Bad news: West Virginia hasn’t identified five starters for the offensive line, which even in the spring should qualify as a surprise for a team that returned five players who started games at the five positions last season.

Good news: WVU has seven players for those five jobs, and that, too, should qualify as a surprise, even in the spring, because one of the seven is a redshirt freshman right tackle.

“I think Yodny, Pankey and Tyler are pretty solid right now,” head coach Dana Holgorsen said. “There’s some competition on the right side, and it has nothing to do with how Bosch or Marcell are doing. It has everything to do with how Colton and Tony Matteo are doing. Those guys are fighting for a job right now.”

It speaks to where he’s at that Yodny Cajuste can miss six games last season, play tight end in the bowl game and be an unquestioned starter today. He, Adam Pankey and Tyler Orlosky should be able to wall off a lot of action on the left side.

The right side is where you have the question marks, and that description feels heavy. I don’t think Tony Matteo’s rise is necessarily a bad thing for Kyle Bosch. Near as I can tell, Bosch has done just fine, but Matteo can play, and he’ll see time at guard and center. Lazard has played about as much college football as Cajuste — a little more, actually — and though he’s a year older, he’s guilty only of not absorbing and expanding quite as quickly, but he has a lot of real estate ahead of him.

The true bright spot so far is Colton McKivitz, who coaches raved about on the scout team last season and who’s spread his wings this spring … and covered a lot of the field. He’s 6-foot-7 and 296 pounds, and, no disrespect to Orlosky, who may be the strongest guy on the team, or Cajuste, who looks like he could play power forward, it doesn’t appear to me that WVU has a body like McKivitz. (He’s large, is what I’m saying, but I suspect Dontae Angus could, uh, fit into this conversation). He could have a future, or he could be the present.

Fortunately for Holgorsen, he has options and he has time to sort through them, but he also has plenty of help as the Mountaineers seek to make sense out of inside and outside spots.

“A lot of people have been asking me, ‘Why’d you hire two o-line coaches,'” he said. “I go, ‘Well there are 20 kids over there. It’s hard for one guy to keep track of.’ There are so many of them. The way the NFL does it, you’ve got two. Everybody has two. Those guys are really working well together. The tackles and the tight ends are getting a lot of individual attention with Coach Wickline, and then Coach Crook’s strength, the reason I brought him here, is what what he could do with the interior o-line and get those guys playing pretty nasty in the run game and the pass game as well.”