At first glance, that’s just a backhoe and it’s parked outside the Puskar Center waiting to do its part as West Virginia builds a new team room right there on the corner of the program’s headquarters.

“I’m just excited to walk outside and see machinery and a fence,” Mountaineers coach Dana Holgorsen said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever start building the team room or not, but at least we have something fenced off.”

Oh, they’ll start, and Holgorsen knows that, and the idea is to have the room done and ready to debut for the Kansas State game Nov. 20.

But for now, Holgorsen and everyone else over there is fine with idle equipment.

“You can point to it with every recruit,” said Alex Hammond, the director of football operations.

That’s not a joke. That’s sincere. A caterpillar or a front loader or an auger or anything suggesting breaking ground, moving earth and building something new are things recruits want to see.

“That’s what Alex and I have been talking about for years,” Holgorsen said. “You can’t be a top-20 program unless you have a crane in your parking lot. I just want to rent one and park it out there.”

Renting or, heck, buying one would be cheaper than what WVU has planned for the Puskar Center and Mountaineer Field, but anything that’s going to be done over there is going to require yellow machines and equipment for a long time.

“Then,” Holgorsen said, “we can say, ‘Look, we’re building!’ “

That plan is already in action. The Mountaineers played host to an important recruiting camp over the weekend. Kids had to walk past the backhoe again and again. They got to move around inside the Puskar Center, where the photo murals are down and simple cosmetic fixes are happening.

Does it matter? Well, the Mountaineers did get a 2015 commitment Monday from a quarterback — “the most under-recruited kid on the East Coast if not the entire country” — who was here for the camp.

“They see paint, that’s what they want,” Hammond said. “That’s progress. That’s not run down. That’s progress.”