What we’ve seen so far this year from West Virginia’s passing attack is much more in line with what we’ve come to expect from Dana Holgorsen’s offenses through the years.

 

This is what we saw with Geno Smith in 2011 and 2012, it’s what we saw when Holgorsen had Brandon Weeden at Oklahoma State, and it’s also what we saw when Case Keenum was running Holgorsen’s system at Houston.

 

Senior Clint Trickett is now firmly at the controls and he’s putting up video-game-like numbers (just as those guys did), the former Florida State transfer completing 75.4 percent of his pass attempts for 1,224 yards and seven touchdowns in his first three games this year.

 

Trickett threw for the second-most yards ever against a Nick Saban-coached Alabama defense (365), and his 511 yards passing at Maryland last Saturday were the most ever by a WVU quarterback on the road.

 

It’s clear Trickett and the rest of the guys on offense are operating on the same page right now, and the results are not surprising at all to Holgorsen.

 

“I’ve seen it for a long, long time,” the coach said earlier this week. “We’re in a position where the timing is better. I’ve made a lot of it … the rapport with Clint and the guys is a lot better. Our pass protection is night and day different than what it was a year ago. We’re just in a much, much better place.”

 

Indeed, West Virginia is in a much better place in every aspect of its passing game - not just from its quarterback.

 

“We should be able to pass protect like this. We should be able to be accurate with our eyes and we should be able to get open and make plays down the field,” Holgorsen explained. “I was excited to see Mario (Alford), Daikiel (Shorts) and Kevin (White) make plays down the field. That’s what our expectations are, and they’re getting to the point to where they’re doing it.”

 

The next big step comes Saturday night when the Mountaineers face an Oklahoma defense that has produced 19 turnovers in its last seven games dating back to last year.

 

A big-time performance against a big-time team on Saturday night could put Mountaineer football right back where it was two years ago when the Mountaineers were 5-0 after their big win at Texas.

 

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I didn’t hear Randy Edsall’s postgame remarks, nor were his full comments included in the postgame transcription posted on Maryland’s website, so what I’m about to reference is from this Washington Post Terrapins Insider blog entry posted by Roman Stubbs:

 

 

In short, Edsall was unhappy that his defense was forced to defend 108 plays during the course of last Saturday’s game against West Virginia.

 

“I think there’s a problem with college football. I really do, with that many plays,” Edsall said afterward. “You take the number of plays that happen over a year, that these kids will end up playing 15, 16 games … takes a toll on them, but I was proud of our kids because they hung in there’ that’s almost two games - close to two games, almost, that they played today.”

 

Indeed, seeing a team run 108 plays in one game is unusual, but certainly not unprecedented. In fact, I know of an instance when a college team ran 101 plays in a game without the benefit of a signaling system, much less a lot of interaction with the coaches up in the press box, or sugar huddles or no huddles or any of the fancy, high-speed stuff they are doing today.

 

Furthermore, when this happened the style of play was much more physically demanding than how the game is played today with the majority of the plays back then taking place within a confined space between the tackles.

 

The year was 1966, when Edsall was still in about the third grade, and the team that ran all of those plays was Penn State. The Lions did it to West Virginia and Penn State’s first-year coach Joe Paterno took his good, old time doing it.

 

Actually, about the only thing Paterno did fast back then was run out onto the field before the kickoff, but that is another story for another time.

 

Jim Carlen, West Virginia’s first-year coach who watched his defense get bludgeoned that afternoon the same way Edsall’s defense got bludgeoned last Saturday, didn’t complain afterward about the state of the game, or how an offensive-oriented rulebook enabled one team to run that many plays, or how his players were going to hold up for an entire season facing that many plays in a game.

 

No, what Carlen did was he rolled up his sleeves and got right back into the meeting room with his defensive coaches to figure out how they were going to stop the next team from doing it to them.

 

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	Holgorsen