care about that. I care about 5-0 and 3-0 in the Big 12, period."
And, that means beating a Jayhawks team which has never won in Morgantown, but brings with it a defensive unit which has eight players that have hauled in an interception in 2018.
"How many of those came from Rutgers?" the coach quipped. "They've played five games, they play a lot of people in the secondary, so they've defended a lot more passes than we have.
"What's our interceptions at? We had three last week, I was proud of that. They're doing a good job with their pass defense. Again, like I said, it's different than what Coach Bowen has done against us in the past. They're dropping more people. The games they won, it forced Rutgers and Central Michigan to be in a lot of passing situations to where they were throwing a lot of balls into drop eight, which we know from going against (defensive coordinator) (Tony) Gibby (Gibson) that it's hard to do."
One thing Gibson's group will have to do when the ball gets kicked off at noon is find a way to slow down KU's freshman running back Pooka Williams Jr., as well as Khalil Herbert, who rushed for 291 yards on 36 carries in last year's 56-34 loss.
"That whole game last year got our attention," Holgorsen said. "The young one (Williams) is really good, so we have to do a better job against the run against these guys. We relaxed a little bit in the third quarter against Kansas last year, and we had to hang on.
"We played a really good fourth quarter and put them away. But that definitely has our attention from a defensive perspective. From a team perspective, it goes along the same lines of what I can use from last week -- I don't care who you play, where you play, when you play, it's about how you play. If you don't play your best with great effort and great energy and have a great week of practice, then you're setting yourself up to get beat."
WVU's annual Homecoming game will be televised on ESPN2.