A recap of the game as told through stats both in and out of the box score

3 – touchdown receptions for Brad Starks against UNLV

4 – receptions for Brad Starks against UNLV

0 – receptions for Brad Starks in 4 games leading up to UNLV

100 – yards receiving by Brad Starks against UNLV

-15 – yards attributed to Brad Starks in 4 games leading up to UNLV (10 yard illegal block penalty –Coastal Carolina, 5 yard false start penalty – Maryland)

12,6 – number of TD receptions and players who have caught a TD pass this season for WVU (Stedman Bailey and Starks with 3 each, Tavon Austin and Jock Sanders with 2 each, and Will Johnson and J.D. Woods with 1 each.  Noel Devine has caught 16 passes, but none for TDs) With 12 TD passes this season, WVU has already matched last year’s season total.

2 – more TDs that WVU has scored with a hurry-up offense.  By my unofficial count, 8or 9 of WVU’s TD drives have come in the hurry up offense (1 against Coastal Carolina, 2 against Marshall, 2 maybe 3 against Maryland, 1 against LSU, and 2 against UNLV)

0 – people who have given me a good reason why we don’t run the hurry up more.  Look, I know there’s a time to milk the clock, but that time is when you’re up by more than two scores in the 4^th quarter.  We have a tough defense who I’m sure would much rather play with a lead than get to sit down for an extra couple minutes.

Looking ahead to South Florida tonight

180.4, 63.9 – Passing and rushing yards per game for B.J. Daniels in 2009 (in games in which he was a starter)

136.8, 37.2 – Passing and rushing yards per game for B.J. Daniels so far in 2010

2-3 – WVU’s record against South Florida all-time

7-0 – WVU’s record on Thursday at Mountaineer field (WVU is 5-1 in their last six Thursday games. Wins against Colorado in 2009, Auburn in 2008, Louisville in 2007, at Maryland in 2007, and at Pitt in 2006.  Their only loss was at Colorado in 2008)

What’s to be made of these rumors about a possible exit for Bill Stewart? They’re everywhere and ugly, quite frankly.

Before anybody jumps to conclusions, it ought to be noted that as far as we know, nothing is set in stone. Nothing has been signed. Nobody has left. Nobody has been fired. Nobody has agreed. These are rumors.

The rumors are these: WVU and Pitt are simultaneously pursuing Oklahoma State’s offensive coordinator, the unfortunately named Dana Holgorsen. This is understandable from Pitt’s perspective, as they’ve saddled themselves with Dave “Never Deserved Any Coaching Opportunities At All” Wannstadt. WVU though?

Stewart was the head coach in charge during the triumphant victory in the Fiesta Bowl, the man in charge immediately after Rich Rodriguez fled town, the man Pat White insisted be the next coach. He led the team to very good performances by WVU’s usual standards and sports a gaudy 28-11 record, including two bowl wins. He has been, by almost any measure of a West Virginia University football coach, very very good.

Except that WVU fans have never taken to the man, mostly because he had the (mis)fortune of taking over a team with names we all recognized, names like Pat White and Noel Devine, names that we were sure meant WVU had the chance to repeat their highs of 2005-2006 and 2007-2008, years in which the team won BCS bowl games. WVU never came close to such an appearance, repeatedly losing games in which our talent seemed like it should have been doing better than the team lining up across from it. Things got particularly bad this season, when a horrible Big East ripe for the picking went untouched by WVU, who couldn’t manage to win games against either Syracuse or UConn, two teams who had generally spent the last ten years being considered league doormats. The offense in both games was pathetically inept.

Which is how you end up with Bill Stewart, a coach who will have double digit wins should he win the upcoming Champs Sports Bowl against North Carolina State, being rumored to be out of a job. This, simply put, is ugly.

It is also where this tiny insignificant blog take a tiny insignificant amount of responsibility: this blog has been screaming for Stewart’s performances. I won’t speak for Scott, but I will say that I’ve considered hurling my remote through the television repeatedly this season, particularly as Noel Devine’s career became the most wasted in West Virginia University history. Has there ever been anybody as talented, I repeatedly wondered, who was left more out to dry by his coaches?

