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Everything, um, tastes better when you’re winning, and Dana Holgorsen has been sipping on victories for a while now.

We’re witnessing a run that’s spanned just shy of a calendar year now, and it’s always useful to evaluate coaches on the course of a 12- or 13-game stretch, which in the case of a Big 12 team ought to include three non-conference games and nine conference games and, if you’re willing, a bowl. The Mountaineers are one Saturday away from a 12-game segment, and they enter this weekend’s game against TCU with a 10-1 record — four non-conference wins (one in a bowl, one in a second neutral site) and seven Big 12 games (4-0 at home, 2-1 on the road).

This has been good football, and this has been good Holgorsen. Let’s call it Good: Holgorsen.

I come at it from a different angle and with different interests, but Winning Dana is always the best Dana. The other versions are good — I like Salty Dana and Brutally Honest Dana when things aren’t going this well — and I think a lot of beat writers and columnists would tell you that it’s easier and, I’m sorry, more fun to cover a team that’s not as successful as this one. But this is fun. WVU football and, dare I say, college football are better, more palatable, when Holgorsen is winning and acting like this.

“This?”

Yeah. Akimbo visor. Messy hair. Touchdowns. Formations. Celebrations. Tantrums. Red Bull. There were some Mad Scientist moments Saturday and moments like the one from Monday.

On the Big 12 teleconference, someone told Holgorsen the television cameras showed him slugging Red Bull on the sideline and then asked whether he’s ever been offered an endorsement deal.

“I’m really happy with Coca-Cola,” he said. “They do a great job.”

Coca-Cola, you probably suspect, has a campus-wide sponsorship deal with West Virginia University.

“They caught me in a weak moment,” Holgorsen said. “I like variety. I slammed one of those and then got back to drinking Coca-Cola and Dasani water, like I normally do.”

Good! (Aside: Another subtle dig at “The Administration” Tuesday, and we’re this close to crafting a post in which Dana’s a WWE face and The Administration is constantly holding him back and keeping him from a title shot.)

Before and after that Red Bull, we saw some throwback WVU, which at the beginning of the season is what we thought we might see during the season. This is as close to 2012 as we’ve seen since then.

The four-wide looks are common now, to the point it’s virtually a base set, but it’s still something the offense didn’t do this often last year or the year before. There were weird formations I’ve never seen in practice, never mind a game. The Mountaineers hadn’t used an empty set since, I think, the bowl game. If it happened this season, it was probably a running back motioning out of the backfield as opposed to starting out empty.

But we saw some resets, too. Skyler Howard is running the ball again after taking and needing time to heal his ribs. Two running backs were on the field at the same time, which is starting to happen more and more as Kennedy McKoy gets familiar, because you need there backs if you’re going to use two.

And WVU has a tight end. This could be a big deal.

WVU tried and failed to incorporate Stone Wolfley and/or Rob Dowdy in the first two games of the season. Every other heavy package the offense used after that featured Eli Wellman and Mike Ferns, who are physical presences but not tight ends. But Trevon Wesco is. He’s a 6-foot-5, 260-pound wild card. He’s a big, strong body to put out there at the end of the line, and though he’s still sort of raw — he was a high school basketball star who was injured short of passing and rushing for 1,000 yards as a senior — and he didn’t play at all last season at Lackawanna College because of a knee injury, there’s still promise here.

He played special teams against Kansas State, and he was on the kickoff team Saturday, but here’s his first snap against the Red Raiders. He’s on the left end of the line.

That’ll work. Holgorsen hasn’t used a tight end as feature of the passing game here. Cody Clay succeeded by surprising teams and by being left uncovered. But he helped the run game so much. That was Wesco’s role Saturday. He only got on the field when WVU got close to the end zone. This was inside-the-30 stuff, and the Mountaineers weren’t afraid to use him.

Third-and-5, run a read play to Wesco’s side. He doesn’t do a lot, but he does enough. He’s been practicing for a few weeks now, and the Mountaineers went to the medicine cabinet against a team that wanted to stop WVU’s running game. That did not work, and the Mountaineers had some healthy gains when Wesco was in the game on the way to 332 yards rushing.

