2006 Sugar Bowl: Sweet Memories
June 04, 2015 08:37 PM | General
Louisville was about to blow West Virginia’s football season right out of the water. The Cardinals strolled into Milan Puskar Stadium one sunny Saturday afternoon back in 2005 like they owned the place, and for three and a half quarters they actually did own it.
Watching Louisville go up and down the field like a hot knife through butter was difficult for West Virginia fans to stomach because they had seen Louisville try to do this before. They recalled how Howard Schnellenberger used to bring Louisville teams heavy on bravado and light on talent into our house, trying to put their muddy feet all over our furniture.
Then, of course, came the kickoff.
But this time Bobby Petrino had a really good football team that was coming off an impressive 11-1 season in 2004 in which the Cardinals defeated Boise State, 44-40, in the Liberty Bowl. In fact, it was Louisville – not West Virginia – that was predicted to win the Big East football championship that year.
It was Petrino who was supposed to ride in on his white Harley and save the Big East following the departures of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College to the Atlantic Coast Conference.
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Meanwhile, West Virginia, which had won shares of Big East titles in 2003 and 2004, was already a forgotten team. Despite finishing at the top of the league standings, nobody (West Virginia players included) really felt like the Mountaineers had won anything, especially in 2004 when they hit their finishing tee shots into the water on No.’s 17 and 18 by losing key conference games to Boston College and Pitt.
Now a year later, West Virginia was once again in the hazard. This time, however, the Mountaineers were just making the turn toward the back nine of their football season.
Leading 24-7 late in the third quarter, Louisville delivered what appeared to be the game’s deciding blow when backup linebacker Brandon Johnson sacked West Virginia quarterback Adam Bednarik for a 10-yard loss. Bednarik’s afternoon (and college career, for that matter) was finished when he got up and tried to take a step but couldn’t because his injured right ankle wouldn’t let him.
In came freshman Pat White, who got six of those lost yards back before completing a first-down pass to Darius Reynaud. Seven plays later, West Virginia was in the end zone for a second time.
Still, the Cardinals were leading by double digits and time was winding down. Hitting all six numbers in the Power Ball seemed more likely than West Virginia getting two more scores in the time remaining on the clock.
After that score, a Steve Slaton four-yard run, the offensive linemen plopped down on the bench, still wondering how they had gotten themselves into such a deep hole against Louisville, of all teams! That’s when White approached them waving his index finder.
“Ain’t no (expletive) way those (expletive, expletive, expletive) guys over there are coming into our place and beating us!” he yelled.
Up to that point, White had never started a football game for West Virginia University and his body of work consisted of being the team’s change-of-pace guy behind Bednarik. White was elusive and he was difficult to tackle, but it wasn’t like he was going to come in and throw the football all over the place and lead the team to victory.
Furthermore, he wasn’t someone who had a whole lot to say anyway.
Those in the Fourth Estate trying to pry quotes out of White found it nearly impossible to get him to say anything substantial. A typical Pat White interview at that point in his Mountaineer career usually went something like this:
Reporter: “So Pat, tell us about that touchdown.”
White: “It was a run.”
Reporter: “How did it happen?”
White: “Good blocking.”
Reporter: “Do you feel like it was the turning point in the game?”
White: “I don’t know.”
Reporter: “Did it motivate your teammates?”
White: “Not sure.”
Reporter: “Was it one of your better runs?”
White: “Maybe.”
Reporter: “OK, thanks Pat.”
That was White to the press, but when the microphones and cameras were gone he loosened up quite a bit. Still, if anyone else had approached those guys the way White did it would have been meaningless, but Pat White had aura about him even then at such a young age.
“He was one of those guys where if no one knew anything about anyone and he walked in a room he just has a certain energy about him that others don’t possess,” recalled offensive lineman Garin Justice, now head football coach at Division II Concord.
Justice said there was only one other time when he felt a person’s presence in that manner and that was when Deion Sanders walked into Bobby Bowden's office one day when Justice was a graduate assistant coach at Florida State.
“No one else could have said what (Pat) said and no one else could have made it sound believable, but the look he had in his eyes when he said it made everyone feel like we were going to win that game,” Justice said. “To me, it was the most special Pat White moment that I had ever experienced. When I think about it now it still gives me goose bumps.”
