MSNsportsNET Rewind
December 12, 2006 12:56 PM | General
December 12, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- A disappointed Don Nehlen walked into the Carquest Bowl press room in 1997 after his West Virginia team’s 35-30 loss to Georgia Tech – the Mountaineers’ seventh straight bowl defeat.
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| Quarterback Marc Bulger passed for 353 yards and a pair of touchdowns against Georgia Tech in the 1997 Carquest Bowl in Miami.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
After a couple of softball questions, a young sportswriter from Florida innocently asked Nehlen about his team’s long bowl losing streak. It was the right question at the wrong time.
“You want to coach them?” snapped Nehlen. “Huh? What do you want me to say? Huh?
“I just wanted you to comment,” the reporter replied. That was the wrong response at the right time.
“What the hell do you want me to say?” said Nehlen. “We’ve lost seven straight bowl games. Check who we’ve played and if you’re smart enough, fine.
“What do you want me to say?” he continued. “We’ve lost seven in a row. We’re not proud of it. But we’ve played some pretty good teams. There are a lot of teams that would like to be able to say they’ve lost seven.
“At least we had a chance to lose them.”
The press conference was over. The bowl losses weren’t – West Virginia dropped another one to Missouri the next year in the 1998 Insight.com bowl before finally ending the streak against Mississippi in the 2000 Music City Bowl.
WVU’s bowl woes began with a 1987 Sun Bowl loss to a loaded Oklahoma State team that had a guy named Barry Sanders as its backup running back.
The bowl losses continued against Notre Dame in the Fiesta, Clemson in the Gator, Florida in the Sugar, South Carolina in the Carquest and North Carolina in the Gator.
The loss to Georgia Tech in 1997 wasn’t entirely unexpected (Tech was 2 ½ point favorites), but there was a ray of hope that the Mountaineers might be able to pull this one off.
West Virginia was facing a 6-5 Georgia Tech team that had the worst defense in the ACC giving up nearly 430 yards and 24 points per game. The Yellow Jackets lost four of its final six games and gave up 89 points in three losses to Florida State, Virginia and North Carolina.
Georgia Tech was the only secondary in the ACC to allow more than 3,000 yards passing and WVU had a pretty good quarterback in sophomore Marc Bulger.
But West Virginia had its problems on defense, too. The WVU secondary allowed 21 touchdown passes during the regular season and teams were passing for an average of 218.8 yards per game. Pitt’s Pete Gonzalez torched the Mountaineer secondary for 279 yards and five touchdowns in a triple-overtime Panthers victory to end the season.
A year removed from having the nation’s No. 1-ranked defense in 1996, West Virginia permitted four teams in 1997 to score more than 30 points in a game. Prior to the Carquest Bowl, Georgia Tech wide receivers Harvey Middleton and Derrick Steagall talked about the Mountaineers’ vulnerabilities in the secondary, especially covering corner routes.
Unfortunately, the two Georgia Tech receivers were about the only ones talking about the game.
The Carquest Bowl game was South Florida’s JV game leading up to the Orange Bowl played four days later at Pro Player Stadium pitting Tennessee against Nebraska. Stadium workers were already making preparations for the big game when the two teams arrived 2 ½ hours before the Carquest Bowl kickoff.
West Virginia sold a little more than 4,000 of its 10,000 ticket allotment for the game, meaning the school had to eat about $288,000 in unsold tickets. A crowd of 28,262 was announced for the game at the 75,192-seat venue, making it one of the lowest attended bowl games of the year.
But that didn’t stop WTBS from showing plenty of wide shots of an empty stadium during the game. The announcers were so enthused that a couple of times they mistakenly referred to West Virginia as Virginia Tech.
“There’s more people in here (press room) than at the game,” Nehlen joked afterward.
Those who did decide to make the trip down to Miami were treated to a reasonably entertaining game.
