Arizona wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan makes the catch for a first down during an NCAA college football game against BYU, Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024, in Provo, Utah. (AP Photo/Tyler Tate)

MORGANTOWN — Historically, West Virginia knows how much it hurts to get too close to the fire ignited by a red hot receiver, so it might be best to put the Tucson Fire Department on alert this weekend when the Mountaineers fly there to face Arizona and the Wildcats’ star wideout Tetairoa McMillan.

“We’ve played good receivers,” Coach Neal Brown noted in this week’s press conference. “This is in no means a negative toward anybody we’ve played. We haven’t played anybody like him.”

The combination of McMillan’s size, speed and route running and WVU’s pass defense this year sent an inquisitive reporter leafing back through the record books to see just what kind of receivers WVU has faced — not just in Brown’s tenure, but historically.

It’s quite a list and there may be room on it for McMillan after he goes against a WVU team that ranks 116th in the nation in pass efficiency defense while allowing 254.3 yards passing per game, ranking them 15th in the 16-team Big 12.

McMillan’s resume’ shows how threatening he is to the WVU secondary. As a freshman, he broke the Arizona record for receiving yards by a true freshman with 702, which was produced through 39 catches, 8 for touchdowns.

Then last year he had 90 catches for 1,402 yards and so far this season he has 708 yards after starting the year with a 304-yard, 4 TD performance against New Mexico in the opener.

That caught his opponents’ attention and he has not yet returned to the end zone in the six ensuing games and last week he reached a new low with just 38 yards on five catches.

But before you get too excited about the Mountaineers’ chances of repeating that success, consider that the opponent was Colorado and they are coached by maybe the best NFL pass defender in history, Deion Sanders, a man who has a pretty good idea of how to shut down a wide receiver.

Brown plans to come up with own version of ways to defend McMillan.

“I think we’d be foolish if we tried to play him exactly like we’ve played everyone else,” Brown said. “We’re not just going to line up and play one-on-one.”

But Arizona coach Brent Brennan took a message out of what Colorado did last week.

“I think, No. 1, we have to find a way to get him the ball better,” he said. “The other part of that is he was getting doubled a lot the whole game, so that’s complicated when they are going to do that to him. We have to be creative with our scheme that way in terms of how do we give him a chance to get away from that double.”

So, it will be a chess match but it turns out that most of this season WVU’s pass defense has been playing checkers and it reached a new low last weekend when Kansas State’s Avery Johnson threw for a career-high 298 yards with three touchdowns and no interceptions against the Mountaineers.

So what kind of records seem to be in jeopardy in this one for the Mountaineers, who have been scorched by some of the best in their history?

Some forget that in the wildest game ever played by WVU, their Big 12 debut in which they won, 70-63, over Baylor, while Stedman Bailey set a school record with 303 receiving yards on 13 catches for 5 touchdowns, he wasn’t the game’s leading receiver.

Baylor shattered all opponent records that day with 17 catches for 314 yards and two touchdowns. In fact, Baylor had three receivers grab more than 100 yards in receptions, as did WVU’s Tavon Austin, who caught 13 for 215 yards and two TDs and JD Woods caught 13 for 114 yards and a touchdown.

Now there have been other notable performances against WVU over the years. Take Oklahoma’s Marquise Brown, who had 11 catches from quarterback Kyler Murray for 243 yards in a 59-56 victory over Brown and WVU six years ago.

The Backyard Brawl has seen WVU victimized by some pretty good receivers, such as Dietrich Jells, who in 1994 had 225 yards and did it on just five catches, averaging 45 yards per reception, one of which was an 80-yard touchdown.

And the Mountaineers also had a bit of a tough time with a Panther receiver named Larry Fitzgerald, who in 2002 had 11 receptions for 159 yards and 2 TDs and then improved on it the next year with 9 receptions for 185 yards and two more touchdowns.

A couple of receivers who went on to star in the NFL hurt the Mountaineers, Marvin Harrison of Syracuse, caught 9 for 213 yards, including an opponent-record 96-yard score from Donovan McNabb, in a 22-0 win over WVU in 1995. And Tyler Lockett of Kansas State caught 9 balls for 194 yards and two TDs in 2012, and two years later caught 10 for 196 yards.

All appearances are that McMillan possesses the same type of talent as all of these Mountaineer tormentors..

“I think he plays the position at an elite level,” defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley said. “It’s all the little things. It’s route running. It’s coming back to the ball, it’s body control. It’s using his body depending on the route. He’s as good as anybody in the country; as good as anyone we’ll see.”