The reasonable conclusion I came to after the season’s finish - one in which WVU seemed to right the proverbial ship - was that WVU’s offensive coordinator (Jeff Mullen) had to be shown the door. His offenses have been largely been ineffective in the time that he’s been here, as evidenced by this year. Had the man been able to scheme 21 points out of every game, WVU would have been undefeated and playing, at a minimum, in a BCS game. But he couldn’t. His offenses collapsed against LSU (understandable-ish, sort of), UConn (not understandable), and Syracuse (infuriatingly not understandable). Replace that man, and remind Stewart that a school of our size and talent ought not be settling for being the Co-Big East in a league as utterly weak as the Big East. Ever.

Now we have all this. It is undeniably shady, almost as bad as what Rich Rodriguez did to the Mountaineers more than three years ago. Stewart’s successes here didn’t occur in a vacuum - they occurred at a program that had historically won fewer than 8 times per year over the last 20 seasons. Stewart averaged 9 wins a season. He won more games in his first four years than Rodriguez did. His bowl record, even if you discount the performance in the Fiesta Bowl (which we shouldn’t), still featured a delicious victory, something that was incredibly difficult to come by in these parts in the days before Pat White.

If Stewart leaves the program having won double digit games this season, it will be a travesty, and that’s coming from somebody who was ready to see him canned mid-season. Mullen? Sure. That guy was useless. But Stewart helmed a program that performed at a better than average clip for the three years that he has been in charge, and that simply cannot be ignored, no matter how enticing Dana Holgorsen might be. (And good god is he enticing, having come out of Mike Leach’s Texas Tech program, a school whose offense WVU could/should have been imitating for the last two seasons.) There’s a right and a wrong way to go about making a change, and if everything that has been reported so far is true, then this is a perfect of example of change being done in the wrong way.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess.  My letter to Santa this year included a new offensive coordinator, a new offensive line coach, and an iTunes gift card.  Saint Luck brought me the new offensive coordinator I wanted (and presumably potentially a new offensive line coach?), but it brought about an end date for Bill Stewart’s tenure.

Sam has thoroughly covered a lot of my apprehensions on the ugly way in which this whole thing was handled and has rightfully defended Stewart from this undeserved resolution.  I will add though that I was also very upset by the smell of “good ol’ boy network” this transaction has on it.  The Black Coaches Association gave WVU an “F” in its hiring of Bill Stewart in 2008 (page 37) without interviewing, well, anyone. I can’t imagine there will be much of an upgrade when the next scorecard comes out.

As for my take, to all the fans who felt it was time for Stew to go (full disclosure: in all conversations I’ve had with anyone this season, I said I only felt Stew should go if he wasn’t willing to replace Mullen—indicating a failure as CEO), here is what I’m here to tell you: this is a slippery slope.  If Holgorsen (whose name I keep double checking to make sure I spell correctly—like I still do for Beilien Beilein) doesn’t win 27 games in his first three years, is he out?  If he doesn’t win the Big East outright, is he out?  If he doesn’t get to a BCS bowl, is he out?  Don’t laugh, the precedent has been set and you’d be surprised how desperately fanbases and university officials don’t want to be hypocrites.  If we begin to turnover coaches who experience success that members of our own conference would dream of, then we might as well join the SEC because that conference, my friends, is for the clinically psychotic. My handle on Mike Casazza’s sports blog is overtheSEC, because I simply can’t handle talking to most fans of SEC teams.

SEC fans are bipolar.  They’re always either one win away from naming their next child after the starting quarterback and getting a tattoo of the logo on their face, or one loss from hanging the coach in effigy and finding the nearest bridge from where they may jump to their death.  Half of the conference is coached by someone in their 4th year or less.  If you’re a coach in the SEC, it’s wise to lease and not buy. 

Here’s a highlight of some of the coaching turnover in the SEC over the past several years.  Houston Nutt was fired from Arkansas after the 2007 following seasons of going 10-4 and 8-4.  He was then hired by Ole Miss and after seasons of 9-4, 9-4, and 4-8 has the 4th hottest seat on the punctuationless CoachesHotSeat.com rankings.  The whole Lane Kiffin experiment is well documented, but don’t forget he replaced a fired coach who had a .745 winning percentage and had taken his team to the SEC Championship only a year prior to getting the axe.  Tommy Tuberville was fired after averaging 9.4 wins in his last five seasons!