No sooner had White made his How in the Hell are We Losing to These Guys Speech? when another freshman, kicker Pat McAfee, popped up a perfectly placed (and perfectly illegal) pooch kick that was recovered by West Virginia on the Mountaineer 48 yard line.
Four minutes later, West Virginia had whittled Louisville’s lead to seven. Fifty four seconds after that White had the football in his hands and in another minute the game was knotted up at 24.
The Mountaineers kept scoring and scoring and eventually the Cardinals quit scoring: West Virginia 46, Louisville 44.
“The thing about Coach (Rich) Rod (Rodriguez) was he was always really good about telling us to just keep fighting and never give up and that was our whole mentality,” said wide receiver Brandon Myles, now an assistant strength coach on Butch Jones’ Tennessee football staff. “I just felt like every time we stepped on the field at Mountaineer Field we were not going to lose the game.”
“I remember the vibe in that stadium,” recalled 2006 Rimington Award winner Dan Mozes, now living in Detroit and working for Barwis Methods as a personal trainer. “We were getting our butts whipped and everything was down. The crowd was down, we were down and then there were different things that happened that turned that game around.
“(Fullback) Owen (Schmitt) was running the ball as hard as he did, Steve was running the ball as hard as he did and then Pat White really established himself as our leader in that game. He began taking control of the team and we could see it happening right in front of our eyes.”
“You could tell whenever Pat got in, the different vibe we had as a team, and Pat is probably one of the best competitors that I’ve ever been around,” added Slaton, a pretty fair competitor himself who ran for 188 yards and scored six touchdowns in that Louisville game. After recently retiring from professional football, Slaton is now attending culinary school and living in Houston with his growing family of two young boys. “Pat could pretty much will himself and will us to do great things.”
With the discovery of Pat White, the Mountaineers had finally found their way.
***
That was Coach Rod‘s way of saying, “thanks everyone for the help; thanks for the interest in what we’re trying to do here but we’ve got a pretty good handle on things and we know what we’re looking for.”
“They knew what type of players they wanted,” said Slaton. “The guys that they got were hard workers and that worked to their benefit.”
“I thought they were really good at recruiting the people that they knew were going to fit their scheme and their culture,” added safety Mike Lorello. “They were just genuinely good people, and I felt like they cared about us and they cared about each other. Their families, wives and kids were all friends and everybody was kind of on the same page. Everything all fit and we were all willing to make that team successful.”
Lorello was recruited off a 3-8 season in 2001, but that didn’t deter him in the least from considering the Mountaineers because what the coaches were selling him was so believable.
“I didn’t know anything about West Virginia growing up in Columbus, Ohio,” he admitted. “The first thing I ever heard about West Virginia was when I came in for a summer workout and my coach pulled me aside and said that West Virginia had stopped by and offered me a scholarship. I was like, ‘What?’”
Dan Mozes, to this day WVU’s only major national award winner, came to Morgantown from nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, upset that Pitt didn’t offer him a scholarship. Some of the Panther players later gave him a little lesson in media etiquette when they found out that he had been running his mouth about what a big mistake Pitt had made by not recruiting him.
During Mozes’ first Backyard Brawl as a redshirt freshman, he was lined up at left guard on a field goal attempt and three Pitt players bent him backwards to the point where the front of his helmet was almost touching the back of his heels.
“The worst pain of my life,” Mozes laughed. “And to top it off, one of the guys said, ‘Yeah, you shouldn’t be playing at Pitt anyway!’”
Linebacker Jay Henry, today vice president of a private equity firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, used to joke that he snuck into Morgantown from Jenks, Oklahoma, and was just lucky to receive a scholarship.
Fullback Owen Schmitt showed up at the Puskar Center one winter afternoon with a box of VHS tapes under his arm looking for a place to play. Fortunately for Schmitt, administrative assistant Donnie Young had nothing else better to do that afternoon so he popped one of Owen’s Wisconsin-River Falls highlight tapes into the VCR and liked what he saw.
