Dana Holgorsen gambles on himself and it pays off

— -- A common thread connects the road traveled over the past year by West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen and the journey that took the Mountaineers from an offseason afterthought in the Big 12 to a team prepared in two weeks to cement its legacy among the best in school history.

Belief.

"Nobody thought we were any good," Holgorsen said.

WVU players and coaches believed, though, after an eight-win season in 2015, that this year would mark their breakthrough.

Holgorsen believed in his system. And in 2016, he waited, turning down a contract extension last winter to remain tied to a deal that expired after next season.

On Dec. 3, after a 10-2 regular season and a third-place Big 12 finish, the 45-year-old coach agreed to a five-year, $18.6 million extension to begin Jan. 1, four days after WVU plays Miami in the Russell Athletic Bowl and attempts to complete the sixth 11-win season in school history.

Athletic director Shane Lyons, full of positivity in announcing the new deal this month, issued a statement last year to explain Holgorsen's return in 2016, saying that "continuity is best for our program."

It wasn't meant to sound like a hearty endorsement.

And the stalemate that followed in contract discussions led to speculation that Holgorsen's time in Morgantown had grown short. Under the old deal, he was owed $2.9 million in 2017, some of which the coach would have forfeited if he had agreed to an extension last year with an institution-friendly buyout clause.

Instead, Holgorsen gambled on himself and the Mountaineers.

"That's what everybody's telling me," Holgorsen said earlier this month after returning home from a whirlwind week of recruiting, his first time on the road with the new contract in pocket. "I guess I'm different. I don't think of it that way. I've got a job to do. I put my head down and I did it."

He acknowledged that the lack of a long-term contract impacted recruiting the past several months. More precisely, said Holgorsen, ESPN.com's Big 12 Coach of the Year, it impacted rival schools' methods in recruiting against the Mountaineers.

"I give our assistant coaches a lot of credit for hanging in there and not letting it disrupt what was going on," Holgorsen said. "The negative recruiting aspect with other schools was obviously happening."

What buoyed Holgorsen during a time rife with potential distractions?

"I've got a lot of confidence in myself," he said, "and I've got a lot of confidence in this football program and the coaches that I have working underneath me. I knew we had a good nucleus of players coming back that, really, for the first time, I recruited.

"So we were pretty determined to go out there and do our jobs at a high level. I was proud of the way the guys did that. And that's really all I thought about."

Holgorsen hasn't always felt such confidence. In fact, as the Mountaineers transitioned to the Big 12 in 2012 and 2013, Holgorsen said he harbored doubts about their progress. WVU won 10 games in 2011 -- including the Orange Bowl over Clemson -- in his first season as a head coach but slipped from there.

During a 20-game stretch, the Mountaineers lost 14 times.

"Like most young coaches who hadn't been a head coach, I think it took him a while to understand, adapt, learn those things that he hadn't been asked to do," said Oliver Luck, the former West Virginia AD who hired Holgorsen in 2010 as coach-in-waiting to Bill Stewart. "But at the end of the day, I thought he dealt with it relatively well."

The Mountaineers continued to scuffle in the Big 12. After a 7-6 finish in 2014, Lyons came from a deputy AD spot at Alabama to succeed Luck, who left WVU for an executive position with the NCAA.

In 2015, West Virginia went winless in October, losing to four ranked Big 12 foes en route to an 8-5 mark. The quibbling over Holgorsen's contract followed.

The Mountaineers started 6-0 this fall and secured their best season as a Big 12 member by rushing for 239.5 yards per game and playing an aggressive brand of defense.

"We had a group of kids who understood that they were being slept on," Holgorsen said. "Our team used that as motivation, starting in January."

They outgained Oklahoma State and Oklahoma in losses by 17 and 28, points, respectively. WVU lost seven turnovers in the two defeats and gained just one, out of character for a team that created a Big 12-best 25 takeaways for the season.

Compared to his first 10-win team, which beat Cincinnati, Pitt and South Florida by a total of seven points to close the regular season in 2010, Holgorsen said he's more at ease with the footing of this group.

The Mountaineers thrive on a blue-collar mentality and refuse to listen to outside voices, whether critical or complimentary of their play.

It works moving forward, he said, because "that's what this program has always been built on."

"That's what the state of West Virginia was and is currently built on," Holgorsen said, "hardworking, blue-collar, passionate people who wake up and do the same s--- every day."

Holgorsen said he planned to get a quick look this month in practice at quarterback Will Grier, the Florida transfer who sat out in 2016 and ought to bring a needed pocket presence next year. But first, all attention shifts to defeating Miami on Dec. 28 in Orlando.

"If you go to Florida and beat Miami," Holgorsen said, "that would be big."

Big for the Mountaineers, to cap a breakthrough season. And fitting for the coach, who bet big on his team.