Some WVU fans who expect a BCS bowl game every year are sounding way too much like the SEC fans I despise—the ones who its hard to hear them on sports radio with the gun in their mouth.  If this keeps up, I might have to change my handle to overWVUfans.

Holy hell, we have genuine confirmation. We’ve even reached talking head commentary part of momentous change. Good for us.

But before we start celebrating the arrival of a man who appears by almost any measure to be an offensive genius, there are still an awful lot of questions that need to be answered here in Morgantown, a place I’m still not sure Dana Holgorsen has ever stepped foot in.

1. How long has the planning for this been going on?
“Since the day he was hired!” seems to ugly a thing to consider, but it certainly seems there are those in Mountaineer Nation who have pined for Stewart’s departure since the night after that amazing victory against Oklahoma. There have always been rumblings that there was a core group of connected individuals who wanted Stewart gone; their influence on the Athletic Department ebbed and flowed, depending upon the situation, but according to Mike Casazza’s excellent reportage, we might be able to believe that their power was flowing after the Syracuse and Connecticut losses this season. This certainly suggests that Stewart’s performance, after a certain point, wasn’t going to matter to these people. That he won more games during his first three seasons as the Mountaineers coach didn’t matter; that he had a chance to get double-digit wins didn’t matter; that he had a genuine opportunity to lead WVU into its third ever BCS bowl game didn’t matter.

2. What were the ramifications of that planning?
Earlier this season, while a friend and I were arguing about Stewart’s coaching, he asked me if I wanted to bet against the man, a bet I refused on principle. No matter what the situation, you never cheer against your team. You always hope for the best possible outcome. But if the planning to remove Stewart had been going on for weeks, you have to imagine that this same cabal of insiders (lead by one very public outsider, Oliver Luck) must have been cheering against the Mountaineers. If the losses continued to mount, removing Stewart in the middle of his contract, and in the middle of a career that had started out better than any other football coach in the school’s history, was going to be far more palatable to the rank and file fans. There’s no denying that those fans were angry about the inexplicable losses to Syracuse and Connecticut - they were ugly performances that highlighted the worst of Stewart’s generally conservative coaching philosophy. But the overwhelming majority of those fans never thought to cheer against the Mountaineers against Cincinnati, against Louisville, against Rutgers, and against Pitt. The same can’t be said for Oliver Luck and the people he looked to for support.

3. What if Stewart had made a BCS bowl? What if he’d won?
It’s bad enough that Stewart is losing his job on the precipice of a double digit win season. But consider this: was there anything that was going to save Stewart once this decision had been made? He did win out after those two ugly losses, and he was a freshman quarterback’s airmailed fade routes away from going back to a BCS bowl game. If the Mountaineers had backed their way into a BCS appearance, would Luck still have executed this plan? The assumption has to be yes - most of the unnamed sources have claimed that Luck didn’t believe the program was “headed in the right direction,” whatever that means. (Well, except that the wrong direction is apparently the possibility of double digit win seasons and bowl appearances.) And forget the assumption: go back to Casazza’s article. He writes explicitly that this planning began weeks ago which means Luck wasn’t waiting for the rest of the season to play out. He didn’t care what happened throughout the Big East (and although UConn was in the league’s driver’s seat after beating WVU, they still had four more games to win).

Then there’s this: if Stewart had backed into a BCS game, what if he’d won it?

4. How bad is this succession plan?
It’s bad. Let’s forget, just for a moment, what the players and the coaches are supposed to do for the next calendar year without a clear leader, disciplinarian, decision-maker, etc. Let’s focus instead on the insidiousness of the plan from a fan’s perspective. (It is remarkable, before we get to the following issue, that Bill Stewart didn’t ask to be bought out entirely.) Who gets the credit for the way next season plays out? Depends who you’re asking but we aren’t going to waste our time asking everybody, because everybody doesn’t matter. Only Oliver Luck and those that support him unquestioningly matter. And what they’re going to do is this: give all of the credit for success to Dana Holgorsen and give all of the criticism for failure to Bill Stewart. (Again: it is remarkable that Bill Stewart is willing to endure something so transparently weighted against him.)

