Published: August 08, 2008 01:30 am            

COLUMN: Starks, Arnett take different routes to top

MORGANTOWN — If things go according to plan, Alric Arnett and Bradley Starks will be on the outside looking in when the 2008 college football begins while not feeling left out at all.

While neither of them played a snap last season, they are atop the West Virginia University depth chart at wide receiver and being looked upon as difference makers.

Over the past seven years, if you were in such a position you felt like an outcast. The description of a wide receiver in coach Rich Rodriguez’s power spread was a blocker with good hands. Blocking was the No. 1 responsibility, catching the ball almost an afterthought, considering that ball was in the air little more than a TWA jet … and TWA went out of business years ago.

But this is a new era, a new coach, a new philosophy.

Call them “the Mountainairs,” if you will.

New coach Bill Stewart promises to throw the ball and promises to stretch the field vertically as well as horizontally. Wide receivers are no longer tackles with numbers in the 80s.

That has Alric and Starks excited.

“I’m with the right team at the right time with the right coaches,” he said.

“The potential is every bit there,” Starks said. “Just thinking about it gets me excited.”

You certainly don’t know much about Arnett, although you learned a lot about Starks this spring when he was the talk of the camp when he agreed to move from quarterback to wide receiver after proving in his redshirt season that he’s among the most athletic players on the team.

Alric redshirted last season, too, although it was hardly by choice.

A thumb injury took him down for the entire season, which may have been a good thing rather than having him waste a year blocking.

The thumb is healed now … or, at least, as healed as it’s going to be.

“There’s still a little pain. It’s just something I have to deal with,” he said, speaking like a football player from another era when the saying was, “No pain, no gain.”

He’s shown the coaches enough already that wide receiver coach Lonnie Galloway proclaimed him a starter even before the first workout.

“It’s his job to lose,” the first-year assistant from Appalachian State said about a week before camp opened.

That was one of those good news, bad news items for Arnett.

“Him saying that about me, I feel like it’s a new pressure,” Arnett said. “I’ve got a bigger hunger now. If it’s my job to lose, I’ve got to compete to keep it. I’m on top. Now, I’ve got to stay here.

“I’ve been through a lot and I’ve been waiting a long, long time for his,” Arnett continued. “This is exciting. It’s going to test my character now.”

That is a test Arnett can pass. For a while there, it might have been the only test he could pass.

Arnett had problems qualifying academically after getting out of high school in Belle Glades, Fla.

It wasn’t one of those heartbreaking things at all, narrowly missing on a test or having the NCAA refuse to accept a class he thought it would accept.

“I wasn’t close to qualifying at all,” he told the Charleston Daily Mail. “I had like a 17 on my ACT, but my GPA was just too low.”

So it was off to junior college, first Butler in El Dorado, Kan., then Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College. Complications arose at both places and he caught only 22 passes for 312 yards in two years, hardly Jerry Rice kind of stuff.

But there must have been something there, for WVU came after him.

Starks story is, well, starkly different than Arnett’s. Long and lean at 6-3 and 182 pounds, he came out of Orange County High in Unionville, Va., as an all-state quarterback with 6,331 career yards passing and 70 touchdowns.

Some say he was a better basketball player, scoring more than 1,400 points in his career and turning down college offers, including one from N.C. State.

He ran the scout team last year and proved to be a match for the first-team defense in practices as a quarterback. But with Patrick White at that position and Jarrett Brown behind him for next year, Stewart wanted to find a way to get his talents on the field sooner than in two years.

He asked him to try wide receiver, and Starks was an instantaneous success in the spring, leaving WVU fans longing for more.

“It will be fun with me and Bradley on the outside,” Arnett said.

Starks admits that there’s a whole lot of quarterback still in him and that, at times, he finds himself wondering “what I would be thinking” if he were at quarterback.

But mostly the transition is complete. When he opens his playbook he sees the plays from a wide receiver’s point of view, even though he knows that if there were a problem where both White and Jarrett Brown went down he’d be the emergency QB.

But there’s no reps at quarterback these days.

“I’m with the wide receiver corps now,” he said.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.

        

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