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Mountaineer Retweet: In Which Karl Joseph Becomes The Master Of Death

The West Virginia defense was everything it was advertised as and more, and after some early bumps the offense kicked it into gear and the Mountaineers ran away with their opener. Let's check the Twitters and get some reaction.

By Matt Kirchner
Ben Queen-USA TODAY Sports

Let's start this out by addressing the elephant in the room. I'm not Priddy. We here at the Musket can't thank him enough for getting this Retweet article rolling and I hope that I can do half as well with this as he did. I've got some experience with this thing from basketball season, but this feels like a promotion to the Majors and I'm ready to have some fun with it. Well, let's get this thing started, shall we?

Don't you love those moments when you refresh your feed and it's just a wall of people saying "Oh, Kansas?" I'm all for conference solidarity but every league needs a Butt Monkey, and this is what you get for willingly letting Charlie Weis be around your program. That just doesn't go away overnight.

Moving on to relevant things.

I didn't even know you could fit an equipment truck on North Street. Whoever sent this truck that way is a first ballot Hall of Famer for bad direction givers.

I did like this. I'm all for anything that's going to get the team more emotionally invested in the game. I'll go off on a bit of a tangent here and say that the intro was pretty good this year. We went away from the same 5-8 plays from Mountaineer history that are always played before the team comes out and stuck with this team and these players. Now, I'm not saying that I can't watch Quincy Wilson annihilate the entire first round of the 2004 NFL Draft, but I like the focus on "right now."

Accurate Skyler Howard is Fun Skyler Howard. There are some overthrow issues, obviously, but in the scheme of things, I'd rather be overthrowing to the point that only one of my guys can come down with it than underthrowing to the point that everything is a 50/50 jump ball. Clint was a great leader for this team last year, but a lot of the best plays were the result of Kevin White being a giant bird of prey, not from a receiver being hit in stride. Skyler, when he's on, does that.

True, we can't have him come out over-hyped in every game and overthrow everything for the first thirty minutes. If that's a pattern, we're not going to have a chance in this league. Hopefully that second half will be building to something long term, and wasn't just the result of Georgia Southern lacking the depth to hang all night.

My biggest fear is that this team becomes 2010, where one of the best defenses in school history is held back by an offense that just can't get out of its own way.

Speaking of defense...

How the hell did this happen last year? How did we not recover a fumble until after we stopped playing well?

All confusion aside, this defense was playing out of their damn minds. It was chaos, but controlled chaos. My biggest worry was that we'd be so hyped up that our guys would over-pursue in the same way we did against Collin Klein in 2012.

This defense, however, is a universe apart from that...thing. Every single man stayed with their assignment and the result was what we saw. Turnovers, three and outs, and a whole lot of fun.

You too can have a passer rating 75 points higher than a FBS college quarterback!

If a team obliterates the previous season's best rushing team in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

We did this thing kind of stealthily, hiding under the shadow of Texas getting pantsed.

TEXAS GETTING PANTSED ALERT

Okay, back to us. Just enough national people noticed however for this performance, especially Karl Joseph's, to get some run late in the evening.

Georgia Southern is a mid-major that gained a ton of respect for going into hostile environments and playing well nearly every single time they got the chance. West Virginia took them to the woodshed for 60 minutes -- the second stringers came out with the same fire as the first.

No matter how much you want to say that this was a "JV team," (quotes from the guys behind me at the game) a shutout is a shutout is a shutout. Especially with the way the talent gap has shrunk in the last half decade with more "money games" resulting in upsets than ever before.

Keep this up, and the world will notice.

Let's hope it's the first of 14.

Again, I'm really glad to have the opportunity to take over the Retweet for the Musket. Thanks for being patient with me as a I get my feet wet on the football side of things, and as always, keeping tweeting and Let's Go Mountaineers!

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