Oct 11, 2023 By Bob Hertzel for The Observer-Reporter newsroom@observer-Reporter.Com 4 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va – To date, West Virginia’s surprising football team has gotten the point as it jumped off to a 4-1 start.

Now the time has come for them to get the points.

Yes, that’s plural.

The Mountaineers, after missing a weekend of play to heal up from an extremely physical victory over TCU the last time out, is at Houston for a 7 p.m. game tonight that matches coach Neal Brown against his predecessor as WVU coach, Dana Holgorsen.

The Mountaineers are looking to increase their first four-game winning streak under Brown and their Big 12 record to 3-0, but to do so they are going to have to find a lost offense that will: a) control the football and keep it away from Holgorsen’s high-powered offense and b) put more points on the scoreboard than they have to date.

While the defense has been surprisingly strong, the Mountaineers have scored only 19 points per game against four Power-5 opponents and that doesn’t figure to get it done against a Houston team that averages 27.4 points per game, not as strong as normal for a Holgorsen offense but more than WVU has managed in any game.

What’s more, the scoring capability has been there in the passing game as they rank 26th in the nation in passing offense at 281 yards per game, a troubling figure with the Mountaineers unsure of the availability of safety Aubrey Burks.

How difficult has it been for WVU offensively? They rank 83rd in the NCAA in scoring despite laying 56 points on Duquesne. The problem clearly has existed in the passing game, where WVU averages only 155.6 yards per game, 120th out of 131 D-1 teams.

“We have to get better throwing the football,” Brown admitted at his weekly press conference. “For us to get where we want to go, our passing game has to improve and we believe it will.”

Where they want to be is balanced between passing and running. Last season, for example, WVU threw the ball 445 times and ran 425 times – the Mountaineers did have quarterback JT Daniels last season.

This season they have run 225 times and thrown 113.

There are reasons for that. The quarterback position has been unsettled with Garrett Greene’s ankle injury forcing Nicco Marchiol to play most of two games.

But neither has been efficient, the receivers have been inconsistent and the running game has been the lone dependable part of the offense … yet it hasn’t really produced the expected big plays from breaking tackles.

“The strength of our team right now is our offensive line,” Brown noted. “So the job is to win games. That’s what we’re doing. We’re playing to our strengths right now and playing defense and special teams at a high level.

“I’m not naive,” he continued. “We’re going to have to score more points to win games, and we need to do that starting Thursday.”

WVU figures to have a healthy Greene to throw the ball, but the receiving corps is not what was expected as two receivers, Cortez Braham and Jeremiah Aaron, left the team before the TCU win.

Brown would be expected to attempt some long pass plays against Houston to try and get some easy scores, although little has been easy in the passing game.

“We haven’t hit as many as we’d like,” Brown said. “We actually called quite a few against TCU. What you hope is – and sometimes hope is not the best strategy – you keep calling them with the intention the law of averages will work out.

“Those plays aren’t necessarily high-percentage plays anyway. If we can hit 40 percent of those shot plays, we’d feel good about it.”

But, Brown admits, they are not close to 40 percent.

So what do you do?

“Just keep working on the chemistry with the receivers and the quarterbacks. Through our practices, that’s what we’ve done a lot of,” offensive coordinator Chad Scott said. “We’ve had some extra days of practice with this bye week, so we’ve done a lot more throughout the team periods of implementing a couple more pass concepts and a couple more pass plays.”

There is one other problem facing the offense. Starting guard Tomas Rimac is out with an injury suffered in the TCU game while left tackle Wyatt Milum, who with Zach Frazier has anchored the line, took a finger in his eye and is thought to be a game-time decision on his availability.