5. How does all of this reflect on Dana Holgorsen?
It doesn’t, yet. All we know right now is that Holgorsen is a offensive wizard whose schemes pile up the yards and the points. There’s a stack of evidence to that effect a mile high. Holgorsen was looking for a head coaching job and found one at WVU, albeit one a year away, one awkward, ridiculous year away. But what happens during the 2012 season if he doesn’t win his BCS bowl game? What if his Mountaineers don’t win the Big East title? What happens if his Mountaineers don’t win 10 games? Holgorsen had better not expect any more loyalty from Oliver Luck and his cronies. They’ve already indicated that they’re measuring success using some metric that the rest of us have neither seen nor would recognize. (Wins and bowl games don’t matter now, apparently.) They’re also willing to cheer for the other team if it advances their own clinical machinations. Holgorsen seems like a smart guy; surely he recognizes this situation for what it is.

6. At some point, somebody’s going to figure out exactly how important Pat White was to the program, right?
Perhaps nothing infuriates me more than this: Pat White is the reason WVU was as good as it was for four years. It wasn’t Rodriguez (he never won a bowl game without Pat White as his quarterback). It isn’t Stewart (although Stewart might get a win December 28, making this entire situation even worse). The reason everybody’s expectations are so entirely out of whack is what Pat White did for WVU from 2005 to 2008. We spent four years winning an overwhelming majority of our games, including four bowl games, to the point where fans everywhere started expecting that we were going to keep on doing that once White left. White was a once in a lifetime player. He and his contributions aren’t going to be easily replaced, regardless of who the coach is, and any assumption that they are going to be easily replaced denigrates what White accomplished here. Hearing WVU fans talk about White like he had nothing do with the team’s success is galling, especially because those fans act as though WVU started playing football in 2005.

They know, don’t they, that in the four seasons (all under Rodriguez) before Pat White’s arrival, WVU averaged seven wins per season? And that since he left, the team (under Stewart) has averaged nine wins per season? I understand if fans thought we’d be continuing the double digit win seasons indefinitely after the team’s greatest player left the team, but maybe that expectation was entirely unrealistic.

7. Do some fans understand exactly how schizophrenic their fandom has become?
As mentioned before, I’ve heard Pat White denigrated by fans who insist that Major Harris was the school’s best quarterback. I’ve heard Geno Smith denigrated by fans who insist that Barry Brunetti was better. I’ve seen Stewart’s accomplishments here dismissed as if anybody could have held the team together after Rodriguez’s abandonment, as if winning 27 games in three years is some negligible feat that any coach in America was capable of. I’ve seen the injuries that Stewart had to contend with (Jarrett Brown’s concussion and Noel Devine’s turf toe) dismissed as being unimportant. (Rodriguez and Stewart were lucky that Pat White rarely got injured, and when he did in the infamous Pitt debacle, WVU’s chances went out the window.) I’ve heard that wins and losses matter except when they don’t. I’ve even heard a revisionist history of Rich Rodriguez.

It’s that last point that’s so interesting, if only because the same fans who raged against how Rodriguez then are praising Oliver Luck now. When Rodriguez was sneaking around, it was an outrage. When Oliver Luck was sneaking around, it was praiseworthy. When Rodriguez was being disloyal, it was an outrage. When Luck was being disloyal, it was praiseworthy. When Rodriguez was walking away from his contractual obligations, it was an outrage. When Luck was walking away from his contractual obligations, it was praiseworthy. When it was Rodriguez, it was outrage, and when it was Luck, it was praiseworthy. The rules, it appears, are entirely ephemeral and depend more upon the whims of a few.

