The story goes that in the fall of 1991, Iowa Wesleyan was putting a hurting on Concordia University in an NAIA contest.

Iowa Wesleyan coach Hal Mumme was in the process of birthing his Air Raid offense, co-conceived with his offensive coordinator and fellow Texas expatriate, Mike Leach. The coaches decided the next play would be a quick screen pass and thus did what they always did when that was the call.

They removed their fire plug of a possession receiver from the field. His name was Dana Holgorsen, and he totally flipped out. He begged to be back on the field. He'd seen the tape on these guys. He was always watching tape and he knew he could score on this play against this team. To him it made no sense to keep him out.

So Mumme relented, sent the kid back out and called his number for the catch. Holgorsen snagged the ball from the air in the open field with a freeway to the end zone. But instead of chugging toward the goal line he started zigzagging, allowing the woefully slow defenders to catch up, only to weave his way through them repeatedly before finally breaking free for the score.

"It was like something out of a cartoon or some old black-and-white football movie where everything looks sped up," Leach remembers now. "When he got to the sideline he immediately went to Hal and said, 'I told you I could do it!' Dana had to make his point and he had to make it his way."

It is 11 a.m. Tuesday in Morgantown, West Virginia, and the pace is quickening inside WVU's football offices. Mountaineers players are wrapping up their morning classes and beginning to file into the building adjacent to Puskar Stadium. The training room is filling up with Eers seeking treatment for any dings suffered three days earlier during a 34-10 romping of TCU that moved the team to 6-0 and into a 10th-place ranking in the AP Top 25 poll.

Holgorsen helped make Case Keenum college football's all-time leading passer. Thomas B. Shea/Getty Images

In July, West Virginia was picked by the Big 12 media to finish seventh in the 10-team conference, and why not? They finished 2015 with an 8-5 record, crushed by a brutal 0-4 October against four ranked conference rivals. This year they are 6-0 for the first time since 2006. The man leading that team has just blown into the room.

"OK, OK, here we go, how you doing?" Holgorsen says as he walks briskly, legs shuffling and arms bowed out. The stride has Flair ... as in Ric Flair. The expression on his face is that of a man who is in a hurry and would probably rather be doing something -- anything -- else than making small talk. Those who work with him every day say this is the way he always looks, unless he's in a meeting room breaking down film.

"You could let this job run you over with all of the other stuff that comes with it," the 45-year-old says, settling into his nice but modest (by Power 5 head coach standards) office. The coach's fingers come to rest on the pages of an open three-ring binder. "I'm doing this because I love to coach football. If I couldn't get in there and really coach football, then I wouldn't be doing what I love anymore."

The story goes that the calls started coming in from other schools around the South Atlantic Conference, one of the Southeast's oldest and proudest NCAA Division II leagues. Its member schools are all small and cozy liberal arts colleges and play their football in small and cozy football stadiums. Stadiums where the press boxes are open air and sit only a few feet above the grandstand.

So in 1999, when this one particular quarterbacks and wide receivers coach from Wingate University would commence screaming and cursing, F-bombingly frustrated that his players weren't running his plays as crisply as they should, the fans sitting below could hear every R-rated word. They would complain to the stadium staff, who would complain to the athletic director, who would make the calls to Wingate asking for the coach -- um, what was his name, yeah, Holgorsen -- to tone it down.

Holgorsen knows that nearly every Saturday he's an internet sensation. He is fully aware that his disheveled hair is "a thing." (So much so that when typing his name into the Google search bar, it autofills "Dana Holgorsen hair.") He knows that college football Twitter timelines nearly vibrated apart during Week 6, when TV cameras caught him chugging one of his beloved sugar-free Red Bulls on the Puskar Stadium sidelines while his team was up by 24 over Texas Tech ... from his custom Red Bull mini-fridge that WVU keeps by the bench.

Usually, it's one of his three children who will inform him of his social media prowess each Saturday. After the Tech win, the info was delivered internally.

Dana Holgorsen just chugged a red bull on the sideline with West Virginia up 34-10 on Texas Tech.



IT'S LIT. pic.twitter.com/2QerzemsAq — ESPN CollegeFootball (@ESPNCFB) October 15, 2016

"When my marketing guy calls and rips my ass, I know it," he says, laughing, when asked about his infamy. "I don't do that on purpose. I can assure you that. I don't follow it. What you see is what you get with me. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it'll always stay."

Anyone who believes it all might be an eccentric act needs only to take the matter to the coaches and players who are with him each day.

"Oh no, that's Coach Holgo for real," says safety Jarrod Harper, one of 20 seniors (and 16 fifth-year seniors) on the roster. "People will ask me all the time, the Red Bulls and the hair sticking up, he's not really like that all the time, is he? And I'm like, that's Coach, man. He's the real deal."

"Yeah, he's still plenty wide open," explains wide receivers coach Tyron Carrier, who's in his first year on the West Virginia staff. "But you know I played for him back in the day [in 2008 and '09 when Holgorsen was offensive coordinator at Houston]. If you saw him then and then saw him now ... I tell him all the time that now he's more Coach Diet Coke than Coach Red Bull."

