Radio sideline reporter Jed Drenning provides periodic commentary on the Mountaineer football program for WVUsports.com. Be sure to follow him on Twitter @TheSignalCaller.
 
It's called the Butterfly Effect, the fanciful concept that the flap of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world can set off a chain of atmospheric events that ultimately leads to a tornado on the other side.
 
In short, small causes can have far reaching outcomes.
 
It also happens in college football. Where else could a team that had lost 19 straight conference games help induce the nation's most lucrative program to put its athletic department on the hook for nearly $40 million?
 
Alright. It's a bit deceptive to suggest the Kansas Jayhawks' upset win over Texas last November – their first victory over the Longhorns since 1938 -- is what caused Texas to fire Charlie Strong (thereby owing him a multimillion-dollar buyout) and hire Houston's Tom Herman (with a contract that included $28.75 million in basic compensation). But the Horns loss in Lawrence was certainly the final straw. It forced hands on all sides and expedited a tug-of-war between LSU and Texas over Herman's services.  
 
A week after losing to the Jayhawks, the Longhorns were upended by TCU to end the regular season. The next day, Texas announced Herman – a former UT graduate assistant under Mack Brown -- as its man, finally putting an end to the evolving wilderness of mirrors that played out over Thanksgiving week.
 
What's happened since? After stumbling its way to a puzzling 2017 opening day loss to 18-point underdog Maryland, Texas has acquitted itself relatively well in Herman's first season at the helm. Remove any delusions of immediate grandeur from the table and reasonable Texas fans will concede that progress – more so than wins and losses -- is the benchmark by which Herman will be judged this year. As such, Season One under his watch has curved toward success. 
 
At first blush, the Longhorns' 5-5 mark won't bowl you over, particularly when you consider that's the same record Texas held through 10 games under Strong a year ago. But all 5-5 teams aren't created equally. Since stubbing their toe against the Terps, the Longhorns have posted a 5-4 record with their average margin of victory coming by a count of 39-15 and all four losses coming against teams ranked in the top 12 nationally.
 
Contrary to the lyrics Tim Rushlow sang for Little Texas back in the 90s, it sure looked like God blessed Troy – not Texas – with his own hand. When the Longhorns crossed swords with No. 4 USC in the Los Angeles Coliseum on the third weekend in September, it took fairy dust and a Sam Darnold miracle in the final minutes to help the Trojans overcome a wicked effort by Texas and win in two overtimes.
 
Against No. 12 Oklahoma in a Red River thriller, Texas snapped the Sooners' school-record streak of 15 straight games with 30-plus points and nearly overcame a 20-0 deficit only to fall short, 29-24. Against No. 10 Oklahoma State, the Longhorns held the Cowboys to their lowest point total in 35 games only to turn the ball over in the end zone and drop an overtime heartbreaker, 13-10.
 
Three elite opponents, which – for different reasons – each managed to wiggle off the hook.
 
If you've been around this game long enough, you recognize the hallmarks of a team on the verge of breaking through. For a host of reasons, Texas never had that look under Charlie Strong.
 
It has it now.
 
This weekend -- 364 days after the Butterfly Effect in Lawrence, Kansas, that helped send Strong packing and Herman adding a closet full of burnt orange gear to his wardrobe -- Texas arrives in Morgantown to face another ranked team as Dana Holgorsen's Mountaineers (No. 24 in the AP) endeavor to win their third straight matchup with the Longhorns.
 
It all seems appropriate. After all, six years ago this Saturday, we saw perhaps the granddaddy of all Butterfly Effects, a small cause that in due course led to a profoundly far reaching outcome, the death of the Bowl Championship Series.
 
It was Nov. 18, 2011.
 
There would be plenty of storylines across the college football landscape that weekend. Top-ranked LSU cruised with a 55-3 demolition of Ole Miss. No. 3 Alabama notched its 10^th win of the season with a 45-21 decision over Georgia Southern. Robert Griffin III made his boldest claim yet for the Heisman Trophy with a show-stopping 479-yard performance in Baylor's upset win over No. 5 Oklahoma.
 
West Virginia, knee-deep in Holgorsen's maiden season in Morgantown, sat idle during an open. The Mountaineers, 7-3 after a 24-21 thriller over a ranked Cincinnati team at Paul Brown Stadium, were preparing for a showdown with Pitt in the Backyard Brawl – unaware that they were marching toward a date with destiny in the Orange Bowl against Clemson.
 
