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Russell Athletic Bowl: WVU-Miami Series Revived
December 14, 2016 11:00 AM | Football
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia’s on-again, off-again football series with Miami is on once more when these two old Big East combatants meet in the 2016 Russell Athletic Bowl in Orlando, Florida, later this month.
Of the 19 times these two schools have played, dating back to 1942 when East Coast wartime blackout restrictions forced the game to take place on a Saturday afternoon instead of Friday night, the Hurricanes have certainly gotten the best of the Mountaineers.
Miami has won 16 and lost just three - two of those three losses, incidentally, coming in the Orange Bowl in 1973 and 1997.
The Hurricanes have been nationally ranked in all but five of the meetings, the exceptions being the first one in 1942, a pair of games in 1973-74, and then during a two-year stretch in 1997-98 when Miami was on NCAA probation.
Four times - 1986, 1992, 2001 and 2002 - Miami was the nation’s No. 1 ranked team and on 10 other occasions the Hurricanes were ranked in the top 10.
Eleven of the 19 games were played in the famed Miami Orange Bowl, today lost to the scrapheap of history.
West Virginia, meanwhile, had four teams good enough to be nationally ranked when playing Miami in 1983, 1993, 1996 and 1998. Three of those contests ended up being losses, although all four were very competitive affairs.
And with the exception of the 1986, 1991, 1994, 2000 and 2001 games, the rest were hotly contested, particularly these seven:
1973 - West Virginia 20, Miami 14
West Virginia running back Dwayne Woods fights for yardage during this 1973 game played in the Orange Bowl against Miami.
West Virginia was in the midst of a four-game midseason losing streak that included a 62-14 defeat at Penn State - the worst loss Bobby Bowden ever suffered as a college coach - and Bowden was down to his last healthy quarterback - Ben Williams when meeting Miami for this early November football game.
What made Ben Williams so significant in WVU sports history is that he is the first African-American to ever start a football game at quarterback for the Mountaineers, and a player’s skin color was a very big deal in the early 1970s.
Williams’ passing and running led the Mountaineers to a very unlikely 20-14 victory, his 32-yard toss to Marshall Mills with 29 seconds left the game’s deciding play.
“At halftime in the dressing room it was like Vietnam,” Bowden told the Miami News afterward. “We had so many players hurt and exhausted, I didn’t know if we’d have enough to finish the game.”
West Virginia’s trainers went through 500 pounds of ice during the game, not only to treat injuries but also to cool down the players in the intense South Florida heat.
“We got into shape for this game by practicing in 40-degree weather, in snow and rain,” joked Bowden, who admitted the victory was an important one for his struggling program. “Talk about crossroads, this was it. When you lose four games in a row, the kids start to lose confidence, and the coaches start to lose confidence. We had been getting behind and folding.
“We decided to go conservative because when we go wide open we get our tails beat,” explained Bowden. “We want to run a pro offense, but you have to have a quarterback to do it. Ben Williams doesn’t have the experience. We tell him which receiver to hit, and if that one is covered, he throws it out of bounds. He doesn’t have the experience to find the second receiver yet. But he’s the first running quarterback we’ve had.”
The Miami victory muted some of the criticism Bowden was hearing, at least temporarily.
“Down here in Florida, you have lots of schools in the state playing football,” Bowden noted. “In West Virginia, we’re just about the only one. When we lose, it’s not a case of half the people being mad at us. When we lose, everybody is mad.”
1974 - Miami 21, West Virginia 20
Before Reggie Jackson, the first Mr. October was really West Virginia’s Bobby Bowden. His Mountaineer football teams would usually start out strong in September and early October before fading when the leaves fell to the ground in November.
And by 1974, many West Virginia fans were growing tired of Bowden’s late-season swoons. It happened in 1973 and it happened once again in 1974 when the Mountaineers dropped a 21-20 homecoming decision to Miami.
Miami drove 50 yards to score the winning touchdown, although an official’s error factored heavily in the Hurricanes’ go-ahead score. West Virginia, leading 20-14 with 6:25 left in the game, punted to midfield where a bouncing ball hit the foot of Miami’s Ernie Jones. West Virginia’s Gary Lombard fell on the football at midfield to give the Mountaineers a new set of downs.
But the official near the play ruled that the ball had taken a crazy bounce on the Astro-turf and didn’t hit Jones and Miami maintained possession at midfield. Afterward, Jones admitted to a Miami reporter that the ball did in fact hit him and should have been considered a fumble.
