MORGANTOWN - There's nothing wrong with voting for Jordan Willis as the Big 12's defensive player of the year, as a panel of 20 reporters who cover the conference did Tuesday and as the group of 10 head coaches did Wednesday.
The Kansas State defensive end is the best pass rusher in the conference, and his 11 ½ sacks were 1 ½ better than what Kansas defensive end Dorance Armstrong submitted. Sacks are the premier stat on defense, less generic than tackles and more exotic than interceptions, and the fact Willis led the league and ranked No. 8 nationally ought to outflank the fact Armstrong had 20 tackles for a loss while Willis had 16 ½.
Kansas State led the Big 12 in total, scoring and rushing defense, and Willis was a major reason why. The best player on the best defense is always going to be the leading candidate for an award reserved for the best defensive player.
Kansas, which won six fewer games and only beat Texas in conference play, led the Big 12 in third-down defense, passing defense and fumble recoveries, and it's a bit more difficult to credit Armstrong for that.
But that's four paragraphs on two players, and that discussion is peppered with a bunch of stats. We haven't mentioned the player who should have won the award, and the case for West Virginia cornerback Rasul Douglas transcends numbers.
The 14th-ranked Mountaineers basically invented a position for him in 2016.
"When you look at what we do," cornerbacks coach Blue Adams said, "it's extremely valuable."
WVU uses left and right cornerbacks. Don't let the depth chart fool you. It designates field and boundary cornerbacks, which means one plays on the wide side of the field on every snap and the other plays on the narrow side, but the Mountaineers don't do that because it's too hard to get lined up in the rapid Big 12. Stick a corner on one side for every play and there's no scrambling from one snap to the next.
Except Douglas played the left side and the right side. He was as comfortable in the field as he was on the boundary.
"It was more a matter of who was running with him," Adams said.
Running with him, not against him. That's an important designation, especially in the Big 12, which counts a number of star receivers on its roster of explosive passing offenses. Adams could have assigned Douglas to the opponent's top outside receiver, but Adams would have compromised his defense.
He didn't game plan with Douglas' receiver in mind. He was thinking of Douglas' teammate on the other side of the field.
"Rasul is the kind of guy you can just put somewhere, because he's going to be able to hold up no matter where you put him," Adams said. "For me, it was about the other guy. If you take away one side of the field and the other side is not as strong, they're just going to go to the other side. What good is that? So how do we stack the deck so we win both times?"
Adams studied the other team's outside receivers. He obsessed over every detail involved in a matchup against cornerbacks Antonio Crawford, Maurice Fleming and Elijah Battle, and it helped that most offenses limited their outside receivers to one side of the field. Adams decided who Crawford, Fleming and Battle would be best against and had a simple strategy for each game: make sure those cornerbacks are used in those matchups, and put Douglas on the other side.
If Crawford started on the right because Adams believed he could handle that receiver, Douglas started on the left. If Fleming came in to give Crawford a break and he was better off with the receiver on the left, then Douglas moved to the right. If Battle was only comfortable on the right, Douglas played the left.
It worked wonders for the Mountaineers. They weren't vulnerable to an opponent that could game plan a passing attack that avoided Douglas. WVU was always able to have the best matchups on the field. Think about that. In a league where offenses are supposed to dictate, WVU's defense was able to maintain an advantage.
Douglas had eight interceptions, and that tied for the most in the NCAA, but in Big 12 play and against all those offenses, WVU led the league in scoring, total and pass efficiency defense. He wasn't named the defensive player of the year, but it's hard to find someone who was more valuable.
"Rasul was the swing guy for me," Adams said, "I didn't worry about him in a mismatch. He was good no matter what. That's the beauty of it."
Contact Mike Casazza at 304-319-1142 or mikec@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mikecasazza and read his blog at http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/wvu/.