MORGANTOWN - What we know about West Virginia football is that Dana Holgorsen's fifth team is perfectly suited for the holiday. It's in disguise. Wearing a costume. Under a mask. Throw in your own line about tricks and treats and a four-game losing streak following a three-game winning streak.
These Mountaineers have masqueraded through seven games, and good luck guessing who or what is beneath all the makeup and bandages. Is it the team that was 3-0 and ranked or the team that's 0-4 and rank? Two months in, and it's as hard to get a handle on this team as it was to handle four straight ranked opponents.
"We lost to another really good football team," Holgorsen said Thursday after losing by 30 points to No. 5 TCU. "I'm tired of saying it, but it's true."
It's also true people are tired of hearing it, and it doesn't help that the season has aligned in such a way - the schedule, the green offense, the black-and-blue defense - that makes it so hard to solve, never mind accept.
The whole situation is confusing.
Holgorsen was wearing black on a night when all the TCU fans were asked to wear black, and then Holgorsen was low-fiving the Horned Frogs quarterback after Trevone Boykin added another clip to his night's highlight reel.
"He made one of the best plays I've seen in a while," Holgorsen said. "He was right there. I didn't know what the hell else to do. I could start yelling at my guys, but what good's that going to do?"
Then there was his own quarterback, and while there are many things Skyler Howard has been during this slide, animated was not one of them. His keel remained even through whatever errors he or his teammates made. He never showed up a running back who lost a fumble or an offensive tackle who shepherded a defensive end to the backfield. He never winced or whined about the plays called from the sideline.
But when Jovon Durante, a freshman receiver who's been supplanted by a freshman quarterback, dropped a certain 55-yard touchdown pass and Howard realized it was the second time Durante had done that and the third or fourth time that had happened in the game, Howard unraveled.
It was brief, but it was there. Howard tried to fight it, but it was clear he was mad as he threw his arms around and barked at nobody. After weeks of critiques, Howard was playing the way others had been begging him to play, but he was getting no help.
"It's frustrating," running back Wendell Smallwood said - because Howard met with his family instead of reporters after the game. "He believes in those guys. He believes in all the receivers. To go out and get so close and be let down and having dropped balls, that means a lot to him. I think it's starting to get to him."
But this slide can't be put at the feet of the quarterback, who again completed fewer than half his passes, or the head coach, who was hired and hailed for his offensive prowess but managed 10 points before halftime and none after it and then confessed, "I'm failing at my job to get that done."
Offense is Holgorsen's identity. It's weird to see him flounder like this and to be flawed at his skill positions, but the strength of this team was never going to be the offense. It was supposed to be the defense.
That's not working either.
Defensive coordinator Tony Gibson played without a starting safety and a key reserve defensive back. A starting cornerback played with one arm and a starting linebacker came off the bench after not practicing all week. All five starting defensive backs were helped off the field at different times. A reserve linebacker was playing defensive end and another had to play safety. Multiple defenders who hadn't played meaningful snaps in years, if at all, were forced to play.
Simply put, there were occasions when the Mountaineers were using most of a scout team defense on the road on a Thursday night against the fifth-ranked team in the country.
"It's like we're waiting for bad things to happen, and it seems like we're not recovering," Gibson said. "It's not good."
Gibson wants no sympathy, and he's not likely to get it. Not after playing TCU, which had to replace eight defensive starters in the first three games alone after losing six starters from last season's Peach Bowl championship team. Not after coming up short in all the areas in which the defense once stood tall.
The Mountaineers used to get stops on third downs. They've turned into a team that facilitated three scoring drives in the first half by committing penalties on third down.
They used to control field position. They've become an outfit that sends 12 players onto the field on the first play of a series, a series that started with 16 seconds left in the first half and ended with a 57-yard field goal that wouldn't have made it from 62.
They used to get turnovers and once led the nation in that category, but they haven't seen one in nine quarters and are suddenly in the habit of dropping interceptions, including a pair of gimmies against TCU.
"We've got to got to make those plays," Holgorsen said of his entire team. "We've got to improve our schemes. We've got to coach better. I've got to call better plays. But it's got to fall on our players as far as making those plays as well. It was pretty apparent in the first half."
Definitive answers in the form of changes and improvements simply have to follow this stretch, and the final five games are when the Mountaineers and their coach will either unmask or be exposed.