MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - So, what's the formula for beating a top 10-ranked football team on the road?
 
According to West Virginia's Dana Holgorsen, it's no different than playing any other team on the road. And he knows of what he speaks. In 2009 when he was Kevin Sumlin's offensive coordinator at Houston, it was Holgorsen's play calling that helped the Cougars upset fifth-ranked Oklahoma State in Stillwater, 45-35.
 
"I just think you get familiar with your opponent, you practice and you go play," he explained.
 
Holgorsen's offensive coordinator, Jake Spavital, was a part of two big road wins against top 10-ranked teams while he was at Texas A&M in 2014. The Aggies knocked off No. 9 South Carolina in Columbia and later that year outlasted third-ranked Auburn, 41-38, in Auburn.
 
Spavital echoed Holgorsen's sentiments.
 
"Really, nothing much changes from week to week," he said. "It really doesn't. I know there's a lot more at stake. There are a lot more distractions with College Gameday, the media and the environment is going to be fun, but I think our kids like to play in those environments."
 
The nation will be aware of West Virginia's game against eighth-ranked TCU for the remainder of this week with ESPN College Gameday in Fort Worth, Texas, to promote Saturday's battle of two ranked teams, TCU at No. 8 and West Virginia at No. 23.
 
It's the first time College Gameday has been in Fort Worth in eight years.
 
"We've been a part of Gameday five times, but it hasn't been here in Fort Worth since 2009, so we're very appreciative of the opportunity to be in that position to do it again," TCU coach Gary Patterson said earlier this week.
 
Sometimes, top 10-ranked teams aren't really top 10-ranked teams. You could go through West Virginia's history of facing those teams since the Associated Press first began ranking them in 1936 and pick out which ones were legit and which ones weren't.
 
Are the Horned Frogs a legit top 10 team?
 
Holgorsen thinks they might be.
 
"When you go into Arkansas and win the way they did and go into Stillwater and win the way they did, yeah, that's a good football team," he said.
 
All four of TCU's wins so far have been by double-digits, including by 21 in Fayetteville and by 13 in Stillwater, two traditionally tough places to play.
 
Of all of the impressive statistics the Horned Frogs have achieved so far, the most impactful is probably their third-down efficiency. TCU leads the country in that stat by converting 63.2 percent of its third-down tries.
 
That means they possess the football and protect their defense by limiting the other team's possessions.
 
And the best way to slow down a high-powered offense such as West Virginia's, ranked second in the country this week averaging 594.8 yards per game, is by keeping the football away from it.
 
You can't score if you don't have the football.
 
Some other things Patterson's Horned Frogs do well - they don't commit a lot of stupid penalties; they take care of the football and they tackle you in space.
 
That's something Patterson's teams have been doing for the last 17 years, which is why they win 74 percent of the time. That's a big reason why these guys are back in the top 10 this season.
 
Spavital said his guys are aware of what's in front of them.
 
"I don't think you have to go down the line to get them motivated to play," he said. "They're going to be fired up because you've got a top-10 opponent; you've got a good crowd and the media publicity and we like playing in those games because it's more about making sure you are going to execute the game plan cleanly and getting ready to go out there and play."
 
This is certainly a great opportunity for West Virginia to put itself back in the national conversation, something it fell 15 yards short of doing in week one against then-21^st-ranked Virginia Tech in Landover, Maryland.
 
The Mountaineers have only defeated a top 10-ranked team on the road twice in their history, in the 1982 season opener against No. 9-ranked Oklahoma and at No. 9 Penn State in 1954.
 


Quarterbacking the Mountaineers that afternoon was Penn State transfer Jeff Hostetler.
 
Since then, West Virginia has come close several times. Later during that '82 season, WVU led second-ranked Pitt 13-0 in the fourth quarter before quarterback Dan Marino directed the only fourth-quarter comeback victory of his college career in the Panthers' 16-13 victory.
 
Five years later, West Virginia had sixth-ranked Syracuse on the ropes in the Carrier Dome until Don McPherson led a fourth-quarter touchdown drive and two-point conversion to clip WVU, 32-31.
 