The biggest headline of them all, however, unfolded nearly 900 miles west of Monongalia County, West Virginia in Story County, Iowa, a place that, at least for one Friday night, lived up to its name.
 
The unbeaten Oklahoma State Cowboys paraded into Iowa State's Jack Trice Stadium with all the swagger you'd expect from the No. 2 team in the country. Mike Gundy's squad was a black-and-orange-clad force of nature that had sliced through its first 10 opponents by an average margin of 52-21. Heading into that night in Ames against a 5-4 Cyclones team led by a freshman quarterback, OSU had been pegged as a prohibitive 27-point favorite.
 
The Cowboys, it seemed, were on a collision course with a BCS title game berth where their mettle would be tested by the No. 1 ranked LSU Tigers in a clash for the ages. Red-blooded college football fans across the fruited plain were eager to see Brandon Weeden, Justin Blackmon and the Cowboys high-flying offense test an LSU defensive secondary – paced by Morris Claiborne and Tyrann Mathieu – that was widely regarded among the best the game had ever seen. Watching a Biletnikoff Award winner scrap with a Honey Badger promised to be worth the price of admission.
 
First, however, came the pesky matter of closing the regular season with two more wins, starting with Iowa State.
 
But figurative butterflies with flapping wings weren't the only things in the air on that fateful evening. So too were footballs. A lot of them – 118 in fact. Nearly half of those came from the arm of Cyclones signal caller Jared Barnett. The redshirt freshman from Garland, Texas, connected on 31 of those throws for 376 yards, and Iowa State complemented Barnett's big night with a formidable attack on the ground (41 rushing attempts, 192 yards). For the duration of the game, the physically overmatched Cyclones diagnosed the numbers in the box and – through a clever blend of inside zone runs and perimeter flash screens -- presented a level of offensive balance that kept OSU guessing all night, preventing the Cowboys from getting the key stops they needed to put ISU away.  
 
When the dust settled, and the marathon was finally over, Iowa State had managed 101 offensive snaps totaling 568 yards, and Oklahoma State had landed on the business end of a 37-31, double overtime stunner. The shock waves reverberated across college football. Instead of heading to New Orleans to face LSU in the championship game, the Cowboys upended Oklahoma in Bedlam then took a left turn to Glendale, Arizona, where their consolation prize was a Fiesta Bowl victory over Andrew Luck's Stanford Cardinal.
 
In a highly controversial decision, the BCS committee opted for a one-loss Alabama team to face LSU for the title in a rematch from the regular season. The result was, from a TV standpoint, the lowest rated championship game of the BCS era. SEC-fatigue was never more apparent. The BCS had danced its way out of the public's crosshairs for years, but this all-SEC title game proved to be the tipping point. The outcry for change was nothing new to the BCS, but fewer viewers this time around also meant disgruntled advertisers -- and money talks.
 
Hours after Alabama's championship game win over LSU, it was reported that the offseason would be spent devising a playoff system. The BCS would soon be no more, replaced by the new CFP (College Football Playoff) following the 2014 season.
 
The game of college football had been fundamentally transformed, and it was set in motion by the flutter of an overachieving Iowa State team on a chilly November night, a team that followed a creative game plan, brilliant in its simplicity, crafted to help put a young quarterback in position to flourish by an unheralded offensive coordinator few folks were familiar with . . . yet.
 
His name? Tom Herman.
 
A compelling argument can be made that perhaps no individual was more central to that historically implausible outcome in Ames, Iowa, than Herman. His efforts that night contributed to his landing in Columbus the following year as the OC on Urban Meyer's first staff at Ohio State, a team that finished 12-0 and led the Big Ten in scoring. Two years later, the Buckeyes staff authored the ultimate "lemons-into-lemonade" coaching tale when – after injuries to Braxton Miller and J.T. Barrett -- Herman helped transform untested third string signal caller Cardale Jones into a titan-slaying national champion.
 
He parlayed Ohio State's title run into his first head gig in 2015 at Houston. There, he continued to defy the odds, becoming just the fourth head coach in NCAA history to win 13 games in his rookie season (Chris Petersen, George Woodruff, Walter Camp). In two years with the Cougars, Herman posted a remarkable 5-0 record as an underdog including wins over blue bloods like Florida State in the 2015 Peach Bowl and Oklahoma in 2016.
 