Of course, there’s nothing to be done about any of this now. Holgorsen’s the man, or will be, and Stewart is confined to history, but there exists a genuine possibility that Stewart gets the John Beilein treatment. Beilein’s contributions here have been either dismissed, forgotten, or written off, because he left the program, and because his predecessor lead the team to greater heights. (Although the writing off of Beilein occurred long before Bob Huggins reached the Final Four last year.) Regardless of what Holgorsen does, it seems clear that the Stewart years are going to be treated as a disaster instead of what they were: three really good years by any historical consideration of WVU’s football program. Could they have been better? I suppose so. But if you told me in 1984, in 1994, in 2004 that we’d have a coach who led us to a 2-1 record in bowl games and average nine wins a season over three years, I would have taken it, and you would have to. The highs of 2005-2008, a time coincidentally matched with the arrival and departure of WVU’s greatest ever player, shouldn’t change that concrete fact.

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.

In honor of the recent Holgorsen incident a song parody from The City of Morgantown, sung to the tune of “The Gambler”

On a warm mid-May evenin’, at the Mardi Gras Casino
I met up with a guy who had Phil Collins’ physique.
So we played blackjack till midnight while we drank our Ketel Red Bulls.
When the buzz it overtook us, he began to speak.
 
He said, “Son, I’ve lived my life, not caring for others’ opinions.
And if you look at my haircut, that comes as no surprise.
But I’ve had my share of successes, and I’ve been to lots of places,
For a taste of your Red Bull, I’ll give you some advice.”
 
So I handed him my Red Bull, and he drank down my last swallow.
Then he flagged down a waitress and ordered another can.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
He said, “If you’re gonna play the game, boy, you gotta have a solid plan.
 
You’ve got to know when to Holg ‘em, know when to fold ‘em
Know when to pass it deep, and occasion-ally run.
You never settle for field goals when you’re sittin’ in the red zone.
There’ll be time enough for field goals, if you save a timeout, son.
 
Every OC knows that the secret to survivin’
Is putting up lots of points upon that big fancy scoreboard.
‘Cause thirty points is nice and forty’s even better
And if your D’s halfway decent, you shouldn’t get outscored”
 
And when he finished speakin’, he got up from the table,
And later on that night, I hear he threw quite of a fit.
He got escorted out the building, and his boss sure wasn’t happy.
But I don’t care too much about that, as long as he beats Pitt.
 
You’ve got to know when to Holg ‘em, know when to fold ‘em
Know when to pass it deep, and occasion-ally run.
You never settle for field goals when you’re sittin’ in the red zone.
There’ll be time enough for field goals, if you save a timeout, son.

I remember it like yesterday. It wasn’t a typical football Saturday, it was THE football Saturday. The day the West Virginia Mountaineers took on the one and only University of Miami. It was the biggest game of the 1996 football season. Students had been drinking for weeks in preparation for this game. We were all beyond excited about it and had a cocky confidence that could only be supplied by kegs of Bud Light and shots of Mad Dog and Jägermeister.

By the time my friends and I reached “The Pit” it was in full effect. The condition of the field, aka The Pit, wasn’t favorable at all. It was late October and The Pit was basically nothing more than a mud hole that would soon have most students covered head to toe in a nice brown layer of wet, slimy goo. The alcohol, much like the students, was in abundance and people were going insane. It was a phenomenal day for many, except the football team, but that didn’t matter to most because they were too drunk to know where they were and probably had no idea who was on the field.

What’s my point you ask, it’s simple. Football games equal binge drinking which equals all sorts of craziness and chaos.

Imagine if after all that binge drinking I would have been able to continue drinking throughout the game, assuming I made it into the stadium. Imagine a drunken, 18-year-old girl with a fake I.D. stumbling through the student gate, to the concession stand and purchasing another Bud Light (for at least $5 or $6 I’m sure) and then pounding it before I even made it to my seat, assuming I could find one. And all of this drinking happened before the Pride of West Virginia ever took the field. Now times that by about 3,000 plus college students and you’ve got a wonderful day at Mountaineer field.

Hopefully there aren’t any young children sitting near the student section, or any older folks trying to enjoy a nice Saturday game of college football because the chances of that happening will be slim to none.