The story goes that the young offensive coordinator at Houston was sneaky. The same offensive coordinator who would turn Case Keenum into a record-breaking quarterback and who would mentor future Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury and who would boost his boss, Kevin Sumlin, to the head job at Texas A&M.

West Virginia's defense has been bolstered by DC Tony Gibson. Ben Queen/USA TODAY Sports

Sumlin worried about Holgorsen because there was no evidence that he slept. Ever. The coach would meet with his coordinator, and the kid would start throwing papers around with plays on them -- crazy plays.

"He was taking the Air Raid thing to a whole different level," Sumlin recalls. "What Hal Mumme and Mike Leach did, running the ball was optional. Dana added a whole other layer to it with the running game. You still see that today. But some of this stuff he was trying to get me to sign off on in 2008 and 2009, not a chance. Routes crossed up and backs and receivers and tight ends all over the place, it looked like spaghetti. No way, sorry man, we aren't doing this."

Then the game would start. At a crucial point Sumlin might look out on the field, not recognize an offensive alignment and ... wait ... was this that spaghetti play?!

"Sometimes it would be a total mess," Sumlin said. "But sometimes it would be brilliant. We'd bust off a 60-something-yard touchdown and at halftime he wouldn't even make eye contact. I'd call him out and Dana would just shrug, like, 'I told you it would work.'"

"What do I think about the hair and the Red Bulls and all of that?" assistant coach Joe Wickline pauses to gather his words. "I think Dana Holgorsen makes this a fun place to work. This job can be so grueling if you let it be. But there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't remind you of how fun this is. And I can tell you this. I've been at this for 35 years. I've never sat in a room with a coaching staff and seen it work like this one does."

Wickline's official title is listed as "offensive coordinator/tight ends-fullbacks." But it's Holgorsen who calls the plays, with Wickline and everyone else on the offensive staff really serving as co-authors. That staff describes a scenario straight out of the film "A Beautiful Mind," where the head coach walks in, takes a play they've drawn up, and adds an entirely new layer to it, be it a tweak to a receiver's route or one change in one position in a pre-snap formation that might mind-twist a defense.

Right now, Holgo and the Mountaineers look like the Big 12's best team. Ben Queen/USA TODAY Sports

"We all go and do our thing with our units and then we come back into the coaches' rooms and bring all of our ideas to the table," Wickline continues. "That's how it works everywhere else, too. But how it doesn't work everywhere else is here we're allowed to take those ideas, everyone's idea, and weave them together. There are ideas we don't use, but there are no bad ideas."

Whenever Holgorsen interviews a potential coach or a potential player, he leads with the same warning: "You either have to work together with everyone else in the room or we can stop wasting my time right now and both move on to someone else."

That's why, around the halfway point of his six-year tenure in Morgantown, he scrambled the coaches' offices, putting defensive coaches next door to offensive coaches. He did the same with the locker room and road roommate assignments. As he's overseen the overhauling of the facilities, he's gone total football feng shui, creating a one-stop world for his players, flowing from tutoring rooms and meeting rooms to locker room and weight room, all with a panoramic view of Mountaineer Field, access to which is denied them until game day.

"As long as the goal is the same, he will listen to anything you think of," says running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider, who was a WVU grad assistant under Rich Rodriguez. "That goal is winning games. Not moving up the coaching ranks or becoming a superstar or any of that. He says if you win games, that other stuff will take care of itself. So win first."

The story goes that he was only going to live in hotel rooms. That's how he often did it as he moved up the ladder as a young coach. That's how he did it in 2010 during his one year as offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State under Mike Gundy. And that's how he did it during his first three years at West Virginia, the first as OC, the next two as head coach.

His room sat right on the Monongahela River, cold as hell. He told friends that he didn't like to "haul a bunch of s--- all over the place anyway because the less s--- you carry with you, the easier it is to move forward." Plus, housekeeping came and cleaned his room every day. That was nice. And there was a bar nearby. That was nicer.

In June 2011, four days after taking over as West Virginia head coach, Holgorsen celebrated by going skydiving with the U.S. Army's Golden Knights and crash landing into the New River Gorge. When he returned home that night a hotel employee congratulated him on landing the job.

"That's not the only thing I've landed this week," the new head coach replied. "I just landed my ass in the river from 10,000 feet."

Those stories -- skydiving, showing up to practice in a helicopter, shooting muskets with the Mountaineers mascot -- it only plays as long as the coach is calling winning plays. In that first season of 2011, Holgorsen's team went 10-3 with a now-famous 70-33 throttling of Clemson.

As a result, the tales of "Holgs" going off the rails came off as sort of cool mountain man tales, a Red Bull-chugging Paul Bunyan. One of the original "head coach in waiting" experiments, he was swept into the job controversially, replacing folksy Bill Stewart after it was reported that Stewart was running a smear campaign to keep the heir forced upon him at arm's length. But the same stories initially used against him -- being escorted from a West Virginia casino in the middle of the night, supposedly just one of multiple such inebriated incidents -- became part of his legend.