We Didn't Respect The Rivalry

At the risk of sounding as if I'm trying to pull off an after-the-fact Nostradamus, I had a bad feeling about the Pitt game as early as last Sunday when the line came out at 26 points and almost immediately shot up to 28. Now, I know what a line truly is; half the Vegas players looked at the Connecticut game a week before and liked the four touchdown spot. The Vegas players did not care that the game was the 100th edition of the Backyard Brawl. The problem is, too many of us Mountaineer fans also did not care.

Foremost, we should have respected the rivalry. That includes all of us: coaches, players, media, and fans. The collective We. The collective We had a psyche problem. We didn't respect the rivalry, and for that We had our heads handed to Us.

Pitt was merely a rung on the ladder to the Crystal Football, We thought. A rung. How rude can We possibly be? After all the decades of scorn, you'd think The University of Pittsburgh should have earned a spot in the contemptuous side of Our souls, not condemned to the indifference We displayed. True, this wasn't just any game. It was the national championship semi-finals, albeit in a secondary sense. Most importantly, it was a game against our arch enemy Pitt. However, We played to go to New Orleans, without concern as to who was on the other side of the ball.

Among all the French Quarter-bead-laden fans at the game, where were the Pitt Sucks shirts? There weren't many, fewer than the past when the game was just your normal, seismic Backyard Brawl. In a convoluted manner, the absence of Beat Pitt caparison is disrespectful. We treated Pitt as if they were Cincinnati. So, by the end of the third quarter, by the time We had figured out We had better beat Pitt, it was too late. We allowed them to hang around for so long, they thought...no, they knew...they could win. And, the rest is history, leaving Us wondering how this happened.

We didn't respect the rivalry. That's how it happened.

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Q: How could the Mountaineers put up 66 on Connecticut and be held to 7 by Pitt?
A: It's Pitt.

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Contrary to the opinions of those of us who right now feel frustrated and angry, I think Rich Rodriguez is the man who will someday take us to the championship game. However, he was completely outcoached by Pittsburgh's Dave Wannstadt. Coach Wannstadt, a man whose job may still be in jeopardy, knew his one chance to win was to keep our 66 point offense off the field. He bled the clock every play, breaking our hearts in the third quarter by holding the ball for almost fourteen minutes. That gave the Pitt offensive line an opportunity to believe, to really believe that they could push us back every time. On that strip of turf, three yards wide and six or seven really large men broad, it was a Panther butt-whippin'.

The Pitt offensive momentum spread to its defense. At times with only seven in the box, Pitt plugged up our vaunted, formerly unstoppable running game. Steve Slaton was held to seven carries; Noel Devine, nine. Pat White had no where to go, and Jerrod Brown did only a little better. Where was Owen Schmidt? Blocking. The line couldn't do the job themselves.

Butt-whippin'.

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Where was Owen Schmidt? More relevant, where was Steve Slaton? Still more relevant, where has Steve Slaton been this season? He's hailed as a team player by the media with his disregard for personal stats, but what does that truly mean? To me, it means he's not getting the blocking he had in the Sugar Bowl against Georgia when he romped for over two hundred yards, breaking Pitt Panther Tony Dorsett's game rushing record. In a pure straight ahead race, Steve Slaton beats Pat White and Noel Devine. However, whereas White and Devine need but a sliver of a hole to break it, Slaton requires a door, at times a garage door. Steve cannot shake and bake like Pat, and he doesn't have the feet and balance of Noel. Slaton needs a lot of help.

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I'm extremely excited about playing number 4 Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. Pardon me, but in the three years I attended WVU between 1978 and 1980, we won 12 games. I was in my late twenties before I saw us take Penn State down . A Peach Bowl bid used to be the ultimate culmination of a great 8-3 season. So, I dealt with the disappointment of that Pitt game quickly. With one big outing against the Sooners, we can get just about all of it back. This is the only game we have remaining. We have a month to get healthy and to heal our spirits, and Oklahoma has a month to cool off. Drop it, dude. It's not for the Crystal Football, but it's a great opportunity.

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In conclusion...raining a team with 'boos' of displeasure and disappointment, a 10-2 team that is bound for a BCS bowl by virtue of winning its conference, a team ranked 9th in the BCS standings and winners of at least 10 games in each of the past three years, raining that team with those 'boos' is inexcusable. We're supposed to be fans with a good deal of football acumen. We shouldn't have our blatant disgust displayed for all to see and hear on national television. That's low class.