By either metric, either the Geno influenced 25 carries for 25 yards of the sans Smith 19 carries for 41 yards, West Virginia’s running attack was not effective against Maryland.

Isn’t that right?

“We try to average one yard a carry, so I think that’s pretty good,” offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said.

Oh. Well, never mi — wait a minute …

I’ll throw out two life preservers here. For starters, Maryland’s defensive line was pretty good and did some funky stuff, namely twists, that put the linemen and the running backs in conflict.

So there is a shared blame and we’ve already covered some of the failures by some of the running backs to properly pick up the blitz.

Really, once a lineman passes off a defender, as instructed, it’s out of his hands. Sometimes when the defensive end hits the quarterback, we miss that it was the running back who failed to hit the defensive end.

Additionally, WVU’s quarterback could have done a better job getting rid of the ball a few times, too.

Still, the offensive line had its share of bad moments and did not drape itself in glory — and that came a week after Dana said repeatedly the group was “soft” against James Madison.

I’ll allow it, but not if that’s the start of a streak. And I’ll say this about Joe Madsen: That guy’s a teammate. He might not agree with what he’s saying, but he’ll say it for a larger purpose. That’s why the guys like him — and J.D. Woods is popular, too, in case you were curious.

The other component is who was running the ball. Nothing against Andrew Buie, but he didn’t belong carrying the ball 20 or 25 times Saturday. Not that he couldn’t, but he shouldn’t.

Alston has a reputation for absorbing injuries. So, too, does Buie. With Alston out, WVU didn’t need to push Buie into the wood chipper, too. So 14 carries felt about right.

Not enough for the bigger picture, for sure, but who else do the carries go to? Alston is out. Garrison is not himself. Clearly Ryan Clarke is not an option. That’s all you have. It was hard to ask WVU to run the ball much more than 19 times, just like it’s hard to be impressive with 19 carries.

Yet the Mountaineers felt like they weren’t far from a far better day.