The numbers suggest it’s hard to sack the quarterback these days, and simply watching games and noting the size, speed and mobility of these passers should reinforce all of that. But West Virginia and Arizona State are exceptions to the rule. Both are good at getting sacks — the Sun Devils lead the country in that — and both re about as bad as getting sacked — the Sun Devils are one of the worst in the country in that category.

So the two quarterbacks are in the crosshairs tomorrow in the Cactus Bowl, and the Mountaineers have a plan for how to get Arizona State’s Mike Berkovici on the ground.

“What I try to teach our guys is to identify where does the quarterback most like to establish his set point?” defensive line coach Bruce Tall said. “Is it at seven yards? Eight yards? Nine yards? That’ll tell us where our bend points have to be.”

Defenders can set their destinations in the backfield and map out their path there, but that’s only if the pass doesn’t leave the quarterback’s hands in a hurry, as many do these days. If the timing is right and the defender creates pressure, there’s the matter of actually tackling the quarterback, and that’s complex today because the passers are fast and mobile.

Tall understands that and has given his players additional help.

“Then I tell them where the quarterback likes to escape, because everyone has a comfort zone,” Tall said.

Tall has found that there are four windows quarterbacks use to flee. He studies all of the scrambles and sacks on tape and determines what windows the quarterback will use when the Mountaineers get close.

“You know where you want to get them, which is important because you want to make sure you put them in uncomfortable situations,” Tall said. “You can get pretty good at it when you break it down. We all have comfort zones eventually, so if you study it hard you find some guys use all four windows and some guys tend to favor one over the others.”

That jump step along the sideline triggered certain memories, and Alabama’s Cyrus Jones, who hails from Baltimore, is probably a little too old to get the one comparison. We’re all probably a little older after Jones provided his own point of reference.

Q. Cyrus, you heard Coach mention the punt return and you kind of did the Walter Payton hesitation step and then you put on a heck of a move. What was going on with that move? And, Coach, have you ever seen anything like that before?

COACH SABAN: Yeah, I see him do it in practice. (laughter) He’s done a great job. I mean, we’ve had really good punt returns this year. Unfortunately for us, about half of them have been called back because of penalties. But Cyrus has done a really good job all year, A, of fielding the ball which is the most important thing and being a tremendous threat with a big play that we’ve had several of this year.

Q. Cyrus, what was up with that move?

DB CYRUS JONES: It was something I grew up doing. My favorite player growing up was Tavon Austin, a guy I grew up watching from Baltimore, just really explosive with the ball. He had moves similar. And I kind of patented my game after him growing up. And that was moves I get from him. So you can credit him with those.

 

Keith Patterson left West Virginia in February 2014 with neither warning nor explanation, and it seemed like a surprise back then for someone who’d become a sideline transient. He had four jobs in four years. He once packed and unpacked three times in three months.

His career created a strain, but it turns out the best way to fix that was to move one more time.

“I heard Nick Saban talk about this last week, but sometimes people get so hung up on the job when there’s another side of everything,” Patterson said. “When you’ve got a family and you’re trying to do the best you can for everybody involved, it can really be so difficult. With my family all being in the midwest and traveling east and things like that, I knew this would be a little more convenient from that standpoint.”

Patterson spent most of his career coaching in Oklahoma and was at Tulsa from 2003-10. His stepson Kelby was playing high school football in Oklahoma when Patterson was with the Mountaineers. Patterson’s wife, Melissa, was one of the team moms who helped put together pregame meals on Thursday nights and went to the games on Friday nights.

“Then she would catch a 6 a.m. flight out of Oklahoma City, land in Pittsburgh, drive to Morgantown and get there typically by the end of the first quarter,” Patterson recalled. “She would stay until Wednesday and then go back home to Oklahoma and do it all over again.

“There was about a six-week stretch that second year when she was driving and flying to all these games that just absolutely got the best of her. That was the thing that was so hard for me.”

Patterson’s second WVU season was Kelby’s senior year, and he’d follow Keith and Melissa’s two stepdaughters and one daughter out of the house and on to college the following summer. Patterson was looking for a solution as Graham was looking for a defensive coordinator.

Graham and Patterson were roommates who both played safety at Oklahoma’s East Central University in the 1980s, and Graham later hired Patterson at Allen High in Texas, Tulsa and Pitt.

“I thought, ‘You know what? Now’s probably the time to do this,’” Patterson said.

Urban Meyer is here with Ohio State, readying for tomorrow’s Fiesta Bowl against Notre Dame, but Urban Meyer is here and not broadcasting games or embedded with his family because he was lured out of an early retirement and assured the Buckeyes were right for him and the shifted lifestyle he was made to live.

Leading the recruiting effort back in 2011? That’d be Gordon Gee, who today is WVU’s president but was the commander in chief at Ohio State when the scandal-stricken football program needed and found a football coach.

“He had experienced health problems, and it was important for us to explore and understand those, and I think it was important for him to feel that he could get back into the coaching business,” Gee said.

OSU athletic director Gene Smith did much of the homework, and the Buckeyes were encouraged to go ahead and ask Meyer. Gee and a small group of Ohio State envoys met with Meyer and his wife in a hotel in Atlanta and began to discuss the job.

Everything went well, and the two sides would stay in touch, Smith speaking to Meyer about football matters, Gee handling other areas.

“We never talked football,” Gee said. “The reason is I don’t know a darn thing about football.”

Gee was instead intent on making sure Meyer would be comfortable. Gee understood the culture of Ohio State football and how fans obsess over it and the participants. Meyer grasped all that, and he knew about the tradition he’d be expected to uphold and elevate.

But Meyer also shared with Ohio State a contract he’d signed with his family. If he was going to return to the sideline, he’d have to make promises to improve his health and his relationship with his wife, his two daughters and his son.