I know, I know. Not every college student binge drinks at football games. And not every college students acts like a complete moron and yells obscenities at innocent by-standers or throws trash cans on to the field. Hell, most of the time it’s the non-student crowd that causes all the problems. Mainly because the students are too busy throwing up in the stands or too high up to be able to throw something and have it reach the field. While I understand alcohol and sports is like peanut butter and jelly to most, I don’t understand why that ends up resulting in rudeness, crudeness and usually ridiculously obnoxious behavior by the men and women who are drunk. And I don’t understand why our University would be in support of it.

Selling beer in the stadium, even if you don’t allow pass-outs, is not going to help better our reputation or help take away the fact that we are viewed as nothing more than a party school. If anything it’s going to reinforce it. The University did away with the block party, they did away with The Pit, and they did away with as much as they could to move away from being a party school, but yet they’re going to sell alcohol at the stadium. How does that make any sense?

And how many other college football stadiums sell alcohol during the games? I don’t understand the rationality behind this move by the University or the Board of Governors. How on earth is selling alcohol at the game going to control the crowd better? How is giving the students, and the other patrons in attendance, an unlimited supply of alcohol going to make them drink less? At least in the past the students would sober up during the first half before they headed back out at half-time to pound a few.

Did the University ever consider that a good way to control alcohol abuse during Mountaineer football games would be to actually check the students as they are walking into the stadium? Most students smuggle in at least two or three beers, sometimes more. And liquor is even easier to get in, especially when put in a Ziploc baggie and shoved between your breasts or in your underwear. And yes, I am speaking from experience.

Removal of the pass-out is a good start to preventing students, and non-students, from leaving the game at half-time to consume more alcohol, but I fear the only result from this will be a smaller crowd during the second half of the game, especially if it’s a slow, low scoring game.

I haven’t agreed with or understood a lot of moves by the University, but I think this one tops the cake. I mean, I completely understand the joys of drinking, at one point in time I was the girl I can no longer stand, but I don’t see how supplying the fans with unlimited alcohol in the stadium is going to make the situation any better.

I would love for the West Virginia Mountaineer football team to be taken seriously amongst its competitors, but that is not the case and it never will be if we keep heading in the direction we’re going. Ninety percent of the time when a game airs on ESPN or ABC or any other major network the sports commentators aren’t talking about the skills of the athletes on the field, they are talking about the drunken debauchery that takes place outside of it. They talk about couches being burnt, about drunken students throwing things onto the field and about our poor choice of head coaches (which we are about to make again).

West Virginia University seems to always take one step forward so it can take two steps back. Heaven forbid we be known for something other than shenanigans and couch burning.

WVU football officially kicks off a week from this Sunday. If you haven’t read Sam’s excellent season preview set as a montage to “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” read it now. I’ll wait.

I agree 100% with Sam on this—at least I think I agree—anyway, here’s what I think:

-Everyone’s Holgorections (trademark still pending) are a little much and a tad premature. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a new system, Geno may not be on his feet long enough to pass the ball, and just because guys are good OCs, doesn’t make them great head coaches.

-A lot of those things that championship teams have (strong O lines, experienced defenses, dozens of NFL draft picks, SEC conference affiliation) we don’t have, however the things we do have (Geno, Tavon, Bruce, a down year in a weak conference) are enough to send your internal “What If” machine into overdrive

To say that “anything from 8-4 and 12-0 wouldn’t surprise me” is kinda lame so I’ll avoid saying that. Instead I’ll go the opposite direction and say this: this year’s Mountaineer team WILL surprise me in some way. Why? Because, if I’ve learned anything in my 30 years of being a Mountaineer fan (and of living) is that we will always be surprised, whether for good or for bad.

Sam previously linked to one of the bigger let downs in Mountaineer history during our lifetime (Tremain Mack) but here are some more surprises for your pleasure/displeasure. (click on the name for link to video)

Phil Brady Fake Punt

Pleasant surprise – Just when we thought we were going to have to give the ball back to the Bulldogs with WAY too much time on the clock, this sealed the win for the gold and blue 

Kellen Winslow’s catch

Unpleasant surprise – His catch on 4^th down and a mile extended the drive and became the highlight of the game, instead of Quincy’s run one minute earlier which almost caused Morgantown to erupt. (If you’re calling that play again, do you really bring the house and leave him in single coverage?)