“The biggest thing for me was finding the best team available that was going to give me a chance,” said Schmitt. “That was what I was going for. I was lucky enough to have Donnie get back to me.”
“Everybody is looking for the tough kid who is going to outwork everybody and to me, attitude and work ethic are more important than how fast you run a 40 or how many bench reps you do,” said offensive lineman Ryan Stanchek, now an assistant coach at Alcorn State. “I know its cliché, but you can’t measure heart.”
For Justice, he basically pulled a George Costanza and kept returning to work even when nobody else wanted him around.
“(Assistant coach Rick) Trickett literally told Garin not to come back to West Virginia after his freshman season because he would never, ever play here,” recalled Mozes. “Instead of Garin saying, ‘Yeah, coach, you are probably right, I’m transferring’ he said, ‘(Forget that), I’m staying and I’m going to show you guys!’”
Justice developed into one of West Virginia’s most reliable players who earned the nickname “Big Oak” from his teammates because of his sturdiness and dependability. He was also a second team All-America choice his senior season.
“He never made crazy, amazing athletic plays, but he never did anything that was bad either,” Mozes recalled. “He did the same thing over and over and he always got the job done.”
Even some of Rodriguez’s big-name recruits such as White and Slaton had their doubters. LSU had White pegged as a defensive back or wide receiver on its recruiting board while Maryland took a pass on Slaton when a couple of other running backs committed to the Terrapins late in the recruiting process.
Their loss (or oversight) was definitely West Virginia’s gain.
“We had some highlight players who put us over the hump, but our core group of players were a no-name, do-right brand of developmental guys,” noted Justice, while also mentioning really good players such as Ernest Hunter, Keilen Dykes, Boo McLee, Jeff Noechel, Eric Wicks, Jahmile Addae, Anthony Mims and Dee McCann who he faced on a daily basis.
“We were just a bunch of misfits who loved playing the game,” added White.
By the way, “Land of the Misfits” happened to be another one of Rodriguez’s favorite sayings.
“If you looked at our team there were guys from New York, there were guys from Florida, guys from Virginia, guys from Pennsylvania, guys from West Virginia and even guys from Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Mozes. “There was a blend of races, nationalities, income levels … it didn’t matter because we all came here for one goal. And of course we wanted to win a national championship and win the Big East and go to the Sugar Bowl, but first and foremost we were a brotherhood. It didn’t matter if we were on offense or defense, we took pride in each other.”
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| Dale Wolfley and Owen Schmitt break down some some key plays in the 2006 Nokia Sugar in this week's Wolf's Den, courtesy WV Illustrated. |
Lorello, in pharmaceutical sales and living outside of D.C., got married recently. Two of the groomsmen in his wedding were Mozes and Henry, which is interesting because the players on the team all say Mountaineer football’s version of Ali versus Frazier took place that fall during one afternoon practice when Mozes and Henry went after each other.
“When they got into it I remember everyone on the team thinking, ‘Aren’t these guys best friends?’” laughed Lorello.
Lorello’s recollection of the infamous Throwdown in Motown begins, of course, with Mozes running his mouth. Lorello and Henry were eating lunch one afternoon and Lorello suggested that it might be a good idea for Henry to shut Danny up later that day during practice by blasting him when he wasn’t expecting it.
Henry agreed, figuring the best time to do so was when somebody on defense jumped offsides because the offensive linemen were always ordered to remain frozen in one place until Pat White said it was OK for them to begin moving again. The defensive guys always got a kick out of seeing the linemen in such a vulnerable position, and frequently thought about how great it would be to take a free whack at one of them some time - just to even things up a little bit.
Well, Henry was dead set on getting Mozes.
Sure enough, one of the defensive guys jumped offsides and Mozes, along with guards Stanchek and Jeremy Sheffey, and tackles Justice and Travis Garrett, were frozen in place as the skill guys took off down the field.
That’s when Henry took off on a dead sprint and unloaded on his buddy, completely knocking Mozes over onto his back.
“After the play I’m jogging back to the huddle and I see Jay running toward me with this huge grin on his face. He’s like, ‘I got him! Did you see me get Mozes?’” said Lorello. “Well, all I could see was Dan 20 yards behind him running at full speed right toward Jay’s back. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Dan is going to absolutely murder Jay right now in front of everybody.’
