MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – There is no question luck played a role in West Virginia's undefeated, untied regular season in 1993. The bad bounces the Mountaineers experienced in 1992 turned into good bounces a year later.
 
Some extra towels from the hotel came in handy at rain-soaked Maryland when WVU nearly fumbled away its big lead in a 42-37 victory over the Terps.
 
Some Mike Collins goal-line thievery and a Vann Washington pick six immediately afterward turned a hotly contested Missouri game into a blowout.
 
Five more WVU turnovers and a missed Ryan Williams 44-yard field with a 1:10 remaining almost brought perfection to a crashing halt against Virginia Tech.
 
West Virginia withstood Louisville's first-half onslaught and endured a couple of missed field goals before producing turnovers on the Cardinals' final two possessions to hold on for a 36-34 victory.
 
The last two wins were three-point thrillers against Miami and Boston College, so, yes, good fortune was on West Virginia's side in its historic 11-0 regular season. A book produced by the University commemorating that season was actually titled "A Big Dream, A Little Luck."
 
Every player in town this weekend to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of that special year will concede they had some good mojo, but that can't explain it all. Luck had nothing to do with what West Virginia did in those other blowout victories against Eastern Michigan, Pitt, Syracuse and Temple. 
 
And good football teams make their good breaks anyway.
 
"What gets lost with that '93 team is, yes, we got all the breaks we didn't get the year before, but we were also very resilient," Collins, one of West Virginia's captains that season, said earlier this week. "Were there things that went our way? Absolutely, but you also create your luck."
 
Collins, now living in Jacksonville, Florida, is among the couple dozen players expected to be in town on Saturday to be recognized along with their coach, Don Nehlen, in the first quarter of Saturday's Texas Tech game.
 
Sadly, a lot has been forgotten about that 1993 West Virginia football team, probably because its poor performance in the Sugar Bowl overshadowed the amazing things it did that year to get there.
 
That's sort of the West Virginia way, I suppose.
 
You ask anyone old enough to remember Nehlen's two undefeated, untied football teams in 1988 and 1993, and the vast majority, if not all, will say the 1988 team was his best.
 
It was the first to go undefeated, which is always special, and it had far-more star power with Heisman Trophy finalist Major Harris on offense and future first-round NFL draft pick Renaldo Turnbull on defense.
 
In 1993, Rich Braham was the team's best player. He was a former walk-on offensive lineman from University High who was upset that he didn't get a Division I scholarship out of high school, which he deserved.
 
Huntington High's Collins wasn't going to get a WVU offer either until Steve Dunlap demanded they give him one over some of the bigger-named recruits the Mountaineers were pursuing in Florida at the time.
 
In addition to Collins and Braham, McKeesport's Tim Brown was the team's third captain. If he doesn't go to junior college at Hudson Valley Community College, he doesn't get any D-I offers either. 
 

There is John Wickline's picture of Brown face-planting Miami's Marcus Wimberly on the wall of our senior director of publications Joe Swan's office. Each time I'm in there, it reminds me just how tough that football team was. If for some reason you find yourself walking down a dark alley, you want Tim Brown and his 1993 Mountaineer teammates right there with you - even punter Todd Sauerbrun, who wasn't against getting into a few scraps in the cafeteria line.
 
Huntington's Robert Walker, who rushed for more than 1,000 yards that year, was once an offensive guard in high school! How many Division I tailbacks in the game's history can say those two things?
 
Mix those guys in with some key transfers like Jake Kelchner and that's how the 1993 squad came to be.
 
What people fail to realize today is that none of the teams considered among greatest in school history – not 1953, not 1988, not 2005, not 2007 nor even 1922 – had a more treacherous path to success than the 1993 squad.
 
"I think people have sometimes diminished the accomplishments of that season because they just look at the score of the Sugar Bowl," Collins pointed out. "There is no other regular season that matches ours. I will put our regular season performance against any other regular season in the history of West Virginia football. We're the 15^th winningest program in college football, and, arguably, that 1993 season was the best ever."
 
In 1993, West Virginia was the first outright, round-robin champion ever in the Big East. And they had to beat blue blood Miami, coming off a national championship in 1991 and just missing another title in 1992, to do it. The Canes back then were every bit as formidable as Georgia is today.
 
Syracuse and Boston College were in the preseason rankings, and Virginia Tech made the polls once the season began. In fact, Frank Beamer's great run of success in Blacksburg started in 1993.
 
And West Virginia beat them all. 
 
It dominated rival Pitt so thoroughly that nobody can remember anything about the game today.
 
It beat Syracuse so bad in the Carrier Dome that Nehlen ordered his quarterback to take a knee at the goal line rather than score a meaningless touchdown at the end of the game to give the Mountaineers a 50-0 victory. Based on what happened in Morgantown in 1992, he had every right to rub it in, but he resisted.

Apparently, he felt his backups had gotten enough work in that night.
 
It beat Miami in front of a record crowd of 70,222 at Mountaineer Field, and then five days later, hopped on a plane to Boston for a Friday night, post-Thanksgiving thriller against an 11^th-ranked Eagles team that upset No. 1 Notre Dame in South Bend a week prior.
 
When it comes to the most underrated victories in school history, that Boston College triumph gets my vote. Half the team was suffering from the flu and starting quarterback Jake Kelchner's elbow was the size of a watermelon, requiring Darren Studstill to come in relief and win the game in the fourth quarter.
 
West Virginia certainly doesn't go undefeated without Kelchner, and it also doesn't go undefeated without Studstill. That season, two quarterbacks were definitely better than one.
 
I will never forget sitting on the top row of the press box, a few seats down from where legendary Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a BC graduate and a big Eagle supporter, was sitting. This was long before the days of club suites and premium seating, so the VIPs sat right with the freeloaders and the riffraff.
 
When Studstill threw his 24-yard touchdown pass down the near sideline to wide receiver Ed Hill with 1:13 left, I watched O'Neill put his head into his hands and mutter, "Oh, #$%^!"
 
I didn't say a word because I couldn't stop smiling. I was smiling on the bus ride to Logan Airport. I was smiling on the plane ride back to Pittsburgh. I was smiling on the bus ride down to Morgantown and was still smiling in Tailgaters pub across the street from the stadium until the wee hours of Saturday morning.
 
There were lots of players in there smiling, too!
 

That team validated Don Nehlen's formula for success during his 20-year tenure at West Virginia – find diamonds in the rough, redshirt and develop them over a four-year period and then watch them blossom during their fifth year. That's what happened in 1988. That's what happened with 27 seniors in 1993, and that's what should have happened in 1998.
 
"We will never be Georgia, Alabama, USC or Ohio State (talent wise), but that's OK, just as long as we know who we are, and we mold our players to be that," Collins explained. "If we do that, we will be successful, no matter what the landscape of college football will be.
 
"If you are not willing to go out on the field and fight, and fight for the guy standing next to you, then this is not the place for you. That's been our identity, and that will always be our identity," Collins added.
 
So, this weekend, if you happen to run into one the guys on that '93 team in town for the Texas Tech game, shake their hand, buy them a round and thank them for the special memories they gave us.
 
There has only been one other regular season like it in the 131 years of Mountaineer football!