Play No. 2!

Brendan Ferns was going to be and still is going to be a good player. ACL injuries, traumatic as they may be, don’t end careers. I don’t know that they make your knee better, like Tommy John surgery seems to do for a pitcher’s elbow, but the operation and the recovery are seemingly formulaic these days. Karl Joseph is to be doing just fine, thank you very much.

The next several months are going to stink. But inside of a year from now, WVU can anticipate a healthy Dravon Askew-Henry and a healthy Ferns back in practice and back to what they were doing before they were hurt.

That doesn’t do much for the defense today, though, and the consequences  for the Ferns injury are a little bit different than they are for the Askew-Henry injury … especially because it happened so quickly after the first.

I have to think that’s the part that really stings — it happened again. That’s four ACL injuries in 11 months — Joseph, Askew-Henry, Ferns and Jaleel Fields, who was merely running in the summer when he joined the list. Joseph’s injury shook the team for a while. Askew-Henry invited deja vu, and that feeling visited the same people who were hit hardest by what happened to Joseph. Ferns was hurt Monday, and he, like the others, is on defense. The players on that side of the ball barely had time to soak in Saturday’s scrimmage, in which the defense did very well, and exhale to say, “OK, we’re going to be all right.” Instead, it was, “Oh, come on. I hate feeling like this.”

At the minimum, what happened to Ferns bugs the defense because it just keeps happening and it keeps standing in the way of that the players and coaches want to do and were even doing. It’s not easy to get up after one of these. After two? After four? This is a test for the Mountaineers, who already knew people on the outside had their doubts about 2016.

Ferns is not a more valuable player, but I think there’s an argument to be made that he’s a little tougher to replace than Askkew-Henry. Again, that doesn’t mean the loss, at its root, is bigger. No one would make that case. But the Mountaineers don’t have too many obvious ideas to pursue right now as they do with Askew-Henry. WVU is again fortunate to have some time to workship its ideas, and there may even be an unexpected benefit, as there may be for replacing Askew-Henry.

We think there’s a pretty clear, or at least pretty reasonable, way to fill in for Askew-Henry — it occurs to me “replace” is a bad word, so let’s stop that right here. Jeremy Tyler can play the position, but he can also play spur and let someone like Toyous Avery give free a whirl. It’s not as transparent for Ferns, though he’s not a first-teamer in any of WVU’s packages. Askew-Henry, of course, was.

But Ferns had a spot, and you recruit a guy like that and get excited when you land him because he’s supposed to make a difference sooner rather than later. He was doing just that. Remember, he was, like, the fourth-team middle linebacker when camp opened, and he raced up to No. 2. There wasn’t a question Al-Rasheed Benton was first and Ferns was second.

I’d be surprised if Hodari Christian gets much traction, though if he does, it would be earned and it would be a wonderful story. He’s a redshirt junior who’s played nine snaps in college.

Instead, I think Justin Arndt handles the backup snaps, and we’re talking 15 or so, maybe three series, in an ordinary game. But Arndt, who maybe should have made the All-Camp team over Ferns because he’s healthy, had his best offseason and preseason. Though he’s the Sam linebacker, he knows all the spots and checks a lot of boxes for a middle linebacker. When WVU played that 3-1-7, Arndt was the linebacker.

That also gets Xavier Preston on the field, and I have not checked out on him. No one has. He’s just going to miss the first game, which makes those 15 or so snaps tricky in the opener against Missouri. Maybe Arndt gets them, but who plays the Sam? I’d guess Sean Walters, the Will who also knows all three positions. If that happens, or if Walters plays middle at all under any circumstances, David Long takes the field at Will. If you feel a little bit better about a post-Askew-Henry existence because it gives you a look at Kyzir White at spur, you might feel similarly satiated by more action for Long.

One housekeeping item: @cmanderson247 was first with the Ferns news. Some people are keeping score, and I wasn’t aware of that. But I really didn’t know Chris had it, either. I didn’t even know it was a big deal. I got a tip around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, and I pursued it, confirmed it and shared it. That, it turns out, was about two hours after Chris did the same that morning. I’d be lying if I said I scanned social media first to see if anyone else had it. Just posted it and went back to work, and a lot of that was answering Tweets. But I got a terse email yesterday, and that was the first time I’d stopped to even consider who was first and if I was first. Chris and I discussed this. It’s fine, and he couldn’t care less about the ethics of the situation, but I do.