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West Virginia-Maryland Preview
September 23, 2015 11:55 AM | Football
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Dana Holgorsen began his weekly news conference on Tuesday by pointing out how much more lively things were in the team meeting room that afternoon.
“It must be game week – it must be Maryland; and hopefully, it is as exciting for you all as it is for us,” he said. “It’s one of the few regional rivals that we have on the schedule.”
Indeed, there does seem to be a little bit more of a buzz around here this week and that’s because there are many elements to Saturday’s West Virginia-Maryland game that make it so deliciously interesting.
First of all, the two schools have a pretty extensive history dating back to a 1919 meeting in either Morgantown or College Park, depending upon which game release you are reading (for the record, the first game was played in Morgantown, the Mountaineers defeating the Terps, 27-0, with WVU’s Rat Rodgers having another one of his dominant performances).
West Virginia and Maryland have played 50 more times since then on an intermittent basis, including a span of 28 consecutive years from 1980 until 2007 when the Terps wanted to take a little break to play a bedlam series with California.
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The rivalry was revived in 2010 and this year’s contest will be the third and final occasion Maryland hops on a bus for the three-hour ride across Interstate 68 to play a football game in Morgantown for a while. This latest hit on the pause button is scheduled to last until 2020 when the series resumes for two more outings.
Secondly, the games for the most part have been fairly entertaining.
Last year’s contest in College Park was decided on the final play when Josh Lambert’s 47-yard field goal won it for the Mountaineers.
The 2004 affair in Morgantown also ended on the last play when Chris Henry got behind Maryland’s Domonique Foxworth for a seven-yard touchdown reception from Rasheed Marshall in overtime.
In 1992, Maryland took a 19-point lead into the fourth quarter only to walk back into the locker room 15 minutes later on the wrong side of a 34-33 score.
The Terrapins also experienced a stinging one-point defeat in 1982 when Boomer Esiason’s two-point conversion pass sailed high of his intended target, enabling West Virginia to pull out a 19-18 victory - one week after the Mountaineers turned the college football world upside down when they went out to Norman, Oklahoma, and defeated the Sooners 41-27.
Bobby Bowden, in town this weekend to be inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame, can still recall in fine detail the 1973 West Virginia-Maryland game in College Park when Danny Buggs took a late punt 69 yards for a touchdown to give the Mountaineers an unexpected 20-13 victory over the heavily favored Terps.
The 1984 contest in Morgantown went Maryland’s way at the gun when kicker Jess Atkinson punched through a 20-yard field goal to win it for the Terps, 20-17. Maryland also pulled out a tough one in College Park three years later when the Terrapins dug themselves out of an early 14-0 hole to defeat the Mountaineers 25-20.
Even many of the bad games have remained stored in people’s memory banks as well.
For instance, whose blood wasn’t boiling in 1985 when West Virginia left College Park without scoring a single point, or once again getting blanked 14 years later in 1999?
Or, watching Maryland put one on the Mountaineers twice in the same season in 2003 – first in College Park and then once again down in Jacksonville, Florida, in the Gator Bowl?
How about West Virginia gunner Keith Taparausky taking out that drunk Maryland student who ran onto the field as West Virginia was about to kick the ball off during a night game in College Park in 1993?
And, who will ever forget what happened two years ago in the rain in Baltimore when Maryland flexed its muscles by routing West Virginia 37-0? Dana Holgorsen certainly hasn’t forgotten that game, nor have his players, many of whom will be on the field once again this Saturday.
“It’s not something I can hide from, or run from,” Holgorsen said. “It’s the worst defeat that I have ever taken.
“They outplayed us; they strained harder; their effort was better. Everything that could’ve went wrong, went wrong,” he added.
