Jock Sanders caught 69 passes last year. In the two years before that spent as the main pass-catching option in offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen_’s decidedly more pass-happy offense, he caught 72 and 59 balls.

Brad Starks was on all three of those teams and is a senior this year in Dana Holgorsen’s first season with the Mountaineers. Starks caught all of 65 passes combined those three years. Tavon Austin was a sophomore last season. He caught 58 balls.

Yet already you get the sense those numbers are going to go up this season. Way up.

WVU is going to throw the ball in 2011. A lot. And someone has to catch those passes. Going solely on Wednesday’s first practice, it might be the other team, but ideally, it’s going to be Austin or Starks, Sticks or Stedman Bailey or J.D. Woods. Or someone not yet on the radar.

Trace the history of this offense, not only at Oklahoma State and Houston and Texas Tech, but also at Stephen F. Austin, where WVU’s new inside receivers coach Shannon Dawson was an offensive coordinator, and someone always gets 100 balls. It’s actually a measure of success because if this guy gets 100, then that guy gets 80 and that guy gets 65 and that guy gets 40. The Mountaineers believe they have options for this guy and that guy, as well as a simple plan to make it happen.

“Throw the ball more to him,” he answered.

Duh!

“That’s just the way it is,” Dawson said. “At Oklahoma State, Justin Blackmon I think caught 19 balls the year before (actually, it was 20, but who’s counting) and he caught 111 last year. Do you think he was thrown the same number of balls?”

Let it be noted that the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State, in his first and only year there, was the same Dana Holgorsen who now runs the WVU offense.

Understand, Blackmon wasn’t exactly a world beater until Holgorsen got his hands on him. At Plainview High in Ardmore, Okla., he caught 61 passes as a senior with 14 touchdowns. He was “only” a three-star recruit, according to Rivals.com, and was listed at No. 91 among wide receiver prospects in the class of 2008.

Last year he was the Big 12’s Player of the Year and winner of the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top receiver.

The fact of the matter is in this offense, having a 100-catch receiver is commonplace.

“We’ve had a 100-catch receiver probably in the last five years, every year,” said Dawson, who was talking about the people who run this offense. “I had a kid catch 120 two years ago. Blackmon caught 100 and whatever last year. A kid at Texas Tech caught 130-some one year. That’s not out of the norm.”