Louisville 2005

Pleasant surprise - Was at this game and thought we were done for until an unreal come from behind win due to improbable (and illegal) onside kick recovery, and three overtimes.

Note: This post contains little to no discussion of actual football. In this post, which to the best of my recollection is one hundred percent accurate, football is merely the backdrop. For actual analysis of the game read this, or come back later for a deeper look into the statistics of the game

I’ve been to over 80 WVU home football games in five different states on four different days of the week spanning four different decades and I can confidently say I’ve never experienced anything like I did on Sunday.

After 2 ½ quarters of play, the sky started to hint of trouble ahead, further magnified by “in case of emergency” alerts from Travis Jones over the PA. I was seated with my wife, sister, cousin, friend, and four year old daughter (sounds like the beginning to a bad WV joke) near the Marshall band so we grew a bit more concerned when he started passing out the ponchos and delivering directions that he was being fed from an earpiece. There was a “when” to his directions, and not an “if” or “in case of.” My sister had taken my restless daughter to see her Gamma and Gampa at their seats on the other side of the stadium but not before we made our own “in case of” plans.

As you’re probably aware, right after Tavon took the kickoff return to the house the announcement was made to clear the stands. (This was about 5:50 PM) We actually were evacuated down through the visitors’ tunnel. As it was still not yet raining, the four remaining (myself, Corey (friend), Ben (cousin), and Danielle (wife)) left the cover of the tunnel for Corey’s car in the blue lot which 1) offered a safe location 2) served as a proposed meeting location for my sister and four year old 3) contained a cooler icy cold beer. As far as we figured, it was a much better location than an already packed visitors’ tunnel.

(Not familiar with the stadium layout? Use this annotated map to help you follow along while you read)

We had made it to the student side of the stadium when lightning hit and within 15 seconds it was raining sideways. Ben took shelter under a parked tractor trailer (in hindsight, the fact that at the time this seemed like a perfectly good and sound idea to him—an intelligent college graduate—and the 60 other people congregating underneath it tells me that people do ridiculous things in times of crisis). In a scene straight out of Band of Brothers he told us to go without him and that he’d be okay and look for us later in the parking lot. For some reason, I didn’t feel like I’d see him ever again and went off to escort my bride. After trekking through the pouring rain, and helping some guys with their tent that was buckling under the wind (who kindly thanked me with a beer) we made it to Corey’s teal (not light blue) Subaru and settled inside soaking wet with Corey, his wife, and my wife. We listened to the radio, watched everyone walk by even more soaked than us and only because of time stamped activity on my phone do I know what happened next.

At 6:19 I received a text from my parents telling me they had my daughter and all was good.
At 6:33 I noticed Ben had texted asking where we were. I gave him our approximate location and told him to look for the light blue Subaru.

At this point it had pretty much stopped raining. Corey and I got out of the car and heard some commotion coming from the light blue lot. Turns out fans had taken to sliding down the muddy hill into several feet of water that had gathered where the team had walked earlier for the Mantrip. I took some video from the steps that connect the light blue and blue lots as several people slid down the hill and splashed (YouTube version from a different angle here). I’m 90% sure a girl went down topless. I was pretty far away but the petite frame and the increased commotion leads me to believe I’m correct in that assessment. For reasons having nothing to do with the previous two sentences, Corey and I walked closer so we could see from below and were miraculously reunited with Ben. (I cannot describe to you how hilarious that moment was. It was a chance meeting where Corey and I positioned ourselves on either side of a guy wearing a clear poncho as the three of us watched the mudsliding and after 30 seconds we realized we were flanking my cousin. It was a reunion that provided perfect symmetry to the Band of Brothers goodbye that took place nearly an hour before. We deliriously laughed as we thought of what the chances were of running into each other again out of the tens of thousands of people)

We returned to the teal (not light blue) Subaru where it was pointed out to me by Ben that it was in fact not light blue and were soon joined by my parents with sister and my 4 year old in tow. They had been hanging under the concourse. After some debate and a jump start from stadium support personnel, the girls and my dad headed home in the Subaru and Corey, Ben and I vowed to re-enter the stadium.