Maryland Statistical Leaders
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#7 Caleb Rowe 6-3 | 220 | Jr. | QB Passing: 22-of-37, 314 Yards, 4 TDs, 5 INTs |
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#45 Brandon Ross 5-10 | 210 | Sr. | RB Rushing: 44 Att., 228 Yards, 5.2 Avg., 2 TDs |
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#8 Levern Jacobs 5-11 | 188 | Jr. | WR Receiving: 13 Rec., 171 Yards, 13.2 Avg., 2 TDs |
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#23 Jermaine Carter Jr. 6-0 | 240 | So. | LB Tackles: 32 Total, 20 Solo |
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#7 Yannick Ngakoue 6-2 | 255 | Jr. | DL Tackles for Loss: 4.5 Total, 4.5 Sacks |
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#21 Sean Davis 6-1 | 202 | Sr. | DB Interceptions: 2, 3 Forced Fumbles |
It’s safe to bet that Maryland’s Randy Edsall hasn’t forgotten last year’s loss in College Park either. If you recall, he spent a good portion of his post-game news conference complaining about the state of college football when a defense (his) has to defend more than 100 plays in a single game - 108 to be exact, as the Terps did that afternoon.
Edsall is also keenly aware of what playing West Virginia can mean to the makeup of his team roster. “There are implications from recruiting, so it’s a big game,” he admitted earlier this week.
For his part, Holgorsen basically said that he doesn’t need a GPS to find his way around the state of Maryland.
“It’s a pretty fertile recruiting ground – we try and dabble into that a little bit. I’m sorry, did that answer your question?” he said.
Yes.
And yes, West Virginia has had a decent amount of success through the years getting players out of the Old Line state, be it Baltimore’s Tavon Austin and Terence Garvin, Bethesda’s Tree Adams, Tim Agee or Pat Lazear, Damascus’s Brian King, Potomac’s Travis Curtis, Waldorf’s Antonio Lewis, Rawlings’s Wes “Express” Ours, New Market’s Antwan Lake or Catonsville’s Brian Jozwiak.
There are five players from Maryland currently on this year’s roster, including backups William Crest Jr., Jarrod Harper and Marvin Gross Jr.
Maryland once took a pass on a pretty decent high school football player named Steve Slaton, who wound up being a pretty decent college football player at WVU; running back Michael Beasley decided to switch sides when he realized how much of a better situation West Virginia was than Maryland in the late 1980s, and former Mountaineer All-American running back Garrett Ford Sr. grew up within sight of Byrd Stadium.
Going way, way back, West Virginia was once the beneficiary of Joe Marconi’s change of heart when he decided that Morgantown was more to his liking after spending one week on Maryland’s campus.
Marconi never played against the Terps, but he did play well against just about everybody else before being taken in the first round of the NFL draft by the Los Angeles Rams in 1956.
Of course, quarterback Scott McBrien, who played one season for Don Nehlen at WVU in 2000, did face the Mountaineers three times after transferring to Maryland.
McBrien led the Terps to a 48-17 victory in Morgantown in 2002 and then beat the Mountaineers twice during the 2003 season - a 34-7 triumph in College Park and a 41-7 victory in the Gator Bowl at the end of the year.
Scott will be back at his old stomping grounds on Saturday to describe the action on the Maryland Radio Network.
Additionally, if you need something else to get you revved up for Saturday’s big game consider this: Maryland coach “Big” Jim Tatum once accused West Virginia of fielding a team full of ineligible players before the Terps’ 1947 meeting with West Virginia in College Park.
What made Tatum’s accusations so galling to WVU supporters was that Tatum had basically skirted the rulebook by using his extensive military connections during World War II to build powerhouse programs at Oklahoma and then Maryland.
After a week-long investigation, it was determined that the players in question were okay to play against Maryland but the smokescreen Tatum had set proved distracting enough to enable the Terps to defeat West Virginia 27-0 – one of four Tatum victories over West Virginia by substantial margins during that period of time.
Nobody except for longtime WVU sports journalist Mickey Furfari would even remember Tatum’s ruse today, but contemporary West Virginia-Maryland fans do recall many of the more recent encounters.
That’s why the stadium will once again be packed on Saturday, including a full student section (all 12,500 student tickets have already been distributed for the game). Kickoff is set for 3 p.m. and the contest will be televised nationally on Fox Sports 1.
The Mountaineer Sports Network from IMG’s coverage begins with the Mountaineer Tailgate Show at 11:30 a.m. leading into the game coverage at 2 p.m.
“I don’t think it’s a mistake that this game sold out fairly quick. I know it means a lot to our fan base, and to WVU,” said Holgorsen. “I know it’s going to be an electric crowd; it’s going to be a live atmosphere; every seat is going to be taken and it’s going to be something that will fire (up his players).
“I know we are going to be pretty excited,” he concluded.
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