MORGANTOWN -- The final college football polls will appear after LSU and Alabama finish things somewhere around midnight tonight, and West Virginia will find itself ranked higher than the No. 23 it was for Wednesday's Orange Bowl.

That's the sort of thing that happens when you score the most points in the history of bowl games and it's the sort of momentum the Mountaineers hope to harness and ride through recruiting and then the offseason.

It's also the explanation that will suffice when the preseason poll comes out and has WVU a little higher than it probably should be.

If Geno Smith and Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey and Coach Dana Holgorsen are the toast of college football's offensive evolution today, if the hot potato pass and the Colorado School of Mines - the latter being where Holgorsen learned about the former - are the talk of the industry, believe that's going to last a while.

Scoring 70 points in a BCS game, even one with the lowest TV ratings ever, has that effect.

When the time comes for preseason polls and predictions, the prognosticators are going to remember 10 touchdowns and then remember everyone and everything in the above paragraph will all be back for 2012.

"This shows we can play with any team in the country," Austin said. "With all of us coming back, we can try to win it all. If we take care of business in the offseason on all three sides of the ball and everyone buys in and gets stronger and faster, we can go to the national championship."

One of those sides of the triangle-shaped ball WVU plays with is defense, and the Mountaineers will take a big hit there for a second straight season.

Julian Miller, Bruce Irvin and Josh Taylor are gone on the line, Najee Goode and Casey Vance are gone at linebacker and cornerback Keith Tandy and safety Eain Smith are gone in the secondary.

That, of course, neglects to mention the coordinator, Jeff Casteel, who also may be leaving   and be replaced by someone with a wholly different way of playing the game. Casteel could take   assistants with him, or the replacement might want his own guys to teach his brand of defense.

The potential is there for major, major change on defense. Yet the Orange Bowl was a brown paper bag - one for Clemson fans to put over their heads and one for WVU fans to use to take deep breaths. Offense is back at WVU.

The team that gave up 33 points Wednesday, 30 or more six times, 40 or more twice and the most points since 2000 managed to win a BCS game ... by 37 points.

True, Casteel's defense may have allowed the third-most points (348) in 119 seasons of WVU football and just about twice as many as it surrendered in 2010, but it was those Mountaineers who forced five three-and-outs, created four turnovers and scored a touchdown.

Then again, when Athletic Director Oliver Luck made the change atop his football program in December 2010, he wasn't thinking of winning 24-21, 21-20 and 30-27, the scores of the last three games of the regular season.

Maybe he wasn't thinking of 70 points, either, but he certainly trended toward one more than the other and he saw it happen in pinch-yourself fashion.

"What has dawned on me watching the bowl season is you really realize how difficult it is to get to a BCS game," Luck said. "Forget about whether you should have a playoff system. To be one of the eight teams in a BCS bowl, not to count the title game, that's special.

"It's a real credit to the players and obviously to Dana and all the coaches for being able to maneuver through the season and win close games at the end of the year and win the Big East championship his first year.

"It's tough to get to BCS games."

It might be easy for the Mountaineers to get back next season, which would make four trips in eight years. If WVU remains in the Big East, the team will again be favored to win the conference.

If WVU is in the Big 12, it's a different story. At the very least, this is a team that should be able to compete and win there. Who knows what happens if the Mountaineers beat the right team at the right time and catch some breaks?

That's all speculative stuff that will be sorted out soon enough, but the facts are the team that scored 70 points Wednesday will have the quarterback, four top receivers, top three running backs and five of the top seven offensive linemen back next season.

If the Mountaineers looked good in south Florida, imagine how this might be eight months from now.

"If you go back and look at the interviews we had from the first one of the year to now, we had issues with turning the ball over, issues with taking sacks, issues with making the wrong checks, issues with doing things outside our system," WVU quarterbacks coach Jake Spavital said.

"Geno had his best game (in the bowl). He made all the right calls. He took care of the ball. He scrambled well. He did everything we've asked him to do and he put it together at once.

"It starts evolving even more now. We can be more complex with the offense. You look at the offense the first week to this week, it's a lot more complex."

That's kind of scary. For the entire season, the offense talked about all the errors Spavital mentioned. They said the only group capable of stopping the offense was actually the offense and they grumbled that the offense kept doing it.

For one night, they got out of their own way, from the moment the game started to when the conservative play calls suggested it was over. They gave everyone a view of what it was supposed to look like.

The Mountaineers hope that was a glance at the future.

"It's a perfect example," Smith said. "It didn't happen very often for us this year, but we had very few negative plays, we kept the chains moving and we made good decisions. I think the sky is the limit for us if we learn to execute like that."