We then wandered around this post apocalyptic scene for another 90 minutes that felt like days trying to meet people and bum beer. Some of the highlights:

-Corey trying to cleverly get some beer from a guy on RV row in a way that someone could have easily misinterpreted as trying to solicit sexual favors.

-A group of three guys who were treating the Blue lot like a scavenger hunt to equip their next barbecue. Us: “Where’d you get that (really nice” cornhole set?” Them: “We found it” Then they opened their “newly acquired” rolling cooler and showed us their “discovered” bottle of Stoli, “borrowed” airplane bottle of Jameson, as well as their “recently ascertained” beers

-A dozen people in a Gold and Blue painted 15 passenger van singing Counting Crows. We spoke to one of the folks in the group who was outside. When they informed us they were from Mullens, my exclamation of “Herbie Brooks!” established our credibility as true WVU fans.

We re-entered the stadium and sat in the seats where Ben and I grew up sitting with our families and grandparents—my grandmother whose life we had just celebrated the day before at a funeral in Bridgeport—and cheered on our Mountaineer defense on a 3 and out, and cheered as we scored a touchdown to put the game away. I don’t know how many fans were there, but I feel like I’ve seen more at the MHS band spectacular.

When the next delay was announced and the stadium was evacuated, we headed to the Beanery for pizza and a dry place to sit. In the spirit of the conservationists we had met earlier, Corey rescued a very nice folding chair from the northwest corner of the Blue lot on our way. After food and thinking that someone had been struck by lightning (still waiting on that retraction ESPN) we made it home right before 11 and soon after calling it a night but not before posing for this

Going into this game I told you I anticipated being surprised, I didn’t anticipate having one of the craziest and most enjoyable experiences of my entire WVU fandom.

After bringing you Dana Holgorsen as “The Gambler” over the summer, the only way to accurately describe the whirlwind of conference realignment is through another song parody. And what better song than the schizophrenic words of Michael Stipe and REM, “It’s the End of the World as we know it (And I feel fine)”?
Suggestion: Listen to the song here to keep up with the tempo and the lyrical rhythm. Enjoy!

Note: Even though I started composing this song yesterday, it’s already partly out of date so forgive any dated references.

That’s great it started with Pitt, and Cuse, headed to, the ACC
Marinatto’s not afraid
Meeting of the ADs, gotta raise the exit fees
Take the league to 12 teams
Piling on from to Tran-geez
Everyone weighing in, Boeheim, Petrino
Twitter starts to chatter with rumors, innuendo
According to my sources, an insider tells me,
A friend of the program and a person in the know
Moves are coming in a hurry
All things should be clearer in the next few days
Teams of team reporters baffled, stumped, buried, scooped
Look at that Thamel tweet! Fine, then
Uh oh, SchadJoe, reporting something we all know, but it’ll do
#freebruce, #freebruce
Each school serves its own needs
Listen to your heartbeat, Ollie
Keep the Mounties in national spotlight, right?
If SEC or ACC, or Big12 takes us, we’d be feeling pretty psyched

It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and I feel fine

Three o’clock, zero hour
School officials still quite dour
Be judicial, unofficial, reports are still quite initial
Shutting up, press releasing, despite speculation increasing
Every move speculate, till the time we celebrate
Tweet what he said, retweet that, calm down, calm down
Watch your twitter time-line, uh-oh, this means
Announcements here! Much fear! All conjecture steer clear!
A super conference, super conference, super conference, why?
Every damn mid major, across the lower 48, save for the Big Sky

It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and I feel fine
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and I feel fine

The other night I drank some wine and dreamt of conference realign,
Wetzel, Travis, Feldman, Forde, SportsbyBrooks, and Paul Fine!
Ennis, Mike Casazza, McMurphy, and Andy Katz
Now we’re hearing 50/50, is the end in sight? 
The next 48 hours are critical, right? Right

It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
Hope our fearless AD doesn’t blow it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and I feel fine
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
I don’t trust your tweet more than I can throw it
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and I feel fine
It’s the end of the Big East as we know it
Politicians are trying to quid pro quo it
If we don’t get out soon, I may Bordeaux it and drink some wine