There’s something charming about the dormant period before a bowl game and the possibilities involved with what coaches will do with their idle minds. Do they install a new offense? Do they work on trick plays? Really, what’s happening in all those closed practices? Why are their snipers atop the press box? When did they get a moat?

And when you have the circumstances preceding today’s Liberty Bowl, you have to wonder even more. Texas A&M and West Virginia have the same offense. The head coaches have worked together. Texas A&M’s offensive coordinator the past two seasons was WVU’s quarterbacks coach the two seasons before that. And that coordinator, Jake Spavital, picked up the phone when he learned of the bowl matchup and now famously called his former mentor to tell Dana Holgorsen, “I know all your signals.”

WVU already had towels and play boards and hand signals. I’m prepared for anything today. Morse Code,  carrier pigeon, Hmong, flares, chimney smoke. Anything.

But then Sunday the coaches poured water on it all. Holgorsen said he knows their offense because it’s his offense, and the same is true on the other side. His counterpart, Kevin Sumlin, said signal strength doesn’t matter, either.

“Much like I told my team, you can watch all the tape you want, and we’ll have a good feel for everything, but the coaches aren’t playing this game. The players are,” he said. “Last time I checked, even if you know the signals, people can’t hear you out there if you yell them out.”

There remains a little intrigue, though, no matter how much the Aggies try to downplay it. They fired their defensive coordinator at the end of the season because, bluntly, Mark Snyder’s group had a bad year and things needed to change. Fast.

Above all else, you have to win your bowl game. You don’t prepare for next season, no matter how many developmental practices you get. The bowl exists for one team to win and one team to lose, so you better believe interim defensive coordinator Mark Hagen has spent a month trying to win this game by first trying to fix his defense.

Hagen, who has been in charge for 11 practices now, said there wasn’t enough time to make sweeping changes or to tailor a lot of things to his specifications on defense. He did, however, have time to watch every down from the season and keep the good and bad in mind as he put together a plan for WVU.

The Aggies are No. 70 in scoring defense, No. 101 in total defense. No. 62 in pass defense and No. 111 in rush defense.

“We kind of picked out some of the things every game that we liked and we tried to adapt them to what we do as a team,” he said. “I don’t want to handcuff our guys and try to do everything Monday night. I think we’ve installed a plan that our defensive staff and our guys feel comfortable with, but at the same time gives us a little buffer, a little bit of protection on the back end to contend with Kevin White.”

The Aggies may not be new, but they can be different and WVU is bound to be surprised here and there. It’s one of the most interesting subplots to  game that doesn’t have too many apart from the obvious ones. Exactly what Texas A&M chooses to do is something of a mystery. A minor one, but a mystery all the same.

What WVU will do defensively is anything but sneaky, at least in conception. Presentation? It’s damn sneaky. The defense will line up in the odd stack 3-3-5 defensive coordinator Tony Gibson prefers and restored this season, his first in his position, and the one that earned a new contract and a hefty raise.

His aim is to make freshman quarterback Kyle Allen uncomfortable and prone to mistakes, and the 3-3-5 does that.

This, of course, is the defense Gibson learned during his first stay at WVU and what he mastered through the years with Jeff Casteel at WVU and later Arizona. And it’s quite a story that begins with someone else’s misguided trip to Columbia, S.C., before the 2001 season.

Dean Hood, who was Rich Rodriguez’s defensive coordinator at Glenville State from 1990-93, had been Jim Grobe’s defensive backs coach at Ohio in 1999-2000 when Grobe was the Bobcats’ head coach. When Grobe was hired by Wake Forest in 2001, Hood followed.

Grobe was a well-known defensive coach who was very good with linebackers and, as such, preferred the 3-4. Grobe gained a great dose of fame when he was an assistant at Air Force and the Falcons, oddly enough, overcame some shortcomings to stun Ohio State in the 1990 Liberty Bowl.

“Grobe was one of the innovators of the 3-4,” Hood said. “He ran the old slant-and-angle 3-4 defense, which really was a huge innovation at the time. He and Cal McCombs got to be pretty good at it, and Grobe always liked the odd front. He offered me the defensive coordinator job at Wake and I took it and he told me he wanted to be an odd front defense, so I had to go learn a little more about it.”