WVU has too many skill players to do a lot of stuff with a tight end, especially between the 20s, but Wesco is not Clay. Wesco will give a quarterback a big area to throw to. He can jump and he has big hands. He’ll go to a height linebackers can’t reach. He’ll box defensive backs out of his catching radius. This is definitely worth tracking because of a play that didn’t happen or work.

This is something WVU runs or at least threatens to run quite often. You have to prepare for it. It also calls back to the Howard touchdown run, because the formation is the same and because Howard will run. So when he’s on the edge with the ball in a similar spot on the field, you have to shift your focus to him. That diversion allows Wellman to slip open in the flat and catch passes. Credit the defender here for stopping it, and I’m not sure Wellman would have scored had he caught it, but watch Wesco. He’s trying, without much success, to sell a block and get to the second level so he can angle toward the back corner of the end zone.

Overall, he’s not where he needs to be or where he will be, but he’s not going to be out there unless he has a chance to help the offense. If nothing else, he returned heavy sets to the repertoire and helped for a day, but given all the additions and alterations Holgorsen is making, you sort of believe there can be more to this. It’s the hallmark of a good team and a fun time.

How did we get here? Let’s find out by taking a look at the Good and the Bad of WVU v. Texas Tech.

Programming notes:

1. New format this week: Good or Bad above the video
2. We’re not doing this next week. I have to be in Kansas City Monday and Tuesday for Big 12 basketball media day, and then I jump back into football Wednesday. If you’ve been following this through the years, this is an annual omission.
3. All your comments are appreciated — I read them all and often think, “Ah, good point. Should’ve included that.” We also dig all your efforts to make sure we get as many eyes on this as possible.

Bad: Omens
Pat Mahomes isn’t healthy. He made some poor throws and some bad decisions, but he also does not match up well against what the Mountaineers do. Pull up the 3-3-5 in your mind and focus on what you think of first. That’s probably something that touches on confusion and no pass rush. Well, what does Mahomes do? He wings it, right? He’s either checking into plays before the snap or he’s moving around after the snap. Either way, he’s trying to make something happen, and he wants big plays. WVU doesn’t (want to) allow big plays. It’s constantly shifting shapes and changing looks before the snap, but by now you — and Mahomes — should know that WVU will typically audible after the offense audibles … and I still don’t understand why offenses let WVU do that. Why call Play A, see the defense, change to Play B and then let the defense adjust so it’s no longer defending Play A and can now defend Play B? There has to be a workaround.

… Where was I? … Confusion, right. See? It knows no borders!

But the Mountaineers got out of blitzes that could have hurt them. They got into coverages that helped. Gibson was content to drop seven or eight defenders. The defensive line — and sometimes one linebacker or safety — did pretty well to upset Mahomes. The big plays weren’t there. Every time Texas Tech had to check down or Mahomes decided to run, WVU was happy to rally to the ball and cede a short or intermediate gain. When WVU blitzed, which happened a lot, Mahomes had to throw fast, and WVU was again happy to race to the ball to make a play. The Mountaineers did not think the Red Raiders could maintain that patience and stay out of their own way.

That said, WVU did look really shaky early. Mahomes was in the backyard and flipping the ball on the run 30 yards down the field. If you believed in the mythology of Texas Tech’s offense — big plays, early scores — and were worried about Mahomes getting hot, this was not a good look.

Then again, it’s an off play for a good player. It’s precisely what a free safety is not supposed to do. Tyler made a mess of it, and he’s not someone who ordinarily does that stuff. But that was about it for Texas Tech and the improvised offense. Basically all the other big plays came on short throws and missed tackles, and WVU was able to take advantage of an interception, a turnover on downs, some lousy execution and a bunch of penalties, meaning Texas Tech couldn’t be patient and stay out of its way.

That touchdown was an outlier and not an omen, which is not to say Gibson was willing to accept it in the moment.

 

Good: That defense
I really don’t have a lot of elaborate praise or language to add to what you already know. WVU tethered a very good offense by taking away big plays possibilities, forcing quick action, making tackles and daring the opponent to piece together drives again and again. The blitzes came from odd angles — the outside guy ends up inside — and from unexpected sources — Rasul Douglas swears Mahomes looked right at him and then tried to outrun him — and the way Mahomes reacted to both of those shows how much he was bothered. That’s the WVU recipe for all the opponents. Texas Tech’s offense is more susceptible because it will not run the ball, and WVU was able to focus on a short set of instructions and execute.

