KANSAS CITY - Jay Jacobs may be turning 78 later this year, but he has always been a kid at heart.

 

Perhaps it’s because he’s been around kids his entire life - from the time he was a youngster growing up in Morgantown, to spending time as a reserve player on West Virginia’s great basketball teams of the late 1950s (he owns the distinction of being one of the few players in school history to have more shot attempts than minutes played), to coaching prep basketball in Marshall County, to later working for years in the Frederick County, Maryland, school system.

 

Whatever it is, fun and games have always been fun and games to Jacobs.

 

Therefore, it’s not surprising that Jacobs’ youthful enthusiasm and outgoing personality never fail to show up in the work he does analyzing West Virginia University basketball games for the Mountaineer Sports Network from IMG.

 

His analysis is usually spot-on because he does his homework; he goes to practices, spends time with the players and coaches and practically lives with them for six months out of the year. It also shows up in his work, but it is the way he approaches the games on air, his tell-it-like-it-is style and his humor – a real comedian’s timing – that helps make the broadcasts so interesting and entertaining.

 

Working alongside veteran play-by-play man Tony Caridi, Jacobs and Caridi have been informing and entertaining Mountaineer basketball fans together now for nearly 20 years.

 

Jacobs can’t put an exact date on when he first began working West Virginia basketball games, but he does know current coach Bob Huggins was a player when he started.

 

“Hey Huggs,” Jacobs yells out to Huggins, sitting up front on the team bus. “What years did you play here?”

 

“Nineteen-seventy-five to 1977,” Huggs yells back.

 

“Well, I started during Huggs’ junior season, so I guess my first year working games here would have been 1976,” he said.

 

If Jacobs is right, that means this is his 40^th year covering Mountaineer basketball games, spanning coaches Joedy Gardner, Gale Catlett, John Beilein and Huggins along with many, many players.

 

If you multiply 25 games per season times 40, conservatively, that comes out to 1,000 games. Throw in another couple hundred women’s basketball games when he was doubling up for both networks, covering as many as 60 broadcasts a year, as well as the work he did for the Sun Belt Conference and ESPN Regional back in the mid-1980s, and you’re talking about a lot of basketball games, plus, a lot of great stories, some of which we will get to shortly.

 

Jacobs became a college basketball analyst almost by accident. The way he remembers it, he was doing some television work covering high school basketball games in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area when Paul Miller, a former WVU teammate working at West Virginia University at the time, happened to catch one the games Jacobs was doing on TV.

 

In the mid-1970s, West Virginia was looking to expand its game broadcasts to include local television, but a major obstacle was finding a competent and knowledgeable analyst with WVU ties to work the games.

 

It was evident that Jacobs’ personality came across well on television so Miller asked him if he was willing to make the two-hour drive over to Morgantown to do some TV work for the Mountaineers. Jacobs said he would give it a try, and 40 years later, he’s still going strong, although now it's strictly on radio.

 

When the television network was first created, Jacobs was to be the one constant on the telecasts with veteran radio play-by-play announcers Jack Fleming and Woody O’Hara rotating between halves, similar to the way broadcast teams used to switch between innings during baseball games.

 

It was an unusual setup that presented several challenges, many of them humorous. Once, during halftime of a game being televised at Virginia Tech’s Cassell Coliseum, Fleming had to go from the top of the area where he was describing the game on radio down to the floor to finish the game on television with Jacobs.

 

The day before, the two actually practiced the transition, Fleming going from the top of the arena down to the floor with Jacobs timing how long it took him to get there. They did this three different times and from that they determined it took Fleming approximately two minutes to complete the trek, seemingly plenty of time between halves to make the switch.

 

No problem, right?

 

“Well, what we forgot were the 10,000 people in the arena the next day,” Jacobs said. “He never made it down in time. He was stuck in a crowd of people, fans wanting to talk to him and so forth, so I’m stranded down there all by myself on the floor.”

 

Jacobs asked the producer sitting back in the truck what he should do.

 

“I’m not sure, Jay … FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE …!”

 

Jacobs, who didn’t have a stat sheet or anything to go off of from the first half, turned around and began describing the halftime dance routine that was taking place behind him.

 

“I believe her name was Louise from Winchester, Virginia, or something like that,” he joked.

