Campus Connection: Nobody Asked Me But ...
December 15, 2014 09:12 PM | General
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| West Virginia players celebrate Sunday's 69-66 victory over Marshall in the 2014 Chesapeake Energy Capital Classic in Charleston. |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Nobody asked me but … It appears new Marshall men’s basketball coach Dan D’Antoni is dusting off the old Thundering Herd playbook – use the media as a platform to coax West Virginia into playing them on more favorable terms.
We’ve seen this act before: Marshall coaches talking about the economic benefits of playing sporting events in Huntington by using the Mountaineers as the hook.
“I heard suggestions for home and home. Here’s my suggestion: Morgantown, Charleston. Next year Charleston, Huntington and just keep it that way,” D’Antoni was quoted in the Charleston Daily Mail following his team’s 69-66 loss to West Virginia last Sunday in Charleston. “It’s good for the state. If they back out now they’re afraid of us. We’re coming back.”
That sounds an awful lot like those “get a dog” quotes that we used to read coming out of Huntington. In one respect, D’Antoni is correct: West Virginia is afraid to play Marshall, but not for the reasons he’s implying. West Virginia is afraid to play Marshall annually because of these three letters: R-P-I.
You see, West Virginia’s yearly goal is to reach the NCAA tournament and in order to do so the Mountaineers have to play a schedule that helps them get there. The problem with playing the Herd is that they do absolutely nothing for West Virginia’s postseason résumé– and they haven’t for more than 30 years.
Go back and research the worst RPI team West Virginia has played each year since Bob Huggins began coaching the Mountaineers in 2007.
I’ll save you the trouble: it’s usually Marshall.
The issue for West Virginia isn’t losing to Marshall – that’s happened many times since the two schools began playing annually in 1978 – the issue is Marshall losing to all of those other teams it plays. Furthermore, go back through the years and look at what Marshall does after it plays West Virginia, especially following big victories over the Mountaineers.
It’s not very good.
For you graybeards out there, here is a similar analogy: West Virginia-Pitt football in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The Mountaineers were regularly going up to Pittsburgh to play the Panthers and getting their clocks cleaned. Unfortunately, other teams were cleaning the Mountaineers’ clock too.
What did the people involved with West Virginia football eventually do? They didn’t taunt Pitt in the media or challenge them to play home and home like school kids at recess – THEY GOT BETTER.
In the 1950s, once Art Lewis got his program going, West Virginia not only beat Pitt – and beat the Panthers in Pittsburgh - the Mountaineers did themselves an even bigger favor by beating a lot of those other teams on their schedule, too.
Pretty soon it was worth Pitt’s while to come down to Morgantown and play football games. And pretty soon, folks outside of the immediate area began to pay attention to the games as well.
The WVU-Pitt game became so popular that it even got a nickname (You can read about that game here). Today, the two schools no longer play but guess what, when it’s deemed beneficial to Pitt and West Virginia the game will be played once again.
In 1969, John Wooden once promised Bucky Waters that he would return a basketball game to Morgantown if the Mountaineers played UCLA in Pauley Pavilion. Of course, Wooden had no intention of bringing his Bruins to the hills of West Virginia.
But 37 years later UCLA finally played a college basketball game in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Why? Because the Mountaineers got better.
As for implying that Bob Huggins is afraid to play anybody, well, that’s just absurd. How about the Cincinnati-Xavier rivalry, the game that’s on national TV every year? For years, Huggins was the face of that game - and he enjoyed being the face of that game, too, I might add.
I remember something Don Nehlen once told me when I asked him about his approach to rivalry games (Don Nehlen’s name seems to carry a little bit of weight down in Huntington these days, by the way).
What Nehlen said to me, to paraphrase, was that his No. 1 goal when he first came to West Virginia in 1980 wasn’t to beat Pitt and Penn State right away.
His No. 1 goal was to beat those other teams on the schedule first, and once that happened, then the Mountaineers could set their sights on the Panthers and the Nittany Lions.
That seemed to work pretty well for him.
And by the way, that short drive the Marshall team makes from Huntington to Charleston to play the Mountaineers isn’t too bad. The check the Herd gets every year for playing there isn't too bad either.
But then again, nobody asked me.
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