A year ago, Clint Trickett was plodding through an orientation class on WVU’s offense. Now he’s lecturing in front of an attentive locker room about “400 level stuff, very advanced stuff,” he says.

It’s not new plays or trick plays or things you’ve never seen from Dana Holgorsen and/or West Virginia before. It is instead a level of comfort and control and camaraderie that just didn’t exist last season, which means it’ll be things you haven’t seen from Trickett or his no-longer-new-to-college teammates.

You’ll be able to recognize and appreciate it on the field Saturday, though there might not be a ton of opportunities to show it off.

A simple unspoken signal with a receiver, be it a quick look or a subtle hand movement, can set up any one of a handful of routes. It helps that the receiver has been around long enough now to not only understand Trickett’s hints, but to know what area the defense will open and where to run the route.

“Clint’s going to have a lot of leeway,” Dawson sad. “The kid’s a smart kid. He understands the layout of the defense, but the biggest thing is he understands where we want to attack a certain defense. That’s probably the best thing we’ve been doing really. He gets the ball to the weak spot. Every defense has a weak spot. Every one. It doesn’t matter what play.

“The key to playing quarterback is to get the ball out on time to that weak spot. He’s been doing a good job of that, and we’ve got to keep stressing it, but he has a good understanding of the layout and he understands the way the safeties’ movements are and the way linebackers void out areas of the defense and he understands that’s where he needs to attack.”