November 18 Notebook
November 18, 2005 10:22 AM | General
November 18, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – When you’ve played the same school 97 times including the last 61 years in a row the game has to be considered somewhat important. And of course that is the case with West Virginia’s annual football tussle with Pitt that has become known as the “Backyard Brawl.”
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| West Virginia quarterb ack jeff Hostetler withstands a fierce Pitt rush to get off a pass in this 1982 game at Pitt Stadium.
Photo taken from Pitt Stadium Memories: 1925-1999 |
The moniker ‘Backyard Brawl’ can be traced back to at least the mid 1960s and in addition to describing a very tough, hard-hitting football game between the Mills and the Mines, it has also come to symbolize one of college football’s most underrated football rivalries. In these parts, with the two schools just 75 miles apart and each fighting for the same high school football players, it is every bit as important as Ohio State-Michigan or Oklahoma-Texas. Yet for a number of reasons, the West Virginia-Pitt game isn’t quite viewed in the same light nationally.
ESPN Sport Nation is conducting a poll right now ranking college football's best rivarlies and the "Backyard Brawl" isn't even included among the 21 being considered.
“The thing about Michigan-Ohio State is that it has always been so widely publicized,” said former Pitt coach Foge Fazio, today doing analysis for The Westwood One Radio Network. “Both of those institutions are so damned big and the Big Ten has had a great reputation long before when we were both still independents.”
Don Nehlen, West Virginia’s coach from 1980-2000 and a former Michigan assistant, got a first-hand look at the Ohio State-Michigan series. He offers this view, “I don’t think (the Backyard Brawl) has quite the national implications that the Michigan-Ohio State has, but from a coaching standpoint it is exactly the same.”
As Fazio and Nehlen mentioned, the reasons are varied. Until recently West Virginia and Pitt weren’t members of the same conference so the games didn’t have quite the same allure as say Southern Cal playing UCLA for the Pac-10 title. Another inhibiting factor was the fact that the “Backyard Brawl” was played in the middle of the season instead of at the end of the year like it is now.
And until 1962, the games were mostly played in Pittsburgh, which is one of the reasons why Pitt has accumulated such a big margin in the overall series record (59-35-3 entering this year). During one stretch from 1910 to 1929, the Panthers only ventured to Morgantown once and then during another period later traveled to West Virginia just six times from 1935-62. Because Pitt was considered a national program in the 1930s and 1940s, that was probably the only way West Virginia could play them.
Because of that, in the eyes of Pitt supporters the West Virginia game was – at least for many years – considered more of a warm-up to the real game at the end of the year against Penn State. Examine any Golden Panther hit list from 30-40 years ago and they had West Virginia as far down as No. 3 behind Penn State and Notre Dame.
When he took over the Panther program in 1982, Fazio tried to explain to Pitt boosters that Don Nehlen was building a pretty good football program down in Morgantown.
“Whenever I was coaching there we had Penn State,” said Fazio. “A lot of people thought, well, we’re going to beat West Virginia and there is nothing to worry about there. Let’s worry about Notre Dame and Penn State – not so much the players and coaches, but the fans and the boosters who seem to buy into what they read.”
One of Nehlen’s first objectives when he came to West Virginia in 1980 was to transform the “Backyard Brawl” into more than just a one-sided affair. Since upsetting the Panthers, 17-14, in Morgantown in 1975, West Virginia lost subsequent games by scores of 24-16, 44-3, 52-7, 24-17, 42-14 and 17-0. The series wasn’t becoming a broken record -- it was a broken record.
“They were at the top of the mountain and we were trying to catch them,” Nehlen said.
Before every Pitt game the coach began telling his team a little story about climbing out of the well and each time they were about to get out of that well there was a Pitt Panther standing at the top trying to knock them back down in. Without deviating one single word, it’s the same story he told every player he ever recruited to West Virginia. All of them can recite Nehlen’s little Pitt Panther fable word for word.
“He’s probably telling that story to somebody right now,” laughed former linebacker Darryl Talley, Nehlen’s first consensus All-American in 1982.
The message was simple: Pitt was the enemy and you better strap your helmets on tight when you play the Panthers because they aren’t going to give you an inch.
The second important thing Nehlen decided to do was get his team stronger. Nehlen told his strength coach Dave Van Halanger that he wasn’t necessarily opposed to him fudging the numbers to make the players appear stronger – just as long as they thought they were getting stronger.
“I had linemen that could run five miles and couldn’t bench press 200 pounds,” Nehlen said. “I’m playing Pitt and Penn State. I told Dave, ‘I don’t give a damn if these kids can run from here to the refrigerator, we’ve got to increase their strength by 30 percent or we’re going to get killed.’”
By 1982, Nehlen had a team strong and confident enough to play with Pitt. The Mountaineers opened the year by winning at Oklahoma and they also beat a very good Maryland team led by quarterback Boomer Esiason.
“I thought we could play on the same field with them but then again you’re talking to somebody who has never been in a fight that he thought he was going to lose,” said Talley.
Pitt won the ‘82 game, 16-13, scoring all 16 of its points in the fourth quarter, but it was evident to the 57,000 fans at Pitt Stadium that Saturday afternoon that West Virginia football had come of age.
“We should have won the game,” Nehlen said afterward.
West Virginia did finally beat Pitt a year later in Morgantown, and has won 13 of the last 22 games in recent play that includes two ties. Because of what Don Nehlen started in 1980, West Virginia today is much more than just a nuisance to the Pitt Panthers.
“From 1982 on, this football program joined the upper echelon of college football and we’ve been able to maintain it to a decent degree ever since,” said Nehlen.
Of course the “Backyard Brawl” today is no longer a one-sided affair. In fact, the two team's records over the last 50 years is an identical 24-24-2. And that is as competitive as you can get.
"There is no question this is our big game; it always probably has been but I think with the restructuring of the Big East with new teams coming in and old teams going out the one constant has always been Pitt-West Virginia," said Pittsburgh coach Dave Wannstedt.
