If you look back to Dana Holgorsen’s earliest days in Morgantown, the DNA of the Mountaineer roster was, to put it politely, drastically different. Yes, there was front-loaded talent like Geno Smith, Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey and Karl Joseph. But aside from the NFL-caliber talent that would routinely dominate the headlines, the Mountaineers were treacherously thin from the two-deep on.
One of the ways that Holgorsen and his then staff tried to combat this lack of depth was taking freshman, many of whom were just trying to find their way around campus and acclimate to college life, and insert them into contributing and starting roles.