A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend and fellow fan of the Mountaineers. I asked him if he thought Cam Thoroughman would be getting so much love from the fans if he wasn’t white. He scrunched up his face and sighed before asking me, “Is Kevin Jones getting the love he deserves considering he’s twice the player Thoroughman is?” Then we stopped our conversation, both nervous about its implications in the grander scheme of things. After all, we both loved Thoroughman as much as anybody. We both still do.

And frankly, everybody loves Thoroughman. He’s tough. He’s gritty. He’s scrappy. He makes the most of his talent. He’s gotten himself on the floor despite a repeatedly injured knee that robbed him of the game that earned him his trip to Morgantown. He makes the most of the time that he’s on the floor, including last Saturday’s all around performance (9pts, 7rbs, 6asts). He’s famously spent his four years here doing all of the little things that help teams win basketball games.

This isn’t about Cam Thoroughman though. This is about John Flowers.

Specifically, it’s about wondering why Flowers contributions this season seem like they’re falling by the wayside. His numbers? They’re excellent: he’s averaging 9.7pts, 7.2rbs, 2.5asts, and 2.5blks per game. He has gone from making 50 percent free throws to more than 75 percent of them. He’s played good minutes and stout defense. He has rarely made mistakes, and for the sake of comparison, he has averaged .3 more turnovers per game than Thoroughman in three times the amount of floor time.

And yet…

…let’s put it this way: Flowers isn’t beloved in the same way that Thoroughman is and there has to be a reason for that. It isn’t like Flowers hasn’t done things that ought to resonate with the fans. His way of celebrating victory over Notre Dame in last year’s Big East Tournament remains one of my favorite things about the 2009-2010 season. He’s always been a bit of an oddity during his time here and his Twittering is legendary.

And yet…

John Flowers and his contributions are not being sufficiently appreciated for reasons that I cannot entirely account for. I can account for the fact that announcers routinely introduce Thoroughman’s play with effusive and enthusiastic praise. I can also account for the fact that it is early in the season, just before the time when the men’s basketball team gets almost the entirety of the Mountaineer Nation’s attention. I cannot account for the rest of it.

And yet…

I originally asked if Cam Thoroughman would be as beloved if he weren’t white. It is a question that gives me the creeps, if only for the way it might be answered. Just as disturbing is wondering whether Flowers would be getting the recognition he deserves he if was white. I think we can all hope that the answer is no. As sports fans, I think many of us are unknowing adherents of the just world phenomenon; even when confronted with this conundrum, we will force ourselves to believe that there is a valid (read: not racially driven) explanation for this difference in recognition. But if race isn’t the explanation we’re willing to accept, then what is the real reason for the disparity?

As an unabashed John Flowers fan, I feel confident saying his is the team’s most indispensable Twitter account. After today’s disheartening loss to Marquette - in which the team again struggled to achieve simultaneous offensive and defensive consistency, Flowers wrote this:

Damn I feel like playin in traffic on i95 right now

John Flowers today wished the women’s basketball team luck, but qualified it with a nod to UConn’s Maya Moore, about whom he tweeted the following:

I got a crush on Maya Moore…jus cuz she can hoop lol I’m a sucka for ladies that can hoop ugggghh

Breaking news alert: Osama Bin Laden is dead.

That news rolled through our lives last night. It was stunning in every imaginable way. I took the news like I’d been punched in the chest, sitting in front of my television, drinking coffee, and waiting for President Obama to address the nation. But even from my home high atop South Park, I could hear the definitive sounds of celebration. They were coming from downtown Morgantown. I heard them for the rest of the night: sirens, car horns, more sirens. Here was one of the scenes.

If you ask me to explain to you how the death of a terrorist leads to a guy celebrating with his pants off, I can’t tell you. My guess is alcohol consumed in great quantities coupled with an enthusiastic crowd. That guy, incidentally, wasn’t the only one parading around with some of his clothes off. That’s John Flowers, this website’s favorite Mountaineer, plainly shirtless and plainly celebrating with the raucous students who emerged around the city.

This is a problem for institutions like West Virginia University, who understandably don’t want students burning everything in sight for the most minor of reasons. That makes sense. The university has earned its reputation for out of control students. University administrators are planning a counter assault, as hinted at here and here.

The following is as odd a sentence as I’m ever going to write. There is a significant difference between burning a couch after beating Virginia Tech and burning a couch after your childhood bogeyman has been vanquished. Games, no matter how passionately fans care about them, are ultimately meaningless. Beating an opponent is a nice release, but celebrating by madness is too much. It was a game and it will forever remain a game. Fighting back against that perspective is praise worthy.

But terrorism has been a very real part of the lives captured in celebratory videos and photographs. They were relatively young children when September 11th occurred. The grew up in a world where Osama bin Laden was a very real, and very menacing, bad guy, no matter how trite a description that might be. All of us were forced to confront a particularly awful reality ten years ago; I cannot speak authoritatively to how to affected children but I can easily imagine that the specter, if only for a few hours, of that threat being diminished was something worth celebrating, something which brought out the sort of uninhibited glee that leads to a college student imagining that a pantless celebration is the best possible celebration.

We can collectively agree that WVU students overreacted last night while at the same time acknowledging that there is a difference between last night’s madness and the kind you’d see after a big win. One is entirely unjustified. The other is too, but it isn’t given a childhood of fear. Find the kids. Make them clean up the damage. Make them pay some money for repairs and salaries. But suspending them from school ignores the historical nature of the evening and the contextual reasons for its occurrence. Sometimes, in other words, kids are going to react like kids and we as a society can say that while it wasn’t okay, it was something we can deal with without being capricious.

I have an entire category dedicated to great Tweets from Mountaineers. What John Flowers just accomplished is something else, something higher, something purer, for he strayed from the casual and joking and went straight for the issue of philosophical truths:

is getting a rub and tug “cheating”