MORGANTOWN - Al-Rasheed Benton is, if nothing else, honest.
"I'm an easy-going guy," West Virginia's junior linebacker said from the team room inside the Puskar Center last week. "I'm not hard to talk to outside of here. But when I line up on the field, I'm a different animal."
The animal? Take your pick. Just make sure it's frightening.
There's something inherently intimidating about Benton standing 6-foot-1 and 235 pounds inside a uniform with biceps that bust out of the jersey. It's amplified when he lines up across from the center and inches forward, when the eyes widen and dart, when an offensive lineman looks up and realizes Benton is more concerned with terrorizing plays than trimming his scraggly beard.
This is not Mike Singletary spooking foes with his glares and bulky shoulder pads. It's not Vontaze Burfict pointing at the quarterback from across the line of scrimmage to let him know he'll be there in a moment.
It's simply Benton.
"I don't necessarily do it on purpose, but when I lock in and focus up, that's just the look I get," he said. "I like putting that fear in people."
It's almost a prerequisite, though the Mountaineers have had many middle linebackers through the years who weren't quite as stirring but were plenty successful. Benton is the keystone in the 3-3-5, a role and a scheme he familiarized himself with in high school, and he has to raid the backfield and range to make plays.
But he also needs people to know who and where he is. So when he hovers around the ball before it's snapped, when he stands in one place and slides to another and then suddenly returns to where he started, when he fixes a stare on someone and starts to huff and puff, there is intent.
That Benton gets the attention doesn't matter as much as what happens around him once he has it.
"It helps with my game," he said. "I want them to fear me. I want them to pay attention to me, because at the end of the day, there are 10 other people on the field. If I can walk up to the line and you feel some kind of way, if you feel scared because of my beard or my big eyes, that frees up somebody else on defense to make the play."
Benton's no stranger to the action himself, though. He played in all 13 games his first two years, and he started last season against Liberty when Jared Barber, a fine player without the menacing ways, could not go. Benton made seven tackles and was named the team's defensive player of the week.
The Root Sports cameras found him that day and delighted in images of Benton sizing up the Liberty offense before the snap. It was the first time Benton saw what others had told him about before, but it was not the first time he'd played that way.
Benton is from Newark, New Jersey, and he has four brothers and three sisters. His two older brothers played football before him at Malcolm X Shabazz High, and they're the ones who pulled him off the basketball court and onto the gridiron. Vincent was an outside linebacker and defensive end who went after quarterbacks. James played middle linebacker and did so in a way that captured Benton's attention.
"I liked the way he hit," he said. "The fierceness and maliciousness I saw those guys play with stuck with me."
Their style was influential, but they had help from a growth spurt that saw Benton grow a few inches in the fourth grade and then a few more a year later. He moved from shooting guard to power forward, and some of the new frustrations made football more appealing.
"I started playing really, really aggressive, but you get fouls called on you for that," he said. "In football, you don't get fouls for being aggressive. I could be as aggressive as I wanted to be."
But Benton, who would be WVU's biggest linebacker if not for Xavier Preston's one-inch, one-pound advantage, started off as a 160-pound linebacker playing for the man who coached his brothers and expected more of the same.
"Being a smaller guy, I was always trying to move around and create an advantage getting to this spot and that spot quickly," he said. "I realized I was drawing a lot of attention just by moving around and putting myself in certain positions. If you can get the offensive linemen to make a wrong check, that works to the advantage of the defense."
The experience was useful preparation for WVU's defense. The Mountaineers do blitz a lot, but they succeed by springing traps before the snap. They're never stationary, and they don't want a quarterback or an offensive line to get comfortable with or accustomed to anything. The unexpected usually prevails, and that's why Benton wants eyes on him.
"I move around a lot," he said. "I walk up to the line and make dummy calls and make it feel like there's more going on than what's really going on, because if I can draw the line's eyes on me, if I can draw their attention to me, someone else is going to be freed up."