photo by: Kevin Kinder/BlueandGoldNews.com

On UCF’s opening drive of the game, Knights quarterback Tayven Jackson stepped up and hit a wide-open Chris Domercant for a 40-yard touchdown. West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez was shaking his head.

The next drive, Jackson found Domercant wide-open once again for a 34-yard touchdown, and just like that, WVU put itself in a 14-0 hole on two walk-in touchdowns.

“I got to find out why we had so many guys so wide open,” Rodriguez said. “We are supposed to have a deep safety in the middle of the field, and we didn’t. The second touchdown of the game should never have happened. There were some breakdowns there.”

There’s no question that WVU’s defense is frequently burned by the big play. The past couple of games, that’s been a glaring issue when an offensive player finds himself in open space for a pitch-and-catch touchdown.

Against UCF, the story was the same. UCF had nine passing plays over 15 yards, and six over 20 yards.

WVU was also torched by explosive plays on the ground, with three rushes for over 30 yards, with one being an 83-yard touchdown.

It’s a mixture of defenders not being in the right spot, being out of muscled, and missed tackles. Bandit Curtis Jones said the communication was the biggest problem.

“As a linebacker, you’re in control of the defense,” Jones said. “I had a couple errors myself, and I just got to back into the film room with coach [Zac] Alley and coach Henry [Weinreich]. Help myself, help our defense become one unit.”

Explosive plays aside, the defense couldn’t really create a stop as a whole. There were times late in the first half where WVU’s defense stopped UCF on fourth down, but other than the two stops, UCF rolled the defense.

WVU’s defense allowed 45 points against UCF, which makes it the fourth straight game with the defense letting up 38-plus points. UCF had 578 yards of total offense and 21 first downs.

“We’re not stopping anybody,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t know if we had any three-and-outs. I said that since the beginning of the year. In order for us to play how we want to play, we got to get first downs and get three-and-outs. We didn’t get any one of them.”

It’s not like the defense started inside its own territory. Punter Oliver Straw had one of his better days punting, and UCF’s average starting position was its own 28-yard line. UCF still found a way to march down the field and score.

“Three drives starting inside the 10-yard line, they scored,” Rodriguez said. “We missed some tackles, we looked slower, we weren’t playing as fast maybe as we needed to. The execution part, the scheme part, we’ll have to look at.”

There are a lot of areas to fix, but time is winding down. WVU is the second half of the season. There are the necessary fixes like figuring out why players are more open and the long-term fixes like physicality. Rodriguez knows what needs to be fixed.

“I know what we got to do to get fixed,” Rodriguez said. “We got to do everything we can to get fixed right now, and fix what we got to fix later, we’ll do that too. There’s stuff we got to fix right now, and that’s where our focus will be.”

Rodriguez said in his press conference that he hoped this was rock bottom. Since it’s rock bottom, hopefully for WVU there’ll be improvement over the next couple of weeks, and if not, it’s going to be a long rest of the season since a medicorce UCF team had its way.

“It was as poorly as we’d played defensively in a long, long time,” Rodriguez said. “Our guys are pretty conscientious, and they’ll do whatever they can to fix it.”