Then, faced with a fourth and 16 at the 41, Miami’s Kary Baker completed a 19-yard pass to Steve Marcantonio, setting up Baker’s 12-yard touchdown pass to Larry Bates for the game-tying touchdown with 1:41 remaining. Chris Dennis converted the point after kick to give the Hurricanes the lead.
But perhaps the most newsworthy event taking place during the game was President James Harlow’s impromptu press conference at halftime to inform Mountain State scribes that Bowden’s job was not in jeopardy, regardless of the game’s outcome.
1993 - West Virginia 17, Miami 14
Robert Walker and teammates celebrate his 19-yard touchdown run to put the Mountaineers back into the lead in this 1993 game played at Mountaineer Field in Morgantown.
Miami’s Rohan Marley was an excellent football player - good enough to lead one of the best defenses in college football in tackles during the 1993 season. The son of famous reggae singer Bob Marley, Rohan teamed with standout defenders such as Warren Sapp and Ray Lewis to give the Hurricanes a very formidable defense that was virtually impossible to score upon that season.
But Marley had one drawback - his size. He stood just 5-feet-8 inches and barely weighed 200 pounds, an acceptable size to play safety or defensive back, but extremely small to play outside linebacker.
Therefore, West Virginia devised a patient strategy of running the football right at Marley behind 295-pound All-American offensive tackle Rich Braham until Marley wore down. That finally happened with 6:08 remaining when Robert Walker took a handoff, followed Braham into the hole and then bounced to the outside where he scampered 19 yards for the game-deciding touchdown.
“They flip-flopped their linebackers and they covered (Marley) up,” coach Don Nehlen said. “He was a great player but he was little. We knew he could run us down, so we decided that we were just going to run at him and run at him and run at him and finally in the fourth quarter we got him. We ran right over him and that was with my fullback and Robert was coming right behind him. Once Robert cleared that, none of them could catch him.”
A jam-packed Mountaineer Field crowd of 70,222, which actually was probably closer to 75,000 or 77,000 with students sitting along the hillside outside the stadium, erupted with approval when Walker’s run overcame a 14-10 deficit.
The eruptions continued well into the night when the final seconds ticked off the clock. West Virginia was undefeated and unknown before the game, but afterward the hard-earned victory over the fourth-ranked Hurricanes in front of a national television audience on ABC finally injected West Virginia into the national championship discussion.
1995 - Miami 17, West Virginia 12
A missed call by the official standing in the back of the end zone likely cost West Virginia a rare upset victory over Miami. The play happened late in the third quarter with the Mountaineers trailing the Hurricanes, 14-9.
Quarterback Chad Johnston flipped a short pass toward Shawn Foreman in the back of the end zone. The West Virginia receiver leaped high into the air and caught the ball at its highest point as he fell out of the back of the end zone. Officials ruled Foreman was out of bounds but television replays clearly showed that he came down with one foot in bounds before falling to the ground.
It was one of several calls that had West Virginia coach Don Nehlen seeing red as he stood inside the Orange Bowl that overcast November afternoon.
“They blew so many calls that you can’t keep track of how many calls they blew,” complained Nehlen afterward.
“What can I say?” asked Nehlen rhetorically. “If this is called right, we win. I mean, you know what six or seven points could have done?”
Instead, Miami, overcoming the effects of NCAA probation as a result of the misusage of Pell grant funds, was able to manufacture its seventh victory under coach Butch Davis and eventually get on the other side of those sanctions, setting up Miami’s great run in the early 2000s when the Hurricanes finished No. 2 in the final polls in 2000 and won its fifth national title in 2001.
1996 - Miami, 10, West Virginia 7
West Virginia's Brian West gets upended as his punt is blocked by Miami's Tremain Mack and returned for the game-winning touchdown.
A simple matter of punting the football was all West Virginia needed to do to preserve its undefeated season and remain in contention for its third national championship bid under veteran coach Don Nehlen.
The Mountaineers were leading 25th-ranked Miami 7-3 and the Hurricanes had done hardly anything of consequence against West Virginia’s No. 1-ranked defense.
And it appeared that West Virginia was going to get by without using its star running back Amos Zereoue, who watched from the sidelines with a foot injury, when backup Alvin Swoope blasted in from the one with 8:40 left in the third quarter to give West Virginia its 7-3 lead.
Miami had trouble moving the ball the entire evening, gaining just 162 total yards, but West Virginia’s offense without Zereoue was not much better. It was almost as if the defense that was on the field last was going to wind up winning this game - which is exactly what happened.
Facing a fourth down and two at its own 30 with 29 seconds showing on the clock, Nehlen called for his punt team to take the field. Punt the ball successfully and West Virginia wins the football game. It’s was as simple as that, although West Virginia had two punts blocked by the Hurricanes the year prior in 1995.
