WVU loses third straight, falls to No. 2 Baylor
WACO, Texas – West Virginia quickly responded to the first and last scores by second-ranked Baylor.
The Mountaineers couldn’t keep up with Corey Coleman in between and lost their third game in a row.
“The best player in college football,” coach Dana Holgorsen said. “You can put me on record for that.”
Coleman caught three more touchdowns to break the single-season school record, and Baylor got a measure of revenge with a 62-38 victory Saturday. West Virginia was the only team to beat the Bears in the regular season last year before they were the first team left out of the inaugural College Football Playoff.
Shelton Gibson had a tying 70-yard catch-and-run touchdown on West Virginia’s third play after Baylor took a 7-0 lead on Seth Russell’s 16-yard TD run less than a minute in on the game’s fourth play.
The Mountaineers (0-3 Big 12, 3-3) never caught up again after Coleman’s 2-yard TD catch on the next drive made it 14-7 and matched Kendall Wright’s school record 14.
“Against a team like Baylor, if you’re not scoring every time, then there’s a chance that they could turn out that way,” said Skyler Howard, who finished 18 of 37 for 289 yards with four touchdowns.
Gibson added a 100-yard kickoff return with 1:05 left, right after Baylor (3-0, 6-0) surpassed 60 points for the fifth game in a row on backup quarterback Jarrett Stidham’s 9-yard TD pass to tight end Trevor Clemons-Valdez.
The Bears won their FBS-best 19th consecutive home game.
“Really good win against really the only Big 12 team that we don’t have a winning record against since 2011,” coach Art Briles said. “That’s a big deal for us as a program. We felt a lot of desire, a lot of need to clear our name. We didn’t feel like we had a good name in West Virginia, so that was kind of our motivating factor.”
West Virginia was coming off an overtime loss at home against 16th-ranked Oklahoma State.
“Another hard-fought loss. Won’t back down and keep fighting,” Holgorsen said. “It’s the best Baylor team I’ve ever seen.”
Russell became the only Baylor quarterback other than Robert Griffin III in 2011 to throw for 300 yards and run for 100 in the same game. Russell was 20 of 33 for 380 yards and five TD passes, and ran 14 times for 160 yards with another score.
Coleman’s nation-leading 16 TD catches have come halfway through the regular season. And Russell’s FBS-best 27 TD passes are well within reach the school record 37 by RG3 in 2011.
With 10 catches for 199 yards, Coleman had his fourth consecutive game with multiple touchdowns and his seventh in a row with at least 100 yards receiving. The 5-foot-11 junior had catch-and-run plays of 50 and 42 yards without scoring.
Howard had a perfectly-thrown ball to David Stills for a 35-yard TD midway through the third quarter, getting West Virginia within 34-24. But Russell then threw TD passes of 36 and 52 yards to Jay Lee in a span of just over 4 minutes.
“There’s a lot of people that put pressure on him,” Holgorsen said of Howard, who is from Fort Worth, Texas, less than 100 miles from the Waco campus. “He’s not going to listen, he’s not going to quit fighting. I’m proud of him for his attitude, his work ethic.”