The Backyard Brawl
November 13, 2006 04:12 PM | General
November 13, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Unlike those manufactured rivalries that some media members have tried to shove down our throats, in the minds of Mountaineers the true enemy is 75 miles to the north up Interstate 79, through the Fort Pitt tunnels, veering right onto the Parkway East and heading directly toward Forbes Avenue in Oakland.
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| Rich Rodriguez says Pitt will always be West Virginia's top football rival.
AP photo |
That’s where the Pittsburgh Panthers reside and that’s where West Virginia’s No. 1 football rivalry will always begin and end in the eyes of sixth-year Mountaineer coach Rich Rodriguez.
“Anybody that’s been around our university or is involved with any of our athletic programs understands what the Pitt game is,” Rodriguez said Sunday evening. “I have already mentioned this to our players that we will not have a bigger rival than Pitt – ever.
“If you’ve gone to West Virginia or you’re going to West Virginia, Pitt will always be your biggest rival. Our upperclassmen understand that and I’m trying to get our freshmen to understand that.”
Twenty six years ago when Don Nehlen took the West Virginia job in 1980 the very first question he was asked by a booster was this (I am paraphrasing): “Hey Nehlen, when the hell are we going to beat Pitt?” The new coach wasn’t asked about Syracuse and Maryland, or if he thought the Mountaineers would ever play the Marshall Thundering Herd.
They didn’t really care about the wine-sippers up at Penn State, either, probably knowing that that was just too much to ask for anyway. Pitt was the No. 1 target, period.
Nehlen got the message and he soon delivered, beating the Panthers 11 times in 21 games with two ties. Rich Rodriguez also got the message having played against Pitt and later witnessing the hand-to-hand combat that has become the Clemson-South Carolina football rivalry. Rodriguez, like Nehlen before him, has continued the winning trend by beating the Panthers three out of five times so far.
When you’ve played 98 times there is a little bit of something for everyone. Those 50 or older will never forget Hall of Fame coach Bobby Bowden blowing a 35-8 halftime lead to the Panthers in 1970. The lunatics pounding on the West Virginia locker room door at the end of the game wanting to personally go over a few of Bowden’s play calls will always have that one permanently etched in their peanut-sized brains.
The 1989 game went down as a tie in the record books but in the eyes of West Virginians it was a loss with a capital L. The Mountaineers were leading 31-9 heading into in the fourth quarter until Grafton native Alex Van Pelt became the state’s biggest traitor since Harman Blennerhassett.
Kevin Kinder, publisher of the Blue & Gold News, remembers as a young kid the anger he felt at Pitt for beating West Virginia in the last-ever game at the old Stadium in 1979. How could Pitt desecrate the memory of the old stadium like that?
Pitt did the same thing 10 years earlier when West Virginia’s old basketball field house was closed down for good. West Virginia has always had much better manners, letting Pitt enjoy the retirement of both the Pavilion and Fitzgerald Field House in basketball, as well as Three Rivers Stadium in football.
“I knew I was going to go to school there and I was thinking this is the last time I’ll go to a football game in this place,” Kinder recalled of that 1979 defeat. “The audacity of Pitt to beat us in the last game at our old stadium …”
Greg Hunter, founder of the Blue & Gold News and a member of the Metro News radio network sports team, remembers having an epiphany after the ‘79 Pitt loss.
“That is the last home game I ever missed,” said Hunter, then a backup offensive guard at Wisconsin-Oshkosh. “We were playing River Falls (Owen Schmitt’s former school) and I was standing on the sidelines freezing my butt off.
“Oshkosh had only seven of those big, heavy capes and I didn’t have one and I’m standing there thinking, ‘I wonder what the score of the Pitt-West Virginia game is?’
“On my way home after the semester I decided that maybe I ought to give up football and head back to Morgantown,” Hunter laughed.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a journalistic career was launched. Hunter hasn’t missed a West Virginia-Pitt game since. Kinder hasn’t either, noting that he is fairly comfortable reciting the scores of every WVU-Pitt game since 1980 along with their key moments.
I, being a big West Virginia fan and a glass-is-half-full kind of guy, have erased from my memory all of those unpleasant moments that have befallen the Mountaineers.
I have to be reminded of Dan Marino’s miraculous fourth-quarter comeback up in Oakland to preserve Pitt’s No. 2 national ranking in 1982. Or that the Panther’s winning drive in Morgantown in 1987 went backwards three yards.
I had completely forgotten about the 2004 game at Heinz Field in what has since become the birthplace of instant replay for Big East football.
Of course you can ask me all about the 1988 victory at Pitt when Panther castaway A.B. Brown ran 64 yards untouched down the middle of the field for a touchdown against his former teammates on one of those famous Nehlen draw plays. It was the parting of the Red Sea -- to borrow a biblical phrase.
Two quarters earlier, Reggie Rembert got things going with a nifty 33-yard touchdown catch in the back of the end zone (no, he did not push the Pitt DB in the back as far as you know).
I have no problem recalling in fine detail Amos Zereoue’s first college carry at Pitt in 1996, or legendary radio voice Jack Fleming simply saying during the long TD run that Zereoue was “as good as advertised.”
Some of the message-board junkies have recently taken great satisfaction in the 52 points WVU put up on the Panthers in wins in 1998, 1999 and 2003, believing it now has some sort of long-term significance.
Yet for me the 1994 victory at Pitt remains a personal favorite, not just because an Ohio Valley guy caught the winning touchdown pass, but also because the game was really a battle of futility.
It was the unemployed version of The Mills vs. The Mines. Picture one of those Turkey Bowls when all of your hung-over high school buddies returned from college to replay their last football game at the local park. Well, those Turkey Bowls had more defense than the 1994 West Virginia-Pitt game.
Of course Zach Abraham caught the winning touchdown pass from quarterback Chad Johnston after Pitt had taken a late lead, and Rashaan Vanterpool had all of those receiving yards for the Mountaineers.
I actually missed Abraham’s memorable touchdown catch because I spent most of the fourth quarter in the press box bathroom purging myself of a Pitt Stadium hot dog I had the misfortune of eating.
Even more remarkable than Abraham’s touchdown catch was the fact that Nehlen left behind his three star players after the game. It’s true because I had to drive two of them back to Morgantown in my beat-up Honda Civic (Abraham caught a ride back to Wheeling with his family).
Nehlen considered Pitt Stadium college football’s equivalent of the Hanoi Hilton and any additional time spent there was time lost forever.
That’s why the team bus pulled out three players light. I can still see Vanterpool sprawled out in the back of my car with an ice bag on his knee and his feet dangling inches from the back of my head, and Johnston sitting in the passenger seat wincing in pain as I plowed through I-79’s Grand-Canyon-sized pot holes.
I seriously doubt that Woody Hayes ever pulled out of Ann Arbor without Archie Griffin, Art Schlichter or Pete Johnson – even when the Buckeyes lost.
Just keep that in mind when you tune in the big Ohio State-Michigan game this Saturday.
