By the time the ball is teed up Sept. 5 and WVU and Georgia Southern commence the season-opener, it’ll have been 22 months since Jared Barber last played what he calls a “real football snap.” The last one, with no offense to the many he banked throughout the past spring, was the final one in the overtime loss to Texas in 2013.

He tore the ACL in his right knee and then suffered a lengthy setback in rehabilitation thanks to a MRSA infection that he and his doctors just could not shake. (That, it turns out, was a bothersome blessing, because without it, he ends up playing last year and walking away with what could be considered an incomplete career.)

But he’s back now. He looked good in the spring. Everyone says he’s at his best right now. The coaches will even grant him time off every now and then because they trust he’s not going to miss some reps here and there, which is rare and at the same time enlightening.

But honestly, how good is he? How can we know right now?

Here’s a way to look at it: Barber’s good enough that he’s keeping Xavier Preston, an apparent monster, on the sideline. You think about that.

“If he’s not an all-conference player next year,” Barber said, “I’ll be very surprised.”

Preston is a backup, though, because the Mountaineers are good enough at linebacker to keep a player like that out of the starting lineup. When spring football had come and gone, Gibson said nobody on his talented and experienced defense was better than Preston.

What Gibson considered before the spring proved to be more important. He knew it would be asking a lot to throw Preston into the top spot at Sam linebacker, where Wes Tonkery finished fourth on the team in tackles as a senior the year before.

“Going into the spring, nobody knew who he was,” Gibson said. “He was a freshman who’d played a few snaps and played mostly on special teams. He was still learning a little bit.”

So Gibson made some preemptive maneuvers, sliding Nick Kwiatkoski from the middle, where he led the team in tackles, to Sam and trusting Barber would return to form and maybe exceed it in the middle. Shaq Petteway, who finally seemed ready to break through after taking over the Will position late in the season, was back, too.

“It was open [competition] for who was going to win the jobs,” Gibson said. “Obviously, Nick won it, but it wasn’t like I said, ‘You get this job and you get that job.’ You still had to go out there and compete.”

The outcome suits the defense just fine. Kwiatkoski, Barber and Petteway are all seniors situated in their natural positions, the places they’d been expected to play when they were recruited to play in Jeff Casteel’s version of the 3-3-5 that Gibson has returned to WVU.

“Me, Kwit and Shaq are the starters right now, and the plan is to play as many snaps as possible,” Barber said. “We don’t plan on coming off the field.”