MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - After four games of watching Will Grier play quarterback so flawlessly for West Virginia we've finally discovered something the junior sucks at - sliding.
 
When Grier leaves the pocket to run downfield, his takeoff and approach looks a lot like the late Snake Stabler the way his dark, floppy hair bounces around underneath his helmet and his slow-motion jukes always seem to get him much farther downfield than expected.
 
But the landing, well … let's just say they're a lot like those charter flights the team takes coming into Clarksburg International: hot, hard and abrupt!
 
"I suck at sliding," Grier admitted after last Saturday's 56-34 victory at Kansas. "I'm working on that and I'm going to practice it."
 
His coach, Dana Holgorsen, loves Grier's pocket presence and his elusiveness, but instead of seeing his franchise quarterback barreling down the field like the neighborhood mailman being chased by a Chihuahua, he'd rather see him move side-to-side in the pocket and keep those brown eyes scanning the field for open receivers instead of figuring out which linebacker he's going to bounce off of.
 
"He goes vertical a lot and I think he thinks he's got a lot of moves and everything, too, and he tries and jukes some guys and he's not very good at sliding, which means he's going to end up getting hit more than I want him to," Holgorsen said Monday morning.
 
"And his ball security is not as good as it needs to be when he does that."
 
Grier ran 10 times for 51 yards against Kansas, including his first two rushing touchdowns of the season. Both were zone-reads near the goal line, one when he gracefully glided into the end zone and the other when he chased his own fumble across the goal line.
 
Meanwhile, he also made a nifty, 24-yard scramble early in the fourth quarter that led to a key touchdown to once again put the Mountaineers ahead by 15 points, 42-27.
 
Grier is the team's third-leading rusher with 131 yards, and his 30 carries so far average out to 7 ½ totes per game. That means 7 ½ times per game Holgorsen and his offensive coordinator Jake Spavital see their breakfasts move up a little closer to their throats.
 
"I'm comfortable carrying the ball," Grier said. "I don't plan on doing it as much and I say it every week and I end up running it more than I want to. I do what I have to do when it's necessary. A lot of it is third-down stuff."
 
Grier is what we hear Holgorsen frequently refer to as a 'baller' - someone who just goes out and plays and does things based off of instinct and feel whenever the situation calls for it.
 
But Grier has done far more damage this year with his right arm than his two legs, completing 65 percent of his pass attempts for 1,374 yards and 13 touchdowns. Holgorsen wants to see a lot more from the arm, and a lot less from those legs.
 
"I don't ever go into a game wanting to run the ball 10, 15 times, but sometimes you've got to do it," Grier concluded.
 
Briefly:
 
* West Virginia (3-1) returns to the national rankings after a two-week hiatus, checking in at No. 23 in both polls heading into the open week. Unless something crazy happens, or the Gazette's Mitch Vingle forgets to submit his top 25 ballot, that means West Virginia and undefeated TCU will be ranked when the two hook up in Fort Worth, Texas, in two weeks.
 
The kick time will be 3:30 and the network televising the game is FS1, released earlier today.
 
* Holgorsen revealed Monday that backup middle linebacker Brendan Ferns is going to need shoulder surgery - already the second time in his young career he has been shelved due to injury.
 
It's yet another injury Tony Gibson's snake-bitten defense has to absorb; six key players were standing on the sidelines Saturday at Kansas.
 
"You want your best players out there playing," Holgorsen said. "I don't think you are ever going to talk to a coach ever, current or way back, who doesn't want their best players out there all the time. That's kind of why we do what we do and when you play against some good teams you need to have your best guys out there in order to have a chance to win. But I was proud how some of our freshmen stepped in and played."
 
At one point in the second half, Holgorsen said the only readily recognizable player on defense was senior middle linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton. "Al played his butt off and had something like 12 tackles and was holding it together, but we need to get some guys back out there who have some snaps. The freshmen who go in there are not going to perform at the level that you want them to."
 
The one exception might be true freshman nose tackle Lamonte McDougle, whose strip-sack led to a fourth-quarter touchdown for the Mountaineers. The defensive staff named McDougle its team champion on Monday morning.
 
McDougle came in for starting nose Xavier Pegues.
 
* The last time West Virginia had to rely on this many inexperienced players was four years ago when the Mountaineers stumbled to a 4-8 record - the program's only losing mark under Holgorsen.
 
"We were in this position four years ago and we were 4-8 in the Big 12 and nobody cared," Holgorsen pointed out. "You can't use that as an excuse. I was proud of how some of our inexperienced, young guys went in there and played their tails off to the point where we won by 22. That's the thing that counts.
 
"Now we've got eight games left and they're all going to be hard in the Big 12 so we've got to get a bunch of guys healthy and our main guys, Kyzir White, Dravon Henry, Toyous Avery and David Long, having those guys back is going to make us a better football team and that's what I am looking forward to."
 
* West Virginia's open week comes after week four, which is a good thing for this year's team. Normally, Holgorsen said he would rather have it come in week six with half of the season remaining, but the team can use the open week on Saturday to get some banged up players healthy before facing an exceptional TCU team.
 
"I think in the perfect world we would play the zero week, which I don't understand why some people get to play on the zero week and other people don't, but I'd rather play on the zero week and then be able to have two bye weeks throughout the course of the year," he explained. "Player time is a big thing. Everyone wants to talk about how player time is important; well, give them another bye week. That would help them out."
 
Holgorsen said the second bye week would also allow programs to get caught up on recruiting, especially now with an early signing period coming into effect in December.
 
"We're always looking for opportunities to be able to go out and recruit and evaluate high school players," he said. "So, if you have 12 games, play four and have a bye week and then play four more and have a bye week and hopefully you get to the (conference) championship game four weeks later. It's not a perfect format (the way it's set up currently), but it really doesn't matter what I think anyway."