Miller Part of Two Great WVU Teams
January 12, 2012 10:34 AM | General
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – In the years to come, Julian Miller is going to have to mark his calendar for two special team reunions.
He began his Mountaineer career in 2007 as a freshman member of West Virginia’s 2008 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl championship team, and he ended it a week ago as a fifth-year senior on the school’s Orange Bowl championship team.
Miller is one of just 11 players still remaining from that unforgettable Fiesta Bowl season, and what he remembers most about that year was how the veteran players were able to pull together when everything around them seemed to be coming apart.
“Coach Rod (Rich Rodriguez) had left and it was an unfortunate event, but we came too far as a team just to let everything go down the drain and give up,” Miller recalled. “Just the hard work and the dedication that we put in from that season just to get us to where we were … I mean we were on the brink of going to the national championship and it was an exciting time. But we still wound up in a BCS game, playing for the Big East and playing for a BCS ring and those types of things. We still had a lot to look at and fall back on.”
Miller said the lessons he learned from the older players in 2007 on the way to the Fiesta Bowl helped him get through another wild and crazy season in 2011.
“Compared to our freshman year, the leadership and the things that we witnessed as freshman, the way those guys carried themselves and the type of team that was my freshman year, it definitely helped us to gain the knowledge that we needed coming into this year,” Miller admitted.
Actually, Miller sees a lot of similarities between West Virginia’s Fiesta Bowl performance in 2008 against Oklahoma and its recent rout of Clemson in the 2012 Orange Bowl.
“There were a lot of critics not giving us any chance to win the game,” he said. “There was a large percentage of America going against us and all of the commentators were saying we just lost our head coach and we have no chance in this game. We were going against a pretty good Oklahoma team at the time.
“And I think the same feeling came around this year. Nobody really gave us a chance,” Miller continued. “Everybody had heard all year about how good Clemson was, how good they were on offense and what they had on defense. Coming into the game - it didn’t seem as much disrespect - but it was just the lack of respect we got from the Clemson team as well as the media. I heard comments about how we were going to get blown out and this was going to be the most unwatched game ever in BCS history and it wasn’t going to be close.”
He's right, the game wasn’t close.
With the contest well in hand midway through the third quarter, West Virginia was in the awkward position of trying to run out the clock to keep the score down. That wasn’t the case against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, but Miller said the work they did out in Tempe was very similar to what first-year coach Dana Holgorsen had prepared for his team in this year’s Orange Bowl.
“I remember the Fiesta Bowl year practices were very short and quick and fast. We got in there, did the work that we needed to do, took care of what we had to and got out of there. We didn’t spend a lot of time on our feet – not a lot of time hitting and things like that,” said Miller. “You don’t want to cause any more nicks and dings because it’s the end of the season and you want to go out there and get the work that you need to get.
“I think the prep for this year was similar,” Miller continued. “We did most of our hard work back in Morgantown before we even got down there to South Beach. I think once we got down there it was just a matter of going over what we’ve been going over all season. I think that helped us out a lot instead of being out there all hours of the day practicing and running and those types of things and that kept us fresh coming into the game.”
Miller, invited to play in next week's East-West Shrine Game, recognizes that he is now a member of two of the best teams in school history, and he understands that future comparisons will be made to those two teams. In fact, he says he has already experienced some of those comparisons during his playing career.
“Since that Fiesta Bowl, especially defensively, we were always compared to that Fiesta Bowl defense and the type of guys we had on that team,” Miller said. “It took us a couple of years, but I think this senior group, just everything that we’ve been through with three different head coaches and the things you wouldn’t expect a fifth-year guy to go through, it just shows the resiliency that we have as players to go out there and lead a team like this with a lot of young guys playing this year, new coaching staff, new schemes and just a new outlook going over the whole organization.
“For us to be able to do what we did and keep everybody together and to win a BCS game, it just shows a lot on the character of all of us seniors that have been through all of that.”
It certainly does.
Miller says the Orange Bowl experience really sunk in for him while he was sitting on the beach and gazing out into the ocean down at the beautiful Fontainebleau resort in South Beach. It was then that he began thinking about all of the twists and turns this season presented, beginning with the crazy Marshall game and all those lightning delays, winning on the final play against Maryland, Cincinnati, Pitt and USF, the ESPN Game Day crew being in Morgantown for the LSU game, and the disappointing losses to Syracuse and Louisville. All of those thoughts came together at that moment.
“When you think about all that you’ve went through out there - and you will be looking out into the ocean you think about those things, you think not only did we earn this, but we deserved it, too,” he said.
