You're forgiven if you forgot about West Virginia, or just wrote the Mountaineers off. "Wild" could not have described your optimism, in fact, if you were still on the WVU bandwagon after mid-September: the 'Neers scored three points on a paltry 250 yards in a three-touchdown loss at East Carolina (which, you'll note, is not so much the headhunting mid-major giant, after all), badly mismanaged the clock in an overtime loss at Colorado (which, you'll note, is not handling that killer schedule so well, after all). Bill Stewart looked lost and sounded lost. He made the Bill Stewart Face. WVU struggled through close games against hapless Rutgers and Syracuse, both at home. Before last Thursday, you could have made a convincing argument the Mountaineers' best win was over I-AA Villanova.

By last Friday, though, whatever you might think of Auburn's tackling, effort or resilience as its own season of pain rolls toward the cliff, you were probably thinking exactly what Randy Edsall was thinking Monday:

"They're really starting to hit their stride right now," Edsall added, referring to the Mountaineers' 34-17 pasting Thursday of Auburn. "They're starting to hit on all cylinders, which is scary for the rest of us here in the Big East. But I think they're very comparable to what they were a year ago."

A year ago, you might recall, Edsall's Huskies got pasted in Morgantown in the de facto Big East Championship, 66-21, just as Noel Devine was jittering his way into the full-time lineup (that was Devine's first game with double-digit carries: 11 for 118 of WVU's 517-yard massacre on the ground). Those were the Mountaineers we got in the Fiesta Bowl rout over Oklahoma, that we expected coming into the season, that we finally saw again in the second half against Auburn and that, with UConn and Pittsburgh dropping their first conference games in consecutive losses to Rutgers, and South Florida falling for the second time at Louisville, must be back in the conference driver's seat. The polls don't agree -- USF is the only Big East team in any of them, ranging from No. 23-25 in the AP, Coaches, BCS and initial Blog polls -- but West Virginia is alone at 2-0 in the conference standings, where the only other team that could conceivably be described as "ascending" at this point is Rutgers, which is crawling out of too deep a hole to play any role but spoiler.

It could be, of course, that Auburn is just that bad -- or the Thursday night atmosphere in Morgantown that electric, or something -- and the mediocre 'Neers of September will come roaring back with a vengeance in the conference's race to lose an automatic BCS bid. Could be. But if Edsall was right, confirming your preseason expectations (and your eyes, if you watched the comeback over the Tigers), we haven't seen the last of Pat White just yet, or even Bill Stewart. We'll see what happens at UConn.