In 2003, it looked like Rich Rodriguez's 1-3 Mountaineers were going to pull off a stunning upset victory over second-ranked Miami in the Orange Bowl when Quincy Wilson's 33-yard touchdown catch and run gave WVU a 20-19 lead with about a minute to play.
 
But the Hurricanes drove the length of the field, getting a clutch fourth-down catch from tight end Kellen Winslow Jr., to move into position to kick a game-winning field goal.
 
Then in 2009, West Virginia was on the wrong side of a replay official's reversal of a Bearcat fumble that led to Isaiah Pead's second quarter touchdown, which turned out to be the deciding points in fifth-ranked Cincinnati's 24-21 victory.
 
Naturally, lots of things have to go right in order to beat a good football team on the road, but Holgorsen believes the No. 1 thing is trusting the process the team goes through each time it boards a charter bus and heads to the airport to play a game away from Milan Puskar Stadium.
 
"We've gone to Fort Worth and won before. They're going to know what the hotel looks like and what the drive to the stadium looks like," he explained. "We're going to know our opponent pretty well and then you have to go in there and play.
 
"To me, it's pretty much as simple as that. Just because TCU is No. 8 in the country doesn't make it any more important than going to Kansas; it just doesn't from my perspective," he added. "You guys can say I'm full of crap if you want to, but it's no different with how we approach it and how we talk about it and how we practice it and how we expect to go do it."
 
When Texas A&M won at Auburn in 2014 during Spavital's second year coordinating the Aggie offense, his starting quarterback, Kyle Allen, was making just his second college start.
 
"I had no idea how he was going to be," Spavital said. "I remember our first drive he hit like a 60-yard touchdown and everything went downhill from there."
 
For those who recall West Virginia's Oklahoma win in '82, it was Hostetler (making his first WVU start) hitting big play after big play against the Sooner defense.
 
Can quarterback Will Grier do that for West Virginia this Saturday against a TCU defense ranked 26^th in the country in points allowed and 29^th in total defense.
 
Will his supporting cast step up and help him?
 
"It's a process; it always is," Spavital said. "You'd like to go down there and take the opening drive and score and then just keep rolling from there but there are going to be a lot of ups and downs. It's mainly just making sure that we're all adapting to what they're throwing at us and we're getting the ball to the kids who came to play.
 
"But that's every weekend for us," Spavital added. "It's who's on, how do we get them the ball and what's the defense giving us?"
 
Or, perhaps what West Virginia's defense is giving them, too.
 
Tony Gibson will be the first to admit his young, inexperienced and banged up unit has not performed well enough to get West Virginia through its difficult Big 12 schedule unscathed.
 
It gave up huge chunks of yardage on the ground two weeks ago against Kansas and comes into Saturday's game ranked 107^th in the country in total yards allowed and 60^th in points allowed.
 
But it did make the plays it needed to make in the fourth quarter to put the Jayhawks away, and he's got reinforcements on the way with some of his injured players returning to the lineup. He said earlier this week that this is probably the healthiest his defense has been since last spring.
 
Getting those additional defensive players back out on the field leaves Holgorsen curious as to how good his team really is this year.
 
"I don't know," he admitted. "It seems like a year-and-a-half ago that we played Virginia Tech at this point. I'm anxious to get out there and find out. I'm also anxious about eight straight weeks of the same thing, eight challenging games moving ahead for us."
 
That begins this Saturday against undefeated TCU at Amon G. Carter Stadium.
 
Kickoff is 3:30 p.m. EST and the game will be televised nationally on FS1 (Aaron Goldsmith, Brady Quinn and Bruce Feldman).
 
The Mountaineer Sports Network from IMG's coverage begins at noon with the Mountaineer Tailgate Show (Dan Zangrilli, Dale Wolfley and Jed Drenning) leading into regular game coverage with Tony Caridi, Dwight Wallace and Jed Drenning at 2:30 on stations throughout West Virginia and online through WVUsports.com and the mobile app TuneIn.
 
Note: Be sure to check out Jed Drenning's deep dive into TCU's offensive personnel tomorrow, particularly quarterback Kenny Hill and the role the Horned Frogs' run game has played in his development.

Correction: The original version of this story inaccurately stated West Virginia had just one road victory against a top-10-rated team in its history, omitting the Mountaineers' 19-14 victory at ninth-ranked Penn State in 1954.