They certainly did.
He began his Mountaineer career in 2007 as a freshman member of West Virginia’s 2008 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl championship team, and he ended it a week ago as a fifth-year senior on the school’s Orange Bowl championship team.
Miller is one of just 11 players still remaining from that unforgettable Fiesta Bowl season, and what he remembers most about that year was how the veteran players were able to pull together when everything around them seemed to be coming apart.
“Coach Rod (Rich Rodriguez) had left and it was an unfortunate event, but we came too far as a team just to let everything go down the drain and give up,” Miller recalled. “Just the hard work and the dedication that we put in from that season just to get us to where we were … I mean we were on the brink of going to the national championship and it was an exciting time. But we still wound up in a BCS game, playing for the Big East and playing for a BCS ring and those types of things. We still had a lot to look at and fall back on.”
Miller said the lessons he learned from the older players in 2007 on the way to the Fiesta Bowl helped him get through another wild and crazy season in 2011.
“Compared to our freshman year, the leadership and the things that we witnessed as freshman, the way those guys carried themselves and the type of team that was my freshman year, it definitely helped us to gain the knowledge that we needed coming into this year,” Miller admitted.
Actually, Miller sees a lot of similarities between West Virginia’s Fiesta Bowl performance in 2008 against Oklahoma and its recent rout of Clemson in the 2012 Orange Bowl.
“There were a lot of critics not giving us any chance to win the game,” he said. “There was a large percentage of America going against us and all of the commentators were saying we just lost our head coach and we have no chance in this game. We were going against a pretty good Oklahoma team at the time.
“And I think the same feeling came around this year. Nobody really gave us a chance,” Miller continued. “Everybody had heard all year about how good Clemson was, how good they were on offense and what they had on defense. Coming into the game - it didn’t seem as much disrespect - but it was just the lack of respect we got from the Clemson team as well as the media. I heard comments about how we were going to get blown out and this was going to be the most unwatched game ever in BCS history and it wasn’t going to be close.”
He's right, the game wasn’t close.
With the contest well in hand midway through the third quarter, West Virginia was in the awkward position of trying to run out the clock to keep the score down. That wasn’t the case against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, but Miller said the work they did out in Tempe was very similar to what first-year coach Dana Holgorsen had prepared for his team in this year’s Orange Bowl.
“I remember the Fiesta Bowl year practices were very short and quick and fast. We got in there, did the work that we needed to do, took care of what we had to and got out of there. We didn’t spend a lot of time on our feet – not a lot of time hitting and things like that,” said Miller. “You don’t want to cause any more nicks and dings because it’s the end of the season and you want to go out there and get the work that you need to get.
“I think the prep for this year was similar,” Miller continued. “We did most of our hard work back in Morgantown before we even got down there to South Beach. I think once we got down there it was just a matter of going over what we’ve been going over all season. I think that helped us out a lot instead of being out there all hours of the day practicing and running and those types of things and that kept us fresh coming into the game.”
Miller, invited to play in next week's East-West Shrine Game, recognizes that he is now a member of two of the best teams in school history, and he understands that future comparisons will be made to those two teams. In fact, he says he has already experienced some of those comparisons during his playing career.
“Since that Fiesta Bowl, especially defensively, we were always compared to that Fiesta Bowl defense and the type of guys we had on that team,” Miller said. “It took us a couple of years, but I think this senior group, just everything that we’ve been through with three different head coaches and the things you wouldn’t expect a fifth-year guy to go through, it just shows the resiliency that we have as players to go out there and lead a team like this with a lot of young guys playing this year, new coaching staff, new schemes and just a new outlook going over the whole organization.
“For us to be able to do what we did and keep everybody together and to win a BCS game, it just shows a lot on the character of all of us seniors that have been through all of that.”
It certainly does.
Miller says the Orange Bowl experience really sunk in for him while he was sitting on the beach and gazing out into the ocean down at the beautiful Fontainebleau resort in South Beach. It was then that he began thinking about all of the twists and turns this season presented, beginning with the crazy Marshall game and all those lightning delays, winning on the final play against Maryland, Cincinnati, Pitt and USF, the ESPN Game Day crew being in Morgantown for the LSU game, and the disappointing losses to Syracuse and Louisville. All of those thoughts came together at that moment.
“When you think about all that you’ve went through out there - and you will be looking out into the ocean you think about those things, you think not only did we earn this, but we deserved it, too,” he said.
They certainly did.
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