Texas leads the Big 12 – and ranks no. 4 nationally – in offensive plays per game with 78. That figure – which suggests an unbridled, up tempo attack -- isn't necessarily a true representation of the style of offense the Longhorns might feature at Mountaineer Field.
 
In its first six games of the year, Texas was all about tempo, ripping off 83 snaps per contest. But then its quarterback, center and both tackles missed time due to injuries at which point the Longhorns seemed to revisit their philosophy on running their snap counts up higher than the thermostat at Grandma's house.
 
Over the last four games, Texas has slowed the pace, averaging during that time a pedestrian 71 plays per outing. With a scrappy difference maker behind center, a deep receiving corps that features eight pass catchers with double-digit grabs (WVU only has four), an offensive line close to full strength and an innovative staff that knows how to weaponize their skill players, the Horns offense can be a handful when firing on all cylinders.
 
What makes these Longhorns so much more dangerous than last season's version, however, is how opportunistic they have been. A year after not scoring a single defensive touchdown, Texas leads the nation with six. All told, Texas has scored 79 points off takeaways while only allowing the opposition 10 off the Longhorns' 13 turnovers. That margin (plus-69 points) is in stark contrast to how Texas fared in this area in 2016 (minus-27 points).
 
Throw in the game tape, and it doesn't take long to see that this Horns' defense challenges you with a laundry list of looks – particularly from a coverage and blitz package standpoint -- and those looks are executed by dynamic playmakers at every turn. The numbers bear this out. The Longhorns rank No. 8 nationally in third down defense and have forced a three-and-out on 54 of their opponents' 140 possessions (No. 7 in the country) while ending 18 more drives with a takeaway.

The Texas defense has always been populated by explosive athletes blessed with the potential to flip the script in a game with a single play. Under defensive coordinator Todd Orlando this year, that potential is being realized. Through 10 games, the Longhorns have already matched or exceeded their interception total from three of the last four seasons and have held five opponents to less than 100 yards rushing after limiting just five to less than 100 yards from 2013-16 combined.
 
Quick hits:

• In conference play (seven games), Texas has the best turnover margin (plus-6) in the Big 12.
• The West Virginia defense has recorded 69.5 tackles-for-loss so far ... already 8.5 more than the 61 they finished with in 2016.
• For the first time since 2010, the West Virginia defense has held its first 10 opponents to less than 45% on third down.
• Will Grier leads the nation with 20 completions of 40-plus yards.
• Since the start of the 2015 season, no team in college football has completed more passes of 50-plus yards than the 34 by West Virginia. (Skyler Howard had 11 in 2015 and 2016; Grier has 12 this year)
• Gary Jennings Jr. has moved the sticks 14 times w/catches on third down — tops in the Big 12. Ka'Raun White is nipping at his heels, tied at No. 2 with 12.
• The top 50 scorers in college football include 32 place kickers, 11 running backs and six quarterbacks but just one wide receiver: WVU's David Sills V. He ranks No. 3 (11.2 points/game). This is a big part of the reason Sills was recently announced as one of 10 semifinalists for the Biletnikoff Award, given annually to the nation's premier pass catcher.

And finally …
 
By not scoring a point in the second half in each of the past two weeks, the Mountaineers pulled off a tricky pair of wins over Iowa State and Kansas State. For those wondering when the last time a West Virginia team – or any other team, for that matter – managed to win two straight contests without scoring a point after the intermission, we turned to WVU's director of football communications Mike Montoro.
 
Monty reached out to his contacts in the statistical underground and they returned the following information. Researching through a database that reaches back to 1996, it was discovered that – since that season – such a feat (back-to-back wins without scoring after the half) has been achieved only two times in FBS football. One of course was when the Mountaineers pulled it off over the last two games and the other was when Michigan State did so earlier this year with a 17-10 win over Iowa (Sept. 30) and a 14-10 win over Michigan (Oct. 7). 
 
Might the weather have an effect this weekend? It's pushing 80 degrees in Austin these days but Saturday at Milan Puskar Stadium we're expecting a not-so-warm afternoon with some elements.
 
Be sure to bring your rain gear.
 
And maybe a butterfly net.
 
I'll see you at the 50.