Hood’s college roommate at Ohio Wesleyan was former WVU assistant Todd Fitch, who at the time was the receivers coach for Lou Holtz at South Carolina. Hood called Fitch because he knew the Gamecocks were an odd front team and had some good ideas. Fitch insisted Hood visit, and Hood loaded up a van and traveled down to SEC country.

“To me, it was a chance to talk ball with Todd and those guys for a few days and learn some defense,” Hood said.

They got to work the first day, but it wasn’t long before Hood perked up.

“Where the hell’s the fourth linebacker?” he asked.

“No one told you?” South Carolina’s defensive coordinator said. “We’re a 3-3.”

Hood wasn’t sure if Charlie Strong was joking or not, but for 2 1-2 days Hood and his assistants studied the 3-3 and took enough notes to fill a notebook and build a playbook.

“I knew we’d just used a bunch of Grobe’s money to go down there to get something we didn’t want, but I thought we could use it as a situational defense and we could use some of the odd front ideas,” Hood said.

Wake Forest fell to 2-2 after a 48-24 loss to Florida State, and Grobe and Hood started talking. Hood knew Grobe was wary of his defense and the personnel.

“We can’t run what we’re running,” Grobe said. “We don’t have the outside linebackers to run a 3-4. We’re going to get killed if we keep running this. Show me that 3-3 stuff you said you got down at South Carolina.”

Now Hood wasn’t sure if Grobe was joking or not, but he started to diagram some plays and formations on the board.

“OK,” Grobe said, “that’s what we’re going to do.”

“You mean as a changeup?” Hood replied.

“No,” Grobe said. “That’s what were going to be now.”

Waiting for Hood and the Demon Deacons defense that week? Phillip Rivers and North Carolina State.

“Grobe stands up and walks by me, pats me on the butt and says, ‘Get going,’” Hood said.

Hood bumped both outside linebackers out of the starting lineup and kept the two middle linebackers on the field. He moved one safety to bandit and a cornerback to spur, which was a way to get a freshman cornerback by the name of Eric King on the field. King grew up to be a pretty good player.

“Then I had to figure out how to fit everything into the playbook, which I wasn’t prepared for,” Hood said. “I figured it’d be a situational deal and then all of a sudden it became our defense, and it was a trial-and-error deal that year.”

Wake Forest gave the Wolfpack fits and led 14-3 in the fourth quarter, but lost 17-14. Wake would run the defense for three seasons and Grobe eand Hood would get  a lot of outside interest in what they were doing, including from WVU in its early days with Rodriguez after the 2001 season. Rodriguez’s Clemson offense had been flummoxed by Mississippi State and defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn’s 3-3-5 in the 1999 Peach Bowl.

“I remember Todd Graham, who was Rich’s defensive coordinator at the time, found me at a coaching convention and said, ‘Rich wants to talk to you about this defense you’re running,’ and I showed him some 3-3,” Hood said. “Then a year later, Casteel and Gibby came with the rest of the staff. By then, we’d been doing it a while at Wake and we had some knowledge of it and we’d made some mistakes and learned all we could about it through the process, so we had a pretty good handle on it.”

The following season, which was 2003, Wake Forest was getting ready to play Maryland in an ACC game late in the schedule. Hood was studying the Terrapins on film and stopped to see what WVU had done earlier in the same season.

“I remember watching the film and going, ‘Son of a bitch, they came up here and got that from us and they’re running it better than we are. Maybe we ought to go up there,’ ” Hood said.

The Demon Deacons were done with the odd stack after the season. They’d done a nice job recruiting defensive linemen and had 15 or 16 in the program and only two seniors in the group. It made sense for them to go to a 4-3, which Hood was used to. Casteel and Gibson then put a lid on their variation of the 3-3-5, and to this day Gibson says he will not open up his doors to a young or curious coach wanting to learn his secrets.

“We’ll never give them everything,” Gibson said. “We’ve always discussed this as a staff. You want guys to feel like they can come in and talk ball, but we won’t every give it away. That’s when you start to get problems. You get something going and people want to come in and talk about it so they can have it, and then they give it to somebody else. I don’t want to have that happen because the truth is, even though more people are doing this now, we’re so much different than everyone else, even different than what Jeff’s doing at Arizona.”

And after much fanfare, we’re ready for the Liberty Bowl. I’ll try to give you everything.