“So Jay is running toward me to give me a high-five and I totally dodged his high-five in time to bump Dan just enough to keep him from killing Jay,” said Lorello, now breaking out into a full laugh. “Dan grabs Jay and there is this huge scuffle between the offensive and defensive guys.”
Those involved say that throw-down escalated far more quickly than the fight scene in Anchorman, even when the Public News team took a break from their pledge drive to jump into the fracas.
“We got after it,” laughed Mozes.
Rodriguez blew his whistle, blew it again and again and then paraded around the field like he’d just watched someone deliberately throw a baseball through his living room window. When order was restored and everybody returned to their side of the ball, Coach Rod bit down hard on his whistle and looked the other way to suppress his ear-to-ear grin.
He thoroughly enjoyed what he saw because he loved being around a team full of competitors.
“You could see him trying to contain his smile,” recalled White. “Sometimes he would even act mad. If we were having a not-so-decent practice and somebody was fighting and it was slowing down practice, then he would really get mad. But a lot of times he loved it.”
“He wanted to see who was going to establish themselves, especially at a young age,” said Mozes. “He had a motto ‘Hold the Rope’ and he wanted to see who was going to hold that rope and who was going to let go.”
This was totally foreign to Lorello when he got to WVU. Lorello recalled his freshman year watching Grant Wiley and Tim Brown going at it one afternoon MMA style during practice and thinking that team unity was completely shot for the season.
“Nobody on my high school team fought (during practice) and I remember when I got here watching Wiley and Brown throwing haymakers at each other and I’m like, ‘Holy crap! What’s going on here?’” said Lorello. “Jay was already my best friend and I’m looking at him and he says, ‘Dude, didn’t you ever get into a fight during practice? We fought all of the time at Jenks.’”
A year later, Lorello’s big moment finally arrived when his manhood was challenged on the practice field and he had to stand his ground.
“I remember Rich Rod giving me this look of, ‘Lorello, really?’ I could sense that he was proud of me for standing up for myself,” he recalled. “He wanted his guys to have a hard edge and I could feel it. It was motivating and we all need a little bit of that.”
“We were definitely competitive and when somebody gets the best of you, your emotions take over and I think that’s what helped us out,” said Slaton. “We let it go a little bit in practice but we were able to control it in games.”
“There was a genuine caring for each other; we were family,” added Stanchek. “We practiced harder than any place I’ve ever been at but when practice was over, we made our circle, high-fived each other and the day was done.”
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| The "Runaway Beer Truck" loses his parking break at Maryland in 2005. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Go back and pull out the Maryland tape and watch the way Schmitt bulldozed his way through those other players or the way West Virginia’s DBs Wicks, Addae, McCann, Lorello and Mims laid out those defenseless Terrapin wide receivers. You could tell the Mountaineer players were set on taking out a couple of year’s worth of frustration on the Terps that afternoon.
“You’d watch our DBs hit somebody and you’d go, ‘Ooh, what a great hit!’ Now it’s, ‘Oh, how many games is he going to be suspended for?’” said Mozes.
Schmitt said the hits he took from the defense in practice were far worse than anything the Maryland players absorbed that afternoon.
“Get some of our scrimmage footage,” he said. “We used to really go after each other.”
***
It took the West Virginia coaches a while to get the right players in the right spots, but the 2005 team was finally molded into form after the Mountaineers’ triple-overtime victory over Louisville.
That’s when White solidified his status as the team’s starting quarterback and Slaton turned into the one of the most dynamic tailbacks in the country. Yet, many Mountaineer fans mistakenly point to the Louisville game as Slaton’s breakout performance. It actually happened during a home loss a few weeks before to Virginia Tech.
“That was the most important game of my career because it gave me the confidence to perform,” admitted Slaton. “Some of the other guys had trouble holding onto the football and Coach Rod was upset with them and he gave me a chance. The first play I fumbled, but after that I got some of that nervousness out of me.”
