West Virginia’s coaches made a decision early on to handle No. 10 cautiously and constructively during his first spring. Skyler Howard, Chris Chugunov, William Crest and David Sills were, without question, ahead of him on a depth chart, and Saunders was on campus when he could have been getting ready for prom and high school graduation.

In short, the Mountaineers didn’t need him, which is not to say Saunders didn’t need the spring. He was there, and WVU would use him, but only in ways to benefit him. Mike Burchett, the graduate assistant who’s coaching the quarterbacks, explained the plan following the ninth practice. “We feel like we’ve got pretty good depth, so this is really an ideal situation. We can bring him in and we don’t have to rush him. That can ruin a kid’s confidence when you bring him in early and throw him into the fire before he’s ready.”

Saunders had taken a few live reps here and there, and he’d also missed a Saturday practice to go to prom, but Burchett was mostly pleased with what he saw. The expectations were realistic. Saunders knew what to do, but everything was happening really fast.

Turns out the last two weeks went even better for Saunders, who played and played pretty well late in the Gold-Blue Game.

Saunders, who passed for 4,753 yards and 37 touchdowns and ran for 2,230 yards and 24 scores in his prep career, completed 6 of 7 passes for 92 yards and a 29-yard touchdown pass to freshman Marcus Simms, who might be pretty good already even though he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, and a 25-yard pass to David Sills.

The latter was a promising play.

That’s not the greatest view, but Saunders doesn’t dart in the presence of danger. He rolls right and keeps his eyes open. A lot of other players would have run forward — or worse, backward — at the first sign of trouble, and many would have scrambled for yards or searched for the sideline once outside the pocket. Saunders instead made a sharp throw on the run, and that gave the offense a touchdown.

Um, Saunders might have better mechanics than Crest and Sills. It just looks better coming out of his hand. He stays on top of his throws. The nose of the ball is down. Nothing sailed. He’s not a better quarterback right now than either of them, but I suspect he’s not terribly far behind now and that he has the capacity to grow over the summer.

“He looked good,” Dana Holgorsen said. “We haven’t put him in that situation much this spring. We’ve eased him into it, because we’ve got a lot of quarterbacks that we can rep, but over the last week-and-a-half, we’ve noticed that things are starting to make sense to him, so we repped him more, and the more we’ve repped him the better it starts looking.”

Saunders had coaches talking after the game, and that was not to be expected. Honestly, I wonder how much he would have played if Chris Chugunov was able to go. But he was out with a bum shoulder that needs rest, and we’ve heard something similar evolve into something significant before. We also know Crest and Sills are, at most, moonlighting at quarterback and that Holgorsen has been pretty clear that Sills — and perhaps Crest, too, by extension — will never become a good quarterback or receiver until he locks himself into one or the other. A lot is yet unwritten, and to be fair, Saturday didn’t write much, but perhaps Saunders solves some problems.