This time, Miami’s Tremain Mack blew past West Virginia’s outside protector David Saunders and literally pulled the ball right off the foot of punter Brian West as he was about to kick it. Mack handed the ball to Nate Brooks - some say in front of him instead of behind which would have constituted a forward lateral - and Brooks ran 20 yards for the game-winning touchdown.
Longtime Morgantown Dominion-Post sports editor Mickey Furfari called it “one of the weirdest windups ever involving a WVU team.”
A dejected Don Nehlen had the look of a man who just witnessed his dog get run over by a truck right in front of his house.
“I’ve been around a long time, and that may be as tough a loss as I’ve ever had,” said Nehlen afterward.
Added second-year Miami coach Butch Davis, “This was a group of guys that just refused to lose.”
1998 - Miami 34, West Virginia 31
There were numerous instances when West Virginia defensive players had Miami running back Edgerrin James within their grasp in the open field. All they had to do was get him to the ground.
The West Virginia offense had no trouble moving the ball against the Hurricanes - quarterback Marc Bulger throwing for 380 yards and four touchdowns in one of his finest passing performances wearing a Gold and Blue uniform, and running back Amos Zereoue providing ample support on the ground with 113 yards on 27 carries - so the game came down to a matter of West Virginia’s defense figuring out a way to tackle James.
It couldn’t.
James’ performance even had hall of fame coach Don Nehlen scratching his head afterward.
“Our tackling was just atrocious,” remarked Nehlen. “That was pretty obvious.”
It was obvious, or was it?
If you surveyed the 60,081 West Virginia football fans in Mountaineer Field that afternoon - and they were virtually all Mountaineer fans considering how few Hurricane supporters ever traveled to road games - asking them to either correctly spell James’ first name or accurately predict his future beyond college would have been an impossibility.
Who would have ever thought Edgerrin James would turn out to be one of the most productive running backs in professional football history?
A good college back, yes, but a great pro?
Well, James wound up his 11-year professional career with 12,246 yards rushing and 80 career touchdowns, twice leading the league in rushing and earning Pro Bowl status on four occasions.
Therefore, the 162 yards and the two touchdowns he produced as a result of all those one-on-one matchups against West Virginia’s defense now seem quite understandable today, as does Miami’s last-minute, come-from-behind, 34-31 victory over the Mountaineers.
2003 - Miami 22, West Virginia 20
A dejected Quincy Wilson ponders West Virginia's near-miss upset of No. 2 Miami in the Orange Bowl.
When Quincy Wilson ran through practically the entire Miami defense late in the game to give 27-point underdog West Virginia a 20-19 lead with just two minutes left to play, the crowd of 54,621 sitting inside the decaying Orange Bowl watched in stunned silence.
Wilson first maneuvered past husky defensive tackle Vince Wilfork along the sideline until he zeroed in on Miami defensive back Brandon Meriweather at the 10. Wilson ran right through Meriweather like he was air to trot into the end zone standing up.
Unfortunately for West Virginia, there was too much time left on the clock when Miami got the football back.
Still, quarterback Brock Berlin needed a fourth-down completion to tight end Kellen Winslow from the Miami 25 to keep the drive alive. The Hurricanes had to get 13 yards to move the sticks and Winslow ended up making 16, giving them a new set of downs at the 41.
Another big play - a pass interference penalty called on West Virginia’s Brian King when Berlin’s deep pass into the end zone to Kevin Beard fell incomplete - gave Miami a first down at the WVU 6. The side judge viewing the play did not call a penalty but the back judge eventually threw his flag.
That put freshman Jon Peattie close enough to comfortably boot the game-winning field goal with 11 seconds left - his fifth of the evening - to help No. 2-ranked Miami avoid an embarrassing loss to 1-3 West Virginia.
“I’m sure they thought we were going to come in and lay down - something like 45-0 and they could play on the sideline and talk to the crowd,” said Wilson afterward.
“I felt like I got kicked in the stomach again,” added West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez. “I’ve been kicked a few times. We need to catch a break, but you need to create your own breaks. I think we took a step in the right direction in a lot of ways.”
Perhaps in more ways than even Rodriguez imagined that night in the Orange Bowl.
Rodriguez’s record at West Virginia before that 2003 loss to Miami?
Thirteen wins and 16 losses.
Rodriguez’s WVU record after that game?
Forty-seven wins and just 10 defeats.
Yes, West Virginia did take a step in the right direction that night in Miami, Florida.
Later this month, we’ll see if Dana Holgorsen’s Mountaineers can also take a positive step in the right direction.
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Coach Rich Rodriguez | April 8
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