How much, is too much?

The Horned Frogs administered an 82-27 whipping on Texas Tech.

It was a physical beating. It was a mental beating, the kind that can destroy a team and destroy a coach and his career.

“It’s as damaging as you let it be,” said Kliff Kingsbury, the Red Raiders’ coach.

The rout, led by quarterback Trevone Boykin with seven touchdown passes, were the most points scored by a team in a Big 12 game and the second most scored by a Big 12 team, Oklahoma State having put 84 on the board against Savannah State in 2012.

The idea, of course, on offense is to score points.

Some would say it’s to score as many points as you can.

But in this era of inflated scores, a team may not be able to hold scores down.

If we are scoring 82 now, can 100 be far off in the future?

It was a point for Patterson, whose 10th-ranked Horned Frogs come to Morgantown on Saturday for a 3:30 p.m. game shown on ABC that will be preceded by an appearance by the ESPN “GameDay” crew, and other coaches to mull over.

That, of course, includes Dana Holgorsen, the Mountaineer coach who has scored as many as 70 points on Clemson in a bowl game and 70 against Baylor in a regular season game.

One hundred points, seven at a time is 14 touchdowns and a safety.

That sounds like just too tall a hill to climb, but Patterson says he was trying to hold the score down.

“We had walk-ons in the game in the fourth quarter,” Patterson said. “It’s one of those games you can’t explain but you know you wish it wouldn’t happen the way it did.”

It didn’t matter. The game got out of hand early, 41 points scored in the first quarter, 24 by TCU, which would lead to 96 points had that figure been duplicated each quarter.

That set a tone, and then matters got completely out of control in the third quarter when TCU scored 31 points.

That, of course, clinched the outcome.

Or did it?

“Remember, two weeks before I had a 21-point lead and lost it playing an uptempo offense,” Patterson pointed out.

That, of course, was the now famous 61-58 loss to Baylor when the Bears came from 21 points down late and won the game.

The point is that no lead really is safe and that even if you put reserves in, you can’t ask them not to score. That’s unfair to them, kids who practice all week and are trying to win jobs in the future or move up the depth chart.

Somewhere along the line, a team, like a prize fighter, has to defend itself. If it can’t, well, the blood will flow.

But 100 points?

Coaches don’t seem ready to address that issue.

“I don’t know if I ever had a conversation like that,” Patterson said.

Holgorsen agrees.

“I don’t think (anyone will score 100),” Holgorsen said. “Eighty-two is awful high. Things have to exist on all three sides of the ball for that to happen. TCU benefitted from some very short fields.”

“I don’t know if that would take place or not,” the wily veteran coach Bill Snyder of Kansas State said. “If you’ve got that dramatic mismatch it’s conceivable but I don’t know there’s coaches out there that would allow that to happen. I don’t think anyone wants to do unnecessary harm to someone else’s program.”

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Freshman backup quarterback William Crest is going to take his redshirt this year because of a shoulder injury, but Holgorsen said he would have preferred Crest to have used the season working with the team rather than redshirting.

“I would rather have practiced him,” the coach said. “I wish we could get him out there. We made the decision he was going to be our backup quarterback and he was on pace for being the backup quarterback.

“If William didn’t have shoulder issues right now, he wouldn’t be redshirting.”

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The WVU coaching staff named running back Wendell Smallwood its offensive champion for the Oklahoma State game, safety Dravon Henry the defensive champion and Justin Arndt special teams champion.

Follow Bob Hertzel on Twitter @bhertzel