I know this is being hailed as a conquest for Gibson and his 3-3-5, but remember the role the opposition played and remember  how well the Mountaineers played. There was some high-level skill and execution involved.

Consider the conflict for Noble Nwachukwu. This could be a run, and he’s left unblocked solely so he goes for the running back and leaves Mahomes free to roll right. Nwachukwu reads that and rewrites the script. He lets the running back go and he takes a sharp route toward Mahomes. He eyeballs the outside shoulder and he doesn’t over run the play. Mahomes has no chance to run, escape or throw.

Texas Tech’s linemen go low — more often than opponents like, and sometimes for no real reason — but Christian Brown had no trouble with that at all. He molts and then moves on Mahomes. It’s really easy to get overexcited when you have a chance to get a mobile quarterback like this, but Brown rolls through this without incident, and I happen to think that sack was a precision strike on the shoulder.

The best part? How many times have we said Brown is not a pass-rusher and pointed out his lack of sacks? Watch him sack and act like he’s been there before. Chillest celebration ever.

This, to me, was as good a representation or as good an indication of WVU’s performance. The alignment is a chore for the offensive line, which is why Gibson goes to it so often, but Texas Tech would seem to be in a good place. In fact, this should probably work. Either everyone standing over the line is blitzing or some people are backing out. Either way, the screen is going to go over the blitz or into group of retreating defenders, who are going to have to deal with the linemen storming up the field.

Just about everyone is blitzing, and motion going to the right is going to cool off some other defenders. That should at least halt pursuit from behind the play. (Aside: I think they could have thrown this to the motion man on the right.) The blitz causes a hurried throw that goes high and screws up the timing, and Brown actually dropped on the play. The blocking is a mess — not uncommon — and Brown and Darrien Howard chas down the ball. I thought this was the defensive line’s best game, and it was also the game that used the most defensive linemen.

Bad: Passing offense

There’s probably a side effect to the pass-first philosophy, even though this isn’t something we’ve ordinarily said or thought about Texas Tech and what’s usually a mean offensive line. But run blocking and pass blocking are different skills, and the way you pass block at Texas Tech, with all those quick throws and a quarterback who can clean up your mistakes, is different. Maybe it’s something the Red Raiders aren’t good at. Maybe those players don’t want to run block. Maybe that’s why they don’t run. But this is second-and-1 against a three-man rush with the linebackers three yards behind the line to reach. Brown is the nose guard, and he just eschews the blocker. He’s the one guy who can’ make this tackle, and he does. If he doesn’t, Adam Shuler, the right defensive end, is coming down the chimney. If he doesn’t, middle linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton is on the scene.

But the game changed in the sequence. It began with the play before this one. A 5-yard run on second-and-6 sets up third-and-1. Mahomes wants to hurry up and sneak it for the first down. For some reason, Texas Tech subs, which means the officials have to let WVU sub. The Red Raiders call a timeout, and then this play happens. The box score credits Kyzir White with this tackle, but watch David Long come down the line. Look at the left tackle. He shoots forward at … I don’t know who he’s supposed to get. I understand the point is to push forward and get a yard, but WVU understood that, too, and had it too easy here. On fourth-and-1, a lineman jumped for a false start. WVU blitzed on fourth-and-6, and Mahomes missed a deep throw up the left sideline.

 

WVU took over, and this was called a lateral. It’s actually one of the most important plays of the game. The “lateral” hits the ground, and it looks like an incomplete pass, but there’s no whistle. Elijah Wellman covers it up anyway, and that was smart because a few defenders were ready to scoop it up and try to score. I think the Mountaineers were surprised by this, because they moved at a normal pace toward third down. I have to think they still try to score on this drive if it’s third-and-4 at the 34-yard line with 57 seconds left. We thought points were going to matter in this game, so a squandered scoring opportunity seemed meaningful. At the end, it felt the more damage was done to the Red Raiders. Their prior drive fell apart and WVU dodged a bullet.

Good: Crawford

Looked like he was on his way to a big day, didn’t it? No way this should go for 12 yards, but he gets the hole because Tony Matteo pulls and hits, (Side Good: He’s getting a lot of action like this.) and then Crawford makes the linebacker miss before he fights for more yardage.