 

Another time, Jacobs was working a game with Fleming at Penn State’s old Rec Hall and at halftime Fleming decided to get himself something to drink. While doing so, he bumped his head on a steel beam above him and when he returned to the court to do his live shot, he unknowingly had a steady stream of blood coming down the side of his head.

 

“It was just pouring down his face and someone in the truck yelled, ‘For God’s sake, wipe him off!’ Fortunately, the stage manager was there and they were able to switch to another shot in order to get him cleaned up.”

 

Huggins, listening to Jacobs’ story, felt compelled to join in and add a TV story of his own.

 

When Huggins began coaching at Cincinnati, the decision was made to capitalize on the great success of his early Bearcat teams by producing a television show on Sunday mornings during the season. Former basketball coach Chuck Machock, who spent time at WVU working for Bucky Waters, was by then doing radio work for Cincinnati and the decision was made to pair the two together.

 

“What do I do?” Machock asked.

 

 

“Who will introduce Huggins?” Machock asked.

 

 

“Well, who will introduce me?”

 

 

“Machock froze,” Huggins said, as he prepared to deliver his punch line. “So I said, good morning Cincinnati, this is your coach, Bob Huggins, and for the next several weeks we will be doing a television show on Bearcat basketball. And now, here is your host, Chuck Machock!”

 

Then, it was back to Jacobs for another story to try and top that one. The one he told was a doozy.

 

In the early 1980s, Jacobs was working a West Virginia-Massachusetts game and one of the players on the UMass team playing in the game that night had a severe acne problem.

 

Jacobs had noticed this earlier in the day watching the Minutemen players shoot around before the game, and when he finally got into the game and the director in the truck switched to a tight shot of him standing at the foul line about to attempt a free throw, Jacobs jokingly said, “And folks, here is your Clearasil player of the game!”

 

“Not a good idea,” Jacobs recalled, shaking his head. “I had to write 71 letters for that one – all handwritten apologies. It was one of those things that came out and you just couldn’t bring it back in. The grandmother living in Brooklyn was crying, the coach’s wife was sick and was home watching the game on television, so she caught it and called all of his relatives and it just grew from there.”

 

These days, Jacobs is far more careful with what he says on air, but that doesn’t mean what he says (and does) isn’t interesting or entertaining.

 

Like the time he showed up in his driveway after returning to Frederick with thick, black animal hair sticking out of the grill of his car.

 

“What happened to our car, Jay?” asked his wife Bonnie.

 

“Well, honey, that was from the bear I hit just outside of Hancock, Maryland,” he said.

 

Indeed, the stories are endless - and interesting - as is Jay Jacobs.

 

Briefly: West Virginia had a full workout earlier today before its public shoot around at the Sprint Center this afternoon at 3 p.m. … Forward Jonathan Holton, who sprained his ankle during the second half of last Saturday’s win at Baylor, said he had no problems today during practice and was moving around fine at the Sprint Center this afternoon … “Going into yesterday, I just wanted to see what I could do, but to tell you the truth, I was just like a kid in a candy store today,” said Holton … The plan for the team tonight is to take in the first half of tonight’s TCU-Texas Tech game before returning to the hotel … Huggins told a great story before today’s shoot around about how he ended up signing Tarik Phillip out of Independence Community College … “Larry and I went into Independence, and I’d been there a whole bunch because we recruited Ruben Patterson, so you kind of know everybody, so I was sitting down and talking to one of their coaches and I said, ‘Tell me about Tarik, how good a shooter is he?’ ‘Well, he makes some but I wouldn’t say he’s a good shooter.’ ‘What kind of ball handler is he?’ ‘Well, he gets it where he needs to go but I wouldn’t say he’s a good ball handler.’ ‘Is he a good defender?’ ‘Well, he steals the ball a lot but I wouldn’t say he’s your prototypical, fundamental defender?’ ‘Is he a Big 12 player?’ ‘Well, you are going to have to look at him and decide for yourself because I honestly can’t tell you. But coach I will tell you this, you can walk in the gym and we’ll line 20 guys up in there and you pick the four you want Tarik to play with and they will win every game - he just wins.’” “They had a losing record and when he became eligible to play for them they won their league championship, he was the MVP of their league and the whole deal – he just has a great knack for getting people to rally around him,” said Huggins … Thursday quarterfinal round game will start at 7 p.m. ET and will be televised nationally on ESPNU.