You hear it all of the time: football is a game of attrition. The teams with the most depth are the ones usually sitting at the top of the league standings at the end of the season.
 
Play somebody short on depth late in the year and it's usually a win, as was the case all those times West Virginia used to beat Rutgers like a drum when the two were in the Big East.
 
Get a team a little short on depth earlier in the season and the outcome is not always quite so clear.
 
Former coach Frank Cignetti, who struggled with depth issues all four years he coached at West Virginia in the late 1970s, used to say it's not your first 22 that usually decides football games, it's oftentimes the players you have beyond your top 22 that determine the outcomes or the type of seasons teams ultimately have.
 
West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen touched on that subject during his Tuesday afternoon news conference in advance of this weekend's big Homecoming game against 24^th-ranked Texas Tech on Saturday at noon.
 
Holgorsen was asked this simple question: "When does it become critical to get more receivers out there contributing instead of just four?"
 
"August 1," he answered. "Can we go back to what I said August 1? How many more times do I have to complain about it?"
 
To recap, back in August, Holgorsen warned us at the beginning of training camp about the importance of developing more than just three or four reliable wide receivers because of the way West Virginia plays offense.
 
Having four is sometimes more than enough when you play a certain way such as the way Kansas State does, but when you use a lot of 20- or even a 10-personnel schemes such West Virginia, you need to have more than four guys ready to go at the wide receiver position. Not to mention the sheer number of plays the Mountaineers are going to run during a game - Texas has run the most in the Big 12 this year with 416, but West Virginia is a close second at 405.

The team last on this list, and by a wide margin, is K-State with 306. That's almost 20 fewer plays per game so the Wildcats can get by without having a whole bunch of wide receivers. It's a little tougher for West Virginia to do that. Consequently, all those verticals Gary Jennings Jr., David Sills V, Ka'Raun White and Marcus Simms are running on a per-game basis can add up over the course of a season.
 
For instance, the high-tech monitors the players wear during games to track their conditioning revealed that Jennings ran more than 10,000 yards during the season opener against Virginia Tech, or the equivalent of about six miles. Last Saturday against TCU, White said he played roughly 80 out of the 84 total snaps the offense had against the Horned Frogs and of those 80 plays, he estimated he ran between 20 or 30 pass patterns with probably 10 of those being verticals.
 
That means 10 times during the course of a game he made a full-out sprint for a minimum distance of 50 yards, which doesn't seem like a lot over a four-hour period. But multiply that by the total number of games he plays during the season, plus all of the practices leading up to the games, not to mention any special teams he might play on, and now you begin to see how easy it is for players to wear down late in the year.
 
"Yeah, we get a little exhausted because the games are pretty long," White admitted. "Hopefully the twos can step up and help us a little bit."
 
If you look around the Big 12 just about every other team, with the exception of K-State or Baylor because of preseason attrition, have enough wide receiver depth to get them through the season, even Kansas.
 


The Jayhawks currently have six receivers with 10 or more catches, and eight with at least six or more. TCU, like West Virginia, has just four with at least 10 catches, but eight guys have five or more and a total of 18 different players have caught at least one pass this year.
 
Iowa State? The Cyclones have five receivers with at least 10 catches and seven possessing at least seven grabs.
 
Oklahoma State? Five have 10 catches or more and seven with more than six.
 
Oklahoma? Five have 10 and eight have at least five.
 
Texas? Four have caught at least 10 and seven have caught at least seven.
 
And Texas Tech, which attacks teams very similar to the way West Virginia does? The Red Raiders have five receivers making at least 10 grabs and seven with five or more.
 
You get the picture.
 
Right now, the bulk of West Virginia's receptions, yards and touchdowns are coming from four guys - Jennings, Sills, White and Simms - to the tune of 94 percent of the touchdowns, 89 percent of the receiving yardage and 82 percent of the receptions.
 
Now, considering just the important catches, the important yards or the important touchdowns when the game's outcome is still in doubt, these four have made almost all of them.
 
Can they maintain that throughout the course of a grueling, four-month college football season spanning 13 games? Perhaps, but wide receivers coach Tyron Carrier doesn't want to find out.
 
He wants some of those twos and threes to become more trustworthy and consistent so they can take some of the load off of his Big Four, which Carrier believes is as good as any group of four wide receivers in the country right now.
 
Against TCU, he said true freshman Reggie Roberson Jr. got 10 snaps and junior Ricky Rogers was on the field for about seven plays.
 
That's it.
 
"My thing is, we always want at least two guys on the field that we feel very comfortable with," Carrier explained.
 
The problem is, when do you find the right time to put the backups in? You certainly want your best guys out there during key situations, but it's not always easy to predict when those key situations will occur.
 
Many times it's at the end of games, of course, but not always. Against TCU, with West Virginia backed up inside its minus-5 for the entire first half, those key situations happened in the first and second quarters as well.
 
"With that field position, it's hard to take those guys out when your back is so close to your own end zone," Carrier admitted. "Then when you get into a groove and drive out of it, you don't want to mess up the groove by substituting. Then you get close to the other end zone and we're stuck because they're tired and I'm like, 'Ahh.' You can get stuck in a hard spot a lot."
 
Carrier recalled what it was like when he once played wide receiver at Houston and he would get tired and tried to tap out of games to get a quick blow.
 
"(Quarterback) Case (Keenum) would be like, 'What are you doing?' No!' Now I get it. It's guys he trusts and in those tight situations you want guys you can trust."
 
We saw last Saturday what can happen when that trust breaks down either because a receiver broke off his route, ran the wrong pattern or read something differently than his quarterback did.
 
On the other hand, we also saw what can happen when the quarterback begins to gain a higher level of trust with the guy to whom he's throwing the ball, as was the case with Ka'Raun White who caught six passes for a career-high 138 yards and a 75-yard touchdown against the Horned Frogs.
 
All six catches White made were in crucial situations, either going for first downs or touchdowns. And it wasn't like White had a perfect game because Carrier identified two more passes that he felt White should have caught.
 
"During the bye week we were working a lot," White said. "He was feeding me the ball. I was making some pretty good plays in practice working my one-on-one techniques and just coming to the sideline and telling him he can trust me."
 
For these other guys to gain Grier's trust, they are going to have to step up their games and perform at a much higher level during practice the way White did.
 
"With Will not being able to trust them that much when they get in, he may not even look their way that much," White conceded. "It's hard on the coaches trying to get the twos in. That's why during practice they've got to keep making plays and being consistent so Will can trust them out there."
 
For Carrier, that doesn't mean his backups have to play a lot, it's just a matter of giving his starters 10 or 15 plays off during the course of a game.
 
"It don't have to be straight either," he said. "It can be two here or four there."
 
Two plays here of four plays there can add up to a lot over the course of a season and it can help preserve Mr. Jennings, Mr. Sills, Mr. White and Mr. Simms when the calendar flips to November and the Mountaineer offense is really going to need these guys performing at a high level.