This is an inside zone play, and Crawford sees space to the left, so he cuts it back, but then he sees the same linebacker and again leaves him looking for a hug. Two different plays. Two good results.

All in all, the run game was great. Crawford was on his way. McKoy was slipping through his own alleys and succeeding when receivers were taking a break. But I want to talk about Rushel Shell. He has three 100-yard games against Texas Tech. He had 104 Saturday, but 38 came after his days was over. Shell scored when he met the least amount of resistance imaginable early in the fourth quarter, and McKoy was supposed to finish the game. Just as the freshman opened up on the sideline and really looked like Wendell Smallwood, he landed on his shoulder and left the game. Enter Shell. That couldn’t have been easy, but he was still good, and he went out of his way to score on fourth down. I guess.

 

Good: More Skyler Howard
We need to talk more about the quarterback, who continues to play better then he’s ever played — better than anyone in the country Saturday! — and we might need to talk one day about whether he’s better than 2014 Trickett. Because he might be. When Howard runs, the 2016 offense separates itself from the 2014 offense. When Howard’s healthy, he runs.

He was smart to keep an eye on the defensive end on zone plays early and then he was smarter to keep later in the game to chunk up some big gains. But he was physically able to handle some designed runs.

WVU enjoys a numerical advantage when it calls this play, and Howard’s a good-enough runner to make this work. And, hey, look who’s pulling! And look how Matteo and Wellman work together to block this properly.

Now watch this:

That’s on Howard. The blocking isn’t there, but it’s third down and the quarterback has to make it happen. (Aside: This was not the lone time he stiff-armed a defender to the turf. He’s feeling fine.)

Bad: Texas Tech and what passes for pass defense
So bad. WVU makes you uncomfortable with all its tempo and formations and the variety of personnel combinations. Motion clearly caused some problems, and running backs heading to the flats created confusion Skyler Howard couldn’t miss. He sees two defenders track the back and lose Jovon Durante here and then … I don’t know what happened here, but it’s certainly a mistake WVU caused.

It felt like Texas Tech had something to do with all of WVU’s big pass plays, and a defensive error is usually what creates those openings, but it happened a lot.

We have  motion again, and the defender who was guarding Durante spins back to play deep safety. The player he replaces runs forward to cover Durante, but the defender standing over the open slot is already there. The new deep safety has to get hurry in a hurry, and this is an easy pitch and catch for Howard and Gary Jennings. Again, Texas Tech isn’t very good and looked bad at many points, but WVU had a lot to do with it.

Good: Familiarity

Durante seems to be given something new every week. Remember the reverse for which no one blocked? He’s caught the hot potato before. This week, we saw a play off of that as he ran a route after motioning, which was complemented by a productive pass from Howard.

But we must talk about the touch pass. To me, he was always the most likely to inherit this and succeed. He’s run it before, and this isn’t exactly expertly blocked by Wellman and Crawford, but they do enough because Durante is just fast as hell in the open field. It’s a matter of time with him, and given how they’re finding things he can do, it feels like that time is coming.

https://twitter.com/_field_general/status/787448297430605824

But did you notice the really familiar part of the offense Saturday?

There are two plays here, and we’ll give them both time. The first is sort of what Ka’Raun White can do. The defenses are understandably concerned about getting beat deep, especially if they need to use a safety to play the run. Cornerbacks have to stay back, and Howard and White know this. They’re picking on this — Trickett and Kevin White has a similar game — and get ready for a double move down the road. But for now, Ka’Raun has 23 receptions and 18 first downs — including 5-or-5 on third down.

But the second play? Yeah, that looked like that guy who plays for the Bears now. They’re not the same players, so comparisons are unfair, but I think the coaches would tell you Ka’Raun is better as a junior than Kevin was. Where Kevin was a stronger player who did more in the air and down the field, Ka’Raun is the one who can turn little things into bigger things. Throughout camp, I heard Ka’Raun made catches and plays no one saw Kevin make. Right now, Holgorsen and his receivers coach, Tyron Carrier, are down on the receivers. I believe that’s wholly coordinated and I think that group can be very good before this season is finished.

