Arizona receiver poses problems as WVU makes Big 12 road trip west

MORGANTOWN – Historically, West Virginia knows how much it hurts to get too close to the fire ignited by a red-hot receiver, so it might be best to put the Tucson Fire Department on alert this weekend when the Mountaineers fly there to Arizona and the Wildcats star wideout Tetairoa McMillan.

“We played good receivers,” Coach Neal Brown noted this during this week’s press conference. “This is in no way a negative towards anyone we have played. We’ve never played against anyone like him.”

The combination of McMillan’s size, speed and route running and WVU’s pass defense this year had a curious reporter looking back through the record books to see what kind of receivers WVU has faced – not just during Brown’s tenure, but historically .

It’s quite a list and there could be room for McMillan after going up against a WVU team that ranks 116th in the nation in pass efficiency defense while allowing 254.3 yards per game, allowing they rank 15th in the 16-team Big 12.

McMillan’s resume shows just how threatening he is to the WVU secondary. As a freshman, he broke the Arizona record for receiving yards by a true freshman with 702, which was produced via 39 catches, 8 for touchdowns.

Last year he had 90 catches for 1,402 yards and so far this season he has 708 yards after starting the year with a 304 yard, 4 TD performance against New Mexico in the opener.

That caught the attention of his opponents and he hasn’t returned to the end zone in the next six games, hitting a new low last week with just 38 yards on five catches.

But before you get too excited about the Mountaineers’ chances of repeating that success, remember that the opponent was Colorado and they are coached by arguably the best NFL pass defender in history, Deion Sanders, a man who has a pretty decent has a good idea of how to shut down a wide receiver.

Brown plans to come up with his own version of ways to defend McMillan.

“I think we would be foolish to try to play him exactly like everyone else,” he says. Brown said. “We’re not just going to line up and play one-on-one.”

But Arizona coach Brent Brennan took a message from what Colorado did last week.

“I think we, No. 1, have to find a way to get him the ball better,” he said. “The other part of that is he was doubled a lot throughout the game, so that’s complicated if they’re going to do that to him. That way we have to be creative with our plan, in terms of how we give him a chance to escape that doppelgänger.

So it’s going to be a chess match, but it turns out WVU’s pass defense has been playing checkers for most of this season and reached a new low last weekend when Kansas State’s Avery Johnson threw for a career-high 298 yards with three touchdowns and no interceptions against the Mountaineers.

So what kind of records seem to be in jeopardy here for the Mountaineers, who have been scorched by some of the best in their history?

Some forget that in the wildest game ever played by WVU, their Big 12 debut in which they won 70-63 against Baylor, while Stedman Bailey set a school record with 303 receiving yards on 13 catches for 5 touchdowns, he was not the most important receiver of the game.

Baylor shattered all opponent records that day with 17 catches for 314 yards and two touchdowns. In fact, Baylor had three receivers who racked up more than 100 yards on receptions, as did WVU’s Tavon Austin, who caught 13 for 215 yards and two TDs, and J.D. Woods caught 13 for 114 yards and a touchdown.

Now, there have been other notable performances against WVU over the years. Take Oklahoma’s Marquise Brown, who had 11 catches of quarterback Kyler Murray for 243 yards in a 59-56 win over Brown and WVU six years ago.

During the Backyard Brawl, WVU fell victim to some pretty good receivers, such as Dietrich Jells, who had 225 yards in 1994 and did so on just five catches, averaging 45 yards per reception, one of which was an 80-yard touchdown.

And the Mountaineers also struggled a bit with a Panther receiver named Larry Fitzgerald, who had 11 receptions for 159 yards and 2 TDs in 2002 and improved the next year with 9 receptions for 185 yards and two more touchdowns.

A pair of receivers who went on to star in the NFL hurt the Mountaineers, Syracuse’s Marvin Harrison, catching 9 for 213 yards, including an opponent-record 96 yards from Donovan McNabb, in a 22-0 win over WVU in 1995, and Tyler Lockett from Kansas State caught 9 balls for 194 yards and two touchdowns in 2012, and two years later he caught 10 balls for 196 yards.

It seems like McMillan possesses the same kind of talent as all these Mountaineer tormentors.

“I think he plays the position at an elite level.” said defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley. “It’s all little things. It’s route running. It comes back to the ball, it’s body control. It uses its body depending on the route. He’s as good as anyone in the country; pretty much anyone we’ll see.”