Up front, Trickett wasn’t real happy with the group of guys that he had, particularly between the tackles where he thought the offense wasn’t hitting on all cylinders, so he decided to move Mozes from left guard to center before the Maryland game. Trickett wanted someone at center firing off the ball with a little more gusto to lead the rest of the offense, and Mozes was definitely the right guy for the task.
The problem was Mozes had hardly snapped before in a game and his first few snaps near West Virginia’s goal line were high and hot.
“Thank God Pat and Adam were athletic enough to jump up and tip them into the air and catch them because they would have gone through the goal posts,” laughed Mozes. “I snapped those balls so hard and so high that I don’t know how they got their hands on the ball.”
The players later learned that Rodriguez was so concerned about Mozes’ wild snaps that he wanted Trickett to move Mozes back to guard. Every high snap Mozes made screwed up the timing of the offense just a little bit more, and made Rich Rod complain a little bit louder.
“That was the running joke among the guys and Coach Trickett was like, ‘Give him one more series to let him cool down,’” Mozes recalled.
“I don’t think Dan had a bad snap the rest of the year,” added Justice. A year later, Mozes was considered the best center in college football, which is a far cry from his first game playing center at Maryland when he was close to getting the hook.
The willingness of the coaches to continue to tinker with their lineup and move people around and also show patience with the players who needed it played a big role in the success of that team.
Perhaps the final piece of the puzzle was the development of Brandon Myles at outside receiver taking the place of Chris Henry. Myles wasn’t in Henry’s league as far as being a playmaker, and he didn’t catch as many passes as Kevin White or Stedman Bailey did in recent years, but he caught just enough to keep defenses honest.
And usually his catches came at big moments in the game.
“I think everybody knew if it was third and long I was probably going to get the ball so I had to make the best of my opportunities when the ball was thrown at me,” said Myles.
West Virginia went on a roll following the Louisville victory with blowout wins over Connecticut, Cincinnati, Pitt and USF to wind up the regular season with a 10-1 record. The Mountaineers captured their first outright Big East title since 1993 and received an invitation to play Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.
Due to the damage to the New Orleans Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, the Sugar Bowl was being played in Atlanta that year. Despite it’s lofty record, a nationally ranked defense, an exciting, game-breaking offense and a solid kicking game, the Mountaineers weren’t given much of a chance against Georgia, which was coming off an impressive victory over LSU in the SEC Championship game.
“People said the Big East didn’t belong in the BCS so we were waving a lot of different flags for a lot of different causes at the time,” Justice recalled.
***
Throughout that week, the big theme down in Atlanta was how overmatched West Virginia was against Georgia, particularly at the skill positions where Big East speed simply couldn’t measure up to SEC speed.
If it wasn’t obvious before then it became quite clear to West Virginia fans down in Atlanta that week that the Mountaineers were swimming in the deep end of the pool after the way LSU took apart Miami in the Peach Bowl. The astute ones were able to quickly connect the dots and draw a line directly back to Georgia.
Many of the West Virginia players were also at that game, but fortunately for Mountaineer Nation, most of the characters Rodriguez had assembled that season weren’t capable of coloring between the lines, let alone connecting any dots.
“I was at that game but honestly, I could probably dig out a photo of me that would show you that I wasn’t even paying attention at all,” said Schmitt, owner of the popular Schmitt’s Saloon in Morgantown. “They were giving these megaphones out, man, and I was too busy putting one of those around my head.”
“We weren’t really rational,” said Henry. “Looking back now, of course you would connect those dots but we were more focused on things internally. We were just so confident that I don’t think that crossed our mind at all.”
“I couldn’t have cared less,” added White. “Now I look back and I’m like ‘whoa we beat the best team in the SEC that year.’ But we didn’t care.”
Lorello said he didn’t even go to the game. “I didn’t care. I had my own game to prepare for.”
The West Virginia coaches did a great job that week of keeping things loose, getting their guys in the right frame of mind and instilling confidence in them.
“We were just so hungry and so ready to play,” said Mozes.
Stanchek said his most vivid memory of the Sugar Bowl was his mother telling him later that she had made her way down to the field to get a glimpse of those massive Georgia defensive tackles that her son was about to take on and wondering how long he was going to be able to hold up against them.
