Virginia

WASHINGTON - Democrats won a narrow majority in the Senate on Tuesday, snatching Republican-held seats in Massachusetts and Indiana and turning back fierce, expensive challenges in Virginia and Ohio to maintain the control they have held since 2007. With a third of the Senate up for election, Republicans were undone by candidate stumbles. GOP candidates in Missouri and Indiana made clumsy statements about rape and abortion that did severe damage to the party's hopes of taking over.

The West Virginia-Kansas State game was supposed to be a matchup of top-five teams with national championship implications, let alone Big 12 title implications, until the Texas Tech Red Raiders threw a giant sombrero in those plans. Kansas State goes into Morgantown on Saturday with a pretty good blueprint for success. The difficulty is in trying to follow it. "There might be philosophical thoughts in regards to how you defend [West Virginia quarterback] Geno Smith and how you function on special teams that you say, 'Maybe within our own schemes, we can do something,' " said Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, who should be facing an ornery group of Mountaineers.

The numbers for West Virginia quarterback Geno Smith leap off a stat sheet in 3D: four games, 1,826 yards passing, 83.4 percent completion rate, 20 touchdowns, zero interceptions. When he takes to the field for the Mountaineers' first-ever Big 12 road game Saturday night at Texas, his 656-yard, eight-touchdown performance of last week against Baylor will be an extremely distant memory. "Got to focus on Texas," he said in an Associated Press article. "We don't take wins into the next week.

No. 7 West Virginia and the Big 12, perfect together. Geno Smith and the fast-moving, high-scoring Mountaineers proved they fit right in with their new conference, outracing No. 24 Baylor, 70-63, on Saturday in Morgantown, W.Va., in the Big 12's highest-scoring game ever. Smith tied a conference mark with eight touchdown passes and narrowly missed another one with 656 yards passing. "It did feel like one of those classic Texas shootouts," said Smith, whose school moved over from the Big East this season.

STATE COLLEGE - Despite everything, Sam Ficken could have been the hero. He had missed three field goals and had an extra point blocked already, but on a dreary Sept. 8 in Charlottesville, Va., he had one more shot to propel his Nittany Lions to a win over Virginia. Never before had the sophomore from Indiana had a game this bad. He said that in his senior year in high school, he missed four kicks the entire season. Now, here he was, Penn State's starting kicker after Anthony Fera transferred to Texas, with the Lions down by one point and all the pressure of clinching the school's first official win since 1997 on his shoulders.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - President Obama pledged to create many more jobs and "make the middle class secure again" in a campaign-closing appeal on Thursday - more than five weeks before Election Day - to voters already casting ballots in large numbers. Republican Mitt Romney, focusing on threats beyond American shores, accused the commander in chief of backing dangerous cuts in defense spending. "The idea of cutting our military is unthinkable and devastating," declared the challenger, struggling to reverse a slide in opinion polls.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown criticized his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, for refusing to release records on whether she claimed Native American ancestry in job applications, as she attacked him for supporting billionaires and opposing legislation to create jobs in their first debate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Squaring off in Boston, Warren pounded Brown over his record, including opposing a bill to provide equal pay for women doing the same work as men. Brown, in turn, portrayed Warren as a liberal eager to tax job-creating businesses while collecting a six-figure income as a professor at Harvard Law School.

Jim Haley, a hard-hitting shortstop for Bonner-Prendergast, has committed to play baseball at Penn State. The 6-foot-2, 190-pound senior also considered Elon, Maryland, Richmond, Temple, and Virginia. He was a first-team all-Catholic League Red Division selection last season. - Rick O'Brien

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - As one of Penn State's most vocal and visible leaders, Michael Mauti has sent along the right messages this week to his teammates: Forget about the loss to Ohio, learn from the mistakes that were made, and be focused on the road at Virginia. But when he goes on the field Saturday at Scott Stadium for the first time, the fifth-year senior linebacker will take with him the sour memory of how easily and thoroughly the Bobcats moved the ball against a defense that has built a reputation for stinginess during his time with the Nittany Lions.

STATE COLLEGE - Most of these Nittany Lions know a thing or two about playing in a hostile environment. Just last year, the Nittany Lions played in front of 105,000 at Ohio Stadium against Ohio State. The year before that, they entertained almost 102,000 at Alabama's Bryant-Denney Stadium. The kicker heading into a Saturday road contest with Virginia, of course, is that Penn State (0-1) played in front of those crowds when it was a spotless program, void of any sort of NCAA infractions or any dirt to be used against it. That is clearly no longer the case as Penn State prepares to head to Charlottesville.