Both offenses today are throwing darts, in more ways than one. There are the quarterbacks, who spin it pretty sharply for both WVU and Syracuse, and there are the coaches and players who are made to wonder about what the other side is going to offer and have had to do a little guesswork in their preparation.

It begins with the Orange, who have no footage of a WVU defense coached by Keith Patterson. They’re expecting WVU to do a lot of the good stuff from the first 12 games that would project to work against the things Syracuse likes to do, but they’re also going back to their game against Pitt last season.

And so, too, is Patterson.

“The biggest thing I do is re-familiarize myself with the personnel and see if anything we did to those guys might have helped,” Patterson said. “But that was at Pitt and we were completely different than what we are right now at WVU. But, obviously, it did help to go back and look.”

“They blitz non-stop,” Smith said. “There’s no rhyme or reason for it. They send five guys over one side at a time. It’s really unsound football, but that’s the way they play.”