MORGANTOWN - What's most unusual about the current state of West Virginia's offense is that it looks only a little like past products under Dana Holgorsen. What's most overlooked is that it functions the same.
Think back to Holgorsen's charmingly simple approach to calling plays and operating an offense upon arrival in December 2010: "If you run it and it works, do it again. If you run it and it sucks, you probably shouldn't do it again."
So Holgorsen and his staff of assistants watch film of the opponent and then pick out a handful of plays they believe will work in a game. They go to practice and work on only those plays during the week, choosing to spend their time on what they're going to call and not what they might call. It only gets exotic when the Mountaineers run the same play from various formations.
This is the routine Holgorsen learned and others have learned from him. It's the routine WVU (6-4, 3-4 Big 12) is using again this week as it prepares for Saturday's game (Fox Sports 1 at noon) against Iowa State (3-8, 2-6) at Mountaineer Field.
What's odd, though, is that the Mountaineers are adding things in practice and then in games as this season progresses. That's typically not something Holgorsen does, not because he can't, but because he won't. Even this week, when he was asked about the Cyclones changing offensive coordinators four weeks ago and maybe playing differently, he said, "You can't really change things too much. You have to keep rolling with what you are doing."
Well, you could change things, but you probably wouldn't win as much. The Mountaineers are changing and they're winning. WVU's run the ball on 70.7 percent of its snaps in its three-game winning streak. It was 58.3 percent in the 3-4 start - and that includes 60.3 percent in winning the first three games and 56.9 percent in the four-game losing streak.
Now, teams can change what they're calling without changing what they're running. That doesn't jeopardize anything, and that's what's happened this month. WVU has spent its time in practice focusing on the running plays it's always used in games. Quarterback Skyler Howard and running backs Rushel Shell and Wendell Smallwood are clearly benefiting from all the extra attention the run game gets in practice, but so, too, are the offensive linemen and the skill position players who have a visibly better grasp of blocking.
Yet the Mountaineers have also added running plays to the game plans. They're breaking out traps and counters that weren't there before, and that would seem to be a greater contradiction than Holgorsen's unmistakable preference for running plays.
But that would be wrong. The additions are actually minor alterations to what's already in place, concepts that are easily taught, understood, rehearsed and then executed. The seamless influx of running plays is the best proof yet that Holgorsen's philosophical marriage with offensive line coach Ron Crook is a success.
"I think that's a very valid point," Crook said. "We haven't reinvented football. It's stuff he's probably done at some point in his past and I've done in my past. As soon as we talk about something new we can do, we start talking about, 'OK, who does this change? Does this change anybody's responsibilities?'
"If you've got one or two guys who've got to do something different, well, that's pretty easy to get coached up. If you start talking about changing things for three or four guys, no, we're probably not going in that direction."
The Mountaineers like to run inside zone and outside zone, and the only real difference is whether the running back heads outside or aims inside. That preceded Crook's arrival from Stanford, where he was the tight ends/offensive tackles coach from 2010-11, the first season under Jim Harbaugh and the second under David Shaw. Crook hit Morgantown with Stanford's power run playbook, and pulling guards pressing forward for their running backs became increasingly effective last season into this season.
But it's not just Shell and Smallwood running those plays. The offense has blended Howard into the power game, and the change is again subtle. The snap is actually the handoff, and Howard follows the blocking that's no different than it is for running backs.
In just the past two games, WVU's branched off the power runs by creating the counters. The running backs take a step the way they're not going and then quickly head in the proper direction. The fullback and the pulling guard switch blocking responsibilities. Everything else is the same.
This is getting closer to what Holgorsen and Crook envisioned when Crook reached out after the 2012 season and said he wanted to be Holgorsen's new offensive line coach. Holgorsen asked Crook, a Parkersburg native, why he wanted to leave Stanford. Crook said he didn't, but he did see an opportunity to do something perhaps strange and potentially seismic at WVU.
"One of the things he said was, 'We need to change the mentality of our football team,'" Crook remembered. "That told me about him as a coach realizing when things need to be changed and realizing when he needs to adapt his beliefs and his philosophies to move in a different direction because he sees how it's going to help his team."