Family would come first. He’d take trips with them and keep the lake house. He’d eat three times a day and spend no more than nine hours at the office. He’d find a way to communicate with his kids every day and he’d silence his cell phone when he went to bed.

Gee remembered it as a “powerful” moment, and he’d consistently assure Meyer and his wife he could live that way as Ohio State’s coach.

“I remember every word he said, all of our conversations,” Meyer said.

I was able to catch most of WVU’s easy road win against Virginia Tech, but I had to get to the completely uneventful football practice, which kept me from seeing the end and catching anything Bob Huggins had to say afterward. I’m going to go out on a limb and say he was less-than-thrilled because of turnovers (again), free throws and consistency. He hasn’t ceded much praise throughout this season, and the beat, I assume, goes on as WVU headed immediately for Manhattan, Kan. (I lied. Practice wasn’t completely uneventful. I get the feeling the Mountaineers will get Rushel Shell and Wendell Smallwood back for 2016 and have no idea what Daryl Worley is going to do.)

Since we’re talking a lot about Daryl Worley, let’s ask: Have you forgotten? Buzz Williams will be in the Cassell Coliseum today, of course, when No. 19 WVU and a changed Virginia Tech team square off in a renewed rivalry.

Among Virginia Tech’s top eight scorers, only two players — Justin Bibbs and Jalen Hudson — played in Morgantown on this date one year ago, an 82-51 win by West Virginia in front of 13,330 at the WVU Coliseum.

The Hokies (8-3) and No. 19 Mountaineers (10-1) meet again today (noon, ESPNU) in front of another packed arena, this time the Cassell Coliseum in Blacksburg. The facility holds 9,847 and the game has been an announced sellout for a week.

“All I kept hearing is we don’t have Pitt, we don’t have a rivalry,” Huggins said. “I wanted to have somebody our fans related to and get excited about playing. We played [in Morgantown] at noon a year ago and had 13,000 people and they just sold it out at their place. I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm about these schools playing.”

Fun story: I spoke with Gordon Gee over the phone yesterday for a story I’m working on here, and it was great. Good anecdotes, good detail, everything I needed and in a pinch during a layover in Dallas and an open spot in his schedule. I was typing up his answers as we spoke, and my wheels were already spinning about how I’d write the story.

Then, as we were saying goodbye and hanging up, I looked down at my laptop and the screen was blank. “That was awfully quick to hibernate,” I thought. Yeah. The file was gone. No trace of it. Can’t explain it. I rebooted it and searched everywhere. Nothing.

During the scramble, Gee’s envoy had texted me to ask how it went, and I finally replied, “Great, until …” and then I filled in the blanks, thanked them for their time and took off for Phoenix. I landed two hours later and got a text from the envoy. Gee heard what happened and insisted we do the interview again while he was riding to Lewisburg for president stuff. And it was great again.

So that was, I don’t know, embarrassing and redeeming and kind of funny. But it wasn’t the journalism highlight of my day.

Before that, I was flying from Pittsburgh to Dallas and wrote a story for today’s paper. It was on Daryl Worley, his outstanding season and his future. The future changed pretty quickly when we found out Worley won’t play in the bowl game. I had a long face when Holgorsen was explaining the situation to us, and I asked, “So you’re saying tomorrow’s a bad day to run my Worley story?”

“I would say it’s pretty bad timing,” he replied.

The dynamics are a little different, of course, but it reminded me of Bill Stewart praising Nate Sowers as a “great American” before the 2009 regular-season finale and later revealing Sowers was ineligible for the 2010 Gator Bowl, the final game of Sowers’ career.

For fun, for history and for posterity, here’s the well-intended, poorly-timed Worley story.

Pretty nice scenery for WVU’s practices at Chaparral High here in Scottsdale. (Pretty neat student section for the Firebirds, too.) Dana Holgorsen spoke on the sideline near the goal line you can see for about 10 minutes today, and he wasn’t originally scheduled to do. The Mountaineers opened practice doors a few minutes earlier than anticipated, and then Holgorsen waited around until everyone who was supposed to arrive for the previously slated start of practice was on hand. He then spoke, and when he did, it was pretty clear why he did and why he waited.

WVU has a few personnel concerns as it readies for the Cactus Bowl, chief among them the present and future status of all-Big 12 cornerback Daryl Worley.

Worley missed spring practice following offseason shoulder surgery. He later confessed the time away from football and the time spent working on his upper body more than his lower body during the rehabilitation process cost him early in the season and at the start of Big 12 play.

His response was resounding, and the junior finished the schedule with a flourish. He led the league with six interceptions, 12 pass breakups and 18 passes defended and ranked sixth nationally in interceptions and 13th in passes defended.

He previously said he was seeking feedback from the NFL’s draft advisory board and would use that to decide whether he’d enter the NFL. Holgorsen isn’t sure how this will affect Worley’s decision.

“We did a big report and the report came back that he should stay in school,” Holgorsen said. “I want Daryl on my team. He could be a team captain and a defensive leader and finish what he started when he came here.

“The ball’s in his court. He knows how much we want him here. I hope we get to coach him for a whole year.”

WVU news: Cornerback Daryl Worley, receiver Jovon Durante and defensive end Eric Kinsey academic casualties for the Cactus Bowl.

— Mike Casazza (@mikecasazza) December 30, 2015

In the interest of fairness: Safety Kevin Williams, a freshman who is redshirting but was mentioned early in preseason camp as a possible contributor in 2015, is also ineligible. I’ll update this when a story is posted.

Suffice to say, the Daryl Worley feature would have looked quite out of place in tomorrow’s early edition. Quick thinking by the Gazette-Mail copy desk.