File photo WVU defensive coordinator Zac Alley is rebuilding the defense around bigger, faster and more physical players.

MORGANTOWN — A year ago at this time, the media air was suffocating us all with the coming and goings within the West Virginia athletic department.

Basketball coach Darian DeVries was within a week of announcing his departure for Indiana, a stunning move since he had coached just one season at the school, and football coach Rich Rodriguez was just beginning spring practice after the even more stunning announcement that he had been rehired to coach the team after a 17-year exile.

The two changes were difficult to comprehend and created a round of social media/talk show controversy that drew opinions from everyone and everywhere.

But there was another change in the mix at the time, a change that was greeted with great positivity as Rodriguez hired Zac Alley as his defensive coordinator, a young coach who had been on the Oklahoma staff in the same position — always a positive line on the resume.

Alley had spent a brief stay in Morgantown before proceeding on the path toward eventually becoming a head coach somewhere, such were his credentials at such an early stage in his career.

It was simply accepted as fact, even before anyone knew who he would be working with, that the Mountaineer defense would rise up as a force in 2025 under Alley’s tutelage. Morgantown was prepared with welcome the new defensive unit — Alley’s Cats — and hope that Rodriguez could mold Nicco Marchiol into the quarterback he needed.

Turned out neither happened, the defense while improved a smidgen — you will not find that metric in any of the analytic sites on line — but when you consider the team allowed 31 points a game and gave up 28 passing TDs, you knew you weren’t satisfied.

Certainly Alley wasn’t, as he once again has nearly completely rebuilt the defense, looking more toward the specifications he had laid out in his very first press conference a year earlier.

In defining his defense, he said it was based on his personnel with multiple schemes.

“I would definitely say we are personnel based,” Alley said. “You want to put guys in position to win. Think players, not plays. If a player is really good at something, you do that with them. If they are not, we try not to do that with them.”

So, Alley wasn’t in search of a new system, just new players and he had he definition of what he felt made good defensive players without having to shuffle through a coaching text book to find it.

“Long, fast and physical, that usually works out pretty well, no matter where you play them,” he said. “Big guys usually beat up little guys; fast guys usually outrun slow guys.”

If you can argue with that, you deserve your own talk show. But the days are past where any athlete can get by on just talent alone.

“Michael Jordan always says, talent wins game; talent plus intelligence wins championships. We always want to find the guys who can learn football. They understand the game. The game is slower for them ,” he said.

Which brings us to one of the prizes he is bringing this year in through the transfer portal.

Tobi Haastrup is a redshirt freshman transfer from Oregon who stands 6-3 and weighs 252 pounds and who grew up in London, England.

He is long, fast and physical.

Oh, yeah, the intelligence is obvious, too, considering he plans to study neuroscience.

“Obviously, Oregon did really well this past year, and Tobi is a special kid,” Alley said. “I think he wants to be a neurosurgeon, so he’s pretty smart. And based on the recruiting process, he might be the least successful person in his family if he does that because they’ve got a heck of a lineage there. He’s got a great pedigree, but hadn’t played.

“There’s a transition to try and play more now, so excited to see what he can do. We hadn’t had a lot of situations where his pass-rush skill set showed up yet. We’re on day two, and it’s still 1st and 10 all the time.”

This is one of those steps forward that you have to take as you gather big, long, physical and fast athletes.

“Darius Wiley is huge,” Alley said, speaking of 6-6, 255-pound pass rusher out of Hutchingson Community College in Kansas. “He’s got so much potential. He’s fast. He’s long. And he can run.”

Normally a lack of size is something you might forgive, such as Honor Huff I basketball and say a Noel Devine or Jahiem White in football, but the lack of size really hurt WVU last season

“I think size is the big thing,” Alley said. “We lacked length in the back seven last year, and it showed up. Perimeter screens, throws on the edges … I mean, we’re in position the last three games of the year to make plays and just getting lost.

“I was like, all right, we’ve got to fix that. It’s not like somebody busted and suddenly we’re in a bad call. Nope. They were just better than us. I think the length on the edges is important — at corner, at safety, at linebacker — to be able to cover up through the space and the way teams play the game in this league.”