Georgia Tech quarterback Joe Hamilton was a handful for the West Virginia defense, leading the Yellow Jackets to four long scoring drives of 80, 76, 94 and 76 yards and a 28-14 halftime lead. If fact, the Tech offense was moving the sticks so frequently that a new set of first-down chains had to be brought out, delaying the start of the second half.
West Virginia tried to keep up with Georgia Tech in the first half, getting a 14-yard Amos Zereoue run and a 21-yard Jerry Porter touchdown catch.
“First of all we only had the ball for 24 plays in the first half,” Nehlen said. “Amos … you’ve got to give him the ball a little bit. He never had the ball. And, all of the sudden we’re behind two scores, so we have to throw more than we want to throw.”
Bulger threw 40 times for the game, completing 25 for 353 yards and a pair of touchdowns. A 10-point third quarter pulled West Virginia to within four, 28-24, before Tech’s backup fullback Charles Wiley scored a 5-yard touchdown with 4:44 left in the game to make it a 35-24.
Less than a minute later, Porter caught his second touchdown pass – a 74-yarder when two Georgia Tech defenders ran into each other – and West Virginia was within a two-point conversion of making it a three-point game.
The conversion try was unsuccessful – just one of several missed opportunities for the Mountaineers in the second half.
Bulger overthrew two wide open receivers on deep routes and Khori Ivy dropped a pass after he got behind a defender. Before that, defensive back Nate Terry dropped a potential interception that could have gone for a 68-yard touchdown.
“We didn’t make any plays,” Nehlen said. “We had a couple of chances for big, big plays but they slipped through our guys’ hands. I think that fourth-down play (from Tech’s 34-yard line with 7:03 remaining) hurt a lot. We had the play open and our kid (Shawn Foreman) slipped and fell.”
Hamilton completed 19 of 36 passes for 274 yards and a touchdown and ran 14 times for 82 yards and a pair of scores. Steagall caught seven passes for 112 yards.
Georgia Tech had 484 yards of offense.
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| Jerry Porter caught touchdown passes of 21 and 74 yards and finished the game with four catches for 124 yards.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
Porter, a converted defensive back, caught four passes for 124 yards and two touchdowns while Foreman added 12 catches for 110 yards for West Virginia. Zereoue was held to just 17 carries for 84 yards.
“We didn’t contain Zereoue for long,” said Georgia Tech coach George O’Leary. “He made plays in the second half. Our defense did a good job of making plays and keeping him off the field in the first half. I thought it was a key situation.”
In the end, though, West Virginia’s defense couldn’t get their hands on Hamilton when it needed to.
“I’ve never seen so many missed tackles … even when I was in Little League,” said linebacker Gary Stills. “I mean, three and four guys missing tackles at the same time. That was sort of amazing.”
Scoring Summary
GT – Wilder 1 run (Chambers kick)
WV – Zereoue 14 run (Taylor kick)
GT – Hamilton 30 run (Chambers kick)
GT – Lillie 3 pass from Hamilton (Chambers kick)
WV – Porter 21 pass from Bulger (Taylor kick)
GT – Hamilton 9 run (Chambers kick)
WV – Zereoue 19 run (Taylor kick)
WV – Taylor 21 FG
GT – Wiley 5 run
WV – Porter 74 pass from Bulger (Pass Failed)
Individual Statistics
Rushing: GT – Hamilton 14-82, Rogers 16-75, Wiley 20-48, Wilder 3-5, Total 53-210; WV – Zereoue 17-84, Bulger 5-minus 28, Total 22-56.
Passing: GT – Hamilton 19-36-0-274-1; WV – Bulger 25-40-1-353-2.
Receiving: GT – Steagall 7-112, Middleton 4-45, Rogers 3-45, Wilder 3-41, Daniels 1-28, Lillie 1-3, Total 19-274: WV – Foreman 12-110, Zereoue 5-55, Porter 4-124, Greene 3-51, Ivy 1-13, Total 25-353.
Attendance: 28,262
