West Virginia quarterback Max Brown makes a throw during an offseason practice. Brown, Nicco Marchiol and Jaylen Henderson are believed to be the frontrunners to be the Mountaineers’ starting quarterback next season.

MORGANTOWN — Let us first not go into panic mode over the fact that Rich Rodriguez has not anointed one of his quarterbacks as the starter as spring practice is concluding.

Saturday’s Spring Spectacular or whatever it is they are going to call whatever they have trumped up to take the place of a real spring game may be the final practice of the spring but it is only the 15th practice under Rodriguez’s system for the quarterbacks.

Right now, the best quarterback in the West Virginia quarterback room remains Pat White and second may be color commentator Jed Drenning, who helped Rodriguez install his system back before the turn of the century at Glenville State.

While the most familiar is Nicco Marchiol, who is 4-0 as a starter at the school but that was all under Neal Brown’s system, which resembles Rodriguez’s only in the fact they line 11 players on the offensive side of the ball but which goes at the pace of a Volkswagen compared to RichRod’s Indy race car speed.

But Marchiol has taken no game snaps in this quarterback-centric offense, which sent him into the spring on even footing with the other five quarterbacks in the room, learning to play with the speed and tempo Rodriguez demands just as are the others.

And, knowing this, Rodriguez is paying little or no attention to how he or the others look or act doing it right now … or ever, for that matter.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever worried about personality,” Rodriguez said. “They pick somebody and ‘the winner: Miss America.’ Well, run the offense and make good plays and you can be a loner.”

At this stage of his instillation of the offense, he accepts that leadership can’t be established when they are still trying to figure out whether the three or four-hole is off to the right and what kind of footwork to use in the shotgun and how to read the defensive end as to whether he should hand the ball off or keep it and run himself.

“Everybody always worries about leadership during practice,” Rodriguez said.

“That’s what coaches are there for. We’re supposed to be leading practice.”

To Rodriguez the leadership will be earned after the system is learned.

“I feel the best leadership is earned leadership, from the standpoint of knowing what you’re doing,” Rodriguez said. “I think a lot of times the best leaders are guys that somebody will go to if they’re not sure what to do on a play.”

Marchiol has two transfers in the room with him in Jaylen Henderson, a redshirt senior from Texas A&M, and redshirt junior Max Brown from Charlotte. It’s expected that one of them, over the summer workouts and in fall camp, will establish himself as No. 1.

Not to be forgotten, of course, is the fact that when Pat White got to WVU he was not the starter, sharing time with Adam Bednarik. His breakout game against Louisville came midway through his freshman season when Bednarik suffered a leg injury, opening the door for White to join Steve Slaton in an explosive, come-from-behind overtime victory over Louisville that defined the offense.

The last couple of practices Rodriguez has taken a large step forward with his quarterbacks and let them go live, meaning they could be tackled. Normally you avoid such a step for fear of losing your starter, but right now he doesn’t have a starter and needs to find out what each can do.

“They all have good athleticism but I guess you don’t know until they go live what their willingness to run the ball is,” Rodriguez said. “You have to be at least a willing runner. We have that. These guys are all willing.

“If it’s called for, or they have to run, I feel confident they can do that,” he continued. “Maybe a couple of guys might be a little faster or shiftier than the others, but all of them as a group give us that ability that we can play with 11.”

That is crucial in Rodriguez’s system. The run comes first and to open everything up he needs to make sure the defense has to defend the quarterback running the ball. That makes it difficult to cover the edges, as well as cutting back on the aggressiveness of the pass rush from the defense.