MORGANTOWN - When your car starts to rattle and smoke billows from under the hood, you need a mechanic. If you get in trouble with the law, you call a lawyer. A stomach ache that doesn't go away before a fever comes along necessitates a trip to a doctor's office.
And when West Virginia needed a running backs coach, head coach Dana Holgorsen hired a receivers coach.
It's not quite the same as taking your sickly self to the garage down the road, but hiring Tony Dews to replace JaJuan Seider was not what some would consider to be conventional. Then again, Holgorsen isn't like some coaches.
"To me, a skill guy on offense is a skill guy on offense, whether it's running backs, receivers, tight ends, quarterbacks," he said. "All those are the same."
In 19 years of college coaching, whether on a Division II staff or as a graduate assistant, be it in the Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference, Big East, Big Ten or Pac-12, Dews had never coached running backs. Offensive line, defensive line, defensive backs, tight ends, linebackers, special teams? Dews coached them all, but he also spent nine of the past 10 seasons coaching receivers. The exception was in 2011, when the former tight end at Liberty coached tight ends at Pitt.
When word arrived that Seider was leaving and a few people Dews knows quite well were looking for a replacement, Dews made his move. He believed he was ready, that he'd made the most of the past 10 seasons alongside Calvin Magee, the running backs coach and offensive coordinator at Arizona today and at Pittsburgh, Michigan and WVU before that.
Dews was always at his side, and Magee made for a good mentor engineering Rich Rodriguez's offense that relies so much on running backs, the run game and all the concepts therein.
"Some day, I'd like to be a coordinator and maybe even a head coach, so I want to learn everything I can," Dews said. "I feel like I took advantage of the opportunities to learn from Calvin, and then when I took this position, I talked to some different running backs coaches around the country I feel are really good coaches, a few I've known a little bit prior to taking the position."
Dews declined to say who, but the names don't matter. The fact Dews did his homework and what those coaches shared might not even matter. Time will tell. What Dews is doing isn't totally out of the ordinary, either. After all, the key to an offense like WVU's is a quarterback who runs and throws, offensive linemen who play different spots, running backs who carry and catch the ball and receivers who play inside and outside.
He can teach running backs about playing receiver, which will help Justin Crawford weaponize his talents a little better and help Kennedy McKoy transition into a dual-purpose player a little easier, but Dews can also add another line and a new title to his resume. His ambition, at 43 years of age, should not be admonished, and it was not upon interviewing with the Mountaineers.
"You do share your vision for where you'd like to go as a professional, and one thing I loved about Coach Holgorsen and talking to him about it was, 'Hey, I welcome that. I want to hire coaches who want to be the best they can be in the profession, whatever that goal may be,' " Dews said.
The timing was interesting - Arizona went 3-9 in 2016, the athletic director moved to Alabama, and the Wildcats were first in rushing and No. 10 in the Pac-12 in passing - but Dews didn't feel time was a variable.
"I didn't look at it as whether I was pigeonholed or not," he said. "I think it was more that the time I spent coaching receivers, the tenure I had with Rich and Calvin, guys who have been very innovative and very successful, I looked at this as an opportunity to come here and have a chance to learn something different."
Dews fit in areas that are just as important as knowing how to teach a particular position. When Seider left following four seasons, Holgorsen had to replace not just a coach, but an outgoing personality on the staff and in meeting rooms, a recruiter with a keen ability to target and finish and somebody who could blend in with a program headed in the right direction following the second 10-win season since 2007.
Dews checked all the boxes, beginning with the initial impression in the form of a booming voice and a distinct persona.
"Presence," Holgorsen said, "was the No. 1 thing that struck me with him."
That should help with recruiting. The Mountaineers are spending less time and energy in South Florida, where Seider was renowned, and Dews, from Clifton, Virginia, can heighten WVU's presence in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Holgorsen had answers to many other questions about Dews before they ever met. Dews was on WVU's 2007 staff, as was defensive coordinator Tony Gibson and defensive line coach Bruce Tall, who both left with Dews for Michigan that offseason and are with the Mountaineers again now. Dews also worked with safeties coach Matt Caponi at Arizona. He met offensive coordinator Jake Spavital a few years ago when Rodriguez welcomed the staffs of Indiana and Texas A&M, where Spavital was the co-coordinator, to campus for an idea-sharing retreat.
They now move forward together.
"When I see the success they've had here, when I look at what Mike Leach has done in the Pac-12 and how a lot of people are doing that in the Big 12, that's what intrigued me about this opportunity," Dews said. "Why not learn something new and be able to know one system and learn another?
"Like anything else, when you get an opportunity to do things your way, you want to do it your own way so that you're not mimicking just what this one person does, but you collectively put your thoughts and ideas you have in mind toward what you want to do."
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/.