Good: Without further adieu

 

I know why people are here today, and to quote a Nobel Prize winner, it ain’t me. Look. At. This. I’ve never seen WVU do this. Never. No way Texas Tech was ready for it. How do I know? There are seven defenders in the box and two outside on three Mountaineers. We made a good bit of noise about Howard’s running earlier, so perhaps the Red Raiders were looking for that? I suspect Howard has the freedom to call his number here if the box isn’t this crowded and the pass is accounted for better.

And look, Holgorsen got a lot of crap for red zone woes earlier this season, and though it was very early in the schedule, it was also a continuation of an aged concern and it ran counter to a spoken desire if not necessity to score more points in 2015. Well, time passes, and WVU spent a lot of practice time working on scoring touchdowns. It’s working. Eight red zone visits Saturday produced six touchdowns.

Let’s review the six:

1. Crawford’s 10-yard run with three receivers and a fullback
2. The play in the picture
3. Howard’s zone read right with two receivers to the left and Wesco next to the right tackle
4. Howard’s quarterback sneak
5. Shell’s ridiculously easy run with the diamond formation and Wesco next to the right tackle
6. The end-around to Shell out of the sneak formation

That’s a lot of stuff (anything), and No. 2 was a surprise.

So, what about this formation? I don’t know how many times it’d work, which makes me wonder if WVU needed to show this in this game. Then again, how do you stop that? It’s five yards, and the Mountaineers will take their chances with two fullbacks out front of Crawford, Shell or McKoy. If it doesn’t score, it’s a long handoff that gains some yards. There’s also a chance the next team to see this jumps the pass to the running back, which leaves a fullback open in the end zone — and Ferns ran a route out of the backfield Saturday and was wide-the-heck open.

The other part of this is that there are other receivers in the play. On the far side, it’s a one-on-one, which is good for fades or an out-and-in. The slot receiver intrigues me, too. All the attention is going to go to the trips bunched to the left, and that can leave a corner route open in the back of the end zone, which WVU runs in other formations.

The talk of the tactics, though, was the — what do we call this?

For starters, call it confusing. Watch Texas Tech realize and communicate it. The panic begins at :04. Figure the players and coaches were ready for the stacked receivers. There was a plan for that, I’m sure, and it looks like they played tight on the near side to take away the screen and played back on the far side because they weren’t worried about the longer throw into a screen — if that happened, they’d have time to run over and stop it.

The other defenses have kept a safety deep, but the Red Raiders did not here and actually blitzed the deep middle safety, though it looks like they tried to mayday that once they realized they might be in trouble. Howard sees it, and he knows Daikiel Shorts is going to sweep across the middle and pull a defender with him to open a window for a throw to White on a simple route that White started with the cushion available on that side.

That’s an incredibly insufficient way to explain this. I welcome your thoughts.

Empty sets cause problems, but empty sets with the stacks cause different problems. The slot receiver mucks up a lot of things as far as the matcups go. You can play man-to-man and hope your defensive backs can cover long enough against what’s probably a five-on-five rush, because you need that safety, right? You can play zone and hope you can cover the windows the fleet of receivers will create or exploit, and you have to deal with the same pass rush dilemma.

The real problem is that this is not five receivers. It’s four and a running back. It could work with three receivers and two running backs. WVU could hurry from four-wide or three-wide into this and create a lot of mismatches.

Here’s a separate time WVU used it, and it comes after Texas Tech had a chance to talk about it on the sideline. The defense plays tight against both stacks. This time the deep safety is out-of-the-picture deep. Howard very obviously trusts Shorts, and he makes a pretty good throw here on third down. There’s a risk, but Shorts won the route and has a step on the defender. The reward is a ton of space, because the deep safety is really deep and everyone else is playing man-to-man.

The Red Raiders tried something different here. I think. It could be a mistake. The defenders play back for the bottom stack, and there’s a safety above them (there is, I promise). There’s one defender on the stack up top while another deep safety loiters above them. It looks like the sideline is trying to fix this and possibly asking the middle linebacker to go over there. Maybe. Perhaps no one else saw the sideline was yelling and the middle linebacker took it upon himself. Whatever the case, the ball is snapped and three defenders are on the left side and three defenders are on the right side. A seventh defender covers Shorts in the slot. Time ticks away. WVU’s line is winning five-on-three because a defensive lineman dropped, but that lineman darts forward. Howard sees it all and runs, because, again, there’s a ton of room.

Good luck, everybody.

Photo credit: @realbbbb