Henry said when he lined up for the first play of the game all he could focus on was the impressive size of Georgia offensive lineman Max Jean-Gilles’ calves because it looked like his thighs went straight down to the ground.
“I’m out there thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m thinking about this right now!’” laughed Henry.
Justice admitted that the team had a lot of “nervous energy” until Slaton busted off his first long touchdown run. Then he made another one, Darius Reynaud and Brandon Myles made some plays and pretty soon the Mountaineers got out to big lead.
“I will never forget, we had good representation at the game but most of the West Virginia fans were up in the second level,” said Stanchek. “We might have had 15,000 there where Georgia had 60,000. To me that was the coolest thing when we’d score and come off to the sideline and the whole place is silent except for those pockets where our fans were going crazy.”
“You’d see these big, humongous, All-Americans and then you’d start watching them play and you see them tapping their helmets (to come out of the game) because they didn’t want any more,” said Mozes. "Then Steve just flew past that (Greg) Blue character. And it’s funny because Blue had the angle on him, too.”
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| The Mountaineer players used to say if Stevie was even then he's leavin'. Here, center Dan Mozes makes a block to spring Slaton out into the open against Georgia in the 2006 Nokia Sugar Bowl. | |
| Dan Friend photo |
It was a quarterback power play and it was Mozes’ job to double team the defensive tackle before working his way to the second level to block the linebacker. But when Mozes fired out he stumbled and lost his balance as the linebacker he was supposed to block shot past him to his backside right.
Somehow, Mozes planted both feet, lunged backward almost as if he was going to do a backflip and got enough of the linebacker to give White the room he needed to run for a critical first down. Later on in that drive Slaton scored what turned out to be the game-sealing touchdown. If Mozes doesn’t make that block White is thrown for a two-yard loss and West Virginia is punting the football back to Georgia from deep in its own territory.
“That play kind of summed up the game,” said Justice. “If we’re going to win this game then we’re going to have to do whatever it takes.”
All of those big early plays added up when Georgia began to take the Mountaineers more seriously in the second half. Fortunately, West Virginia had built up enough of a cushion to pull out a 38-35 victory, thanks to a fake punt Rodriguez called with a minute and a half left and the ball resting near midfield.
Who would have ever thought the season would come down to a punter using both of his legs instead of just one?
For that team, it was certainly fitting.
If you go on the Internet and watch the Youtube video of Phil Brady’s fake punt for the first down that preserved the victory, be sure to look over to the West Virginia sideline where a bunch of nervous defensive coaches were standing right next to the first down marker that Brady needed to reach.
Had Georgia’s coaches been paying attention they would have been tipped off that a fake punt was coming.
“I don’t recall the details of the fake punt, but I do remember being excited after he made it,” said Henry.
Everyone was excited because Brady’s run and West Virginia’s unbelievable performance right in the heart of SEC country put Mountaineer football on a different level.
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| Mountaineer fans were on their best behavior - for most of the night anyway! | |
| Dan Friend photo |
It put the players on a different level, it put the coaches on a different level, it put the school on a different level and it put the state of West Virginia on a different level.
West Virginia had been in big games before and had failed, sometimes miserably. This time the outcome was much different.
It’s difficult to believe 10 years have gone by since that amazing night in Atlanta.
“It was a big win for the program on a national level,” said White, who today is part-owner of the zero-calorie, zero-sugar, zero-caffeine, zero-fat sports performance drink Rehydrate. “It recognized West Virginia after that. I guess they respected our program and what we had, including our leader (Rodriguez).”
“You look back at the full story and you’ve got to remember people were doubting the Big East and people were doubting West Virginia,” Justice said. “We had never been successful on this stage and this was when the SEC was really starting to make its climb to take down the Big Ten as the best football conference in the country. And people also forget about the (Sago) mine tragedy. We were playing for a lot of different things at the time.”
“We were a bunch of nobodies and the beauty of that team was that we were kind of discovering ourselves, but we also had the leadership in the places that we needed it,” said Schmitt. “It was a signature win for us and it was something that we needed to do to put us on the map.
“Whether or not Georgia slept on us I couldn’t care less,” added Schmitt, “because we whipped ass.”
That they did.
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