Really, this isn’t a secret. Dana Holgorsen has always been obsessed with notching positive plays and avoiding negative ones. We got that impression when we first got to know him last year and those who have known him far longer thought that focus would really help in his first season at WVU.

It’s only somewhat novel as a concept. All coaches want the same thing, but maybe not with the same emphasis. You’ll listen to some and they talk about converting third downs or scoring touchdowns rather than kicking field goals in the red zone. They want a certain number of explosive plays ever game or to reach some sort of magic threshold for rushing attempts or passing yards or something like that in a game.

Dana probably has some of those, but he’s narrowed it down to a much finer point: Positive plays. No second-and-12. No three-yard loss on second down after an eight-yard gain on first down. Avoid those losses and you can accomplish some of those larger goals, for sure.

WVU got away from that late last season and fully admits it. The second-half romp in the snow at Rutgers was a little like football pyrite and it seemed to dupe the players into thinking they were very good — and this is their confession, not my projection. So they lost to Louisville and had “a struggle” — more of WVU’s words — to end the schedule against Cincinnati, Pitt and South Florida.

What’s the one thing that arches your brow most right now? It seems to me people wonder and worry about the effect the Orange Bowl will have. Was that pyrite, too? Was that one 70-point night a bit misleading because nothing was as easy in the games to precede it? Has the rest of the college football public, some of it with the ability to rank and vote for the Mountaineers, overlooked that, or just flat-out missed it? And what does the subsequent hype do to WVU?

Great questions that, obviously, we cannot have answered for quite some time. Yet the Mountaineers, more than anyone else, seem plugged into the very same set of questions. To hear them address it, the Orange Bowl isn’t a poison pill as much as it is a reminder for what WVU has to do and what WVU cannot let happen again.

“We started looking for home run plays too much,” WVU wide receiver Stedman Bailey said. “This year, we take a look back at last year and realize, ‘OK, we were trying to come up with the big plays too early or too much.’ We know we need to play our game, which is to go play by play and just get positive yards.”