MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Have you ever wondered which West Virginia University football team played the toughest schedule?
If your metric is nationally ranked teams, then Dana Holgorsen's 2017 Mountaineer squad played the most in one season with six – No. 21 Virginia Tech, No. 8 TCU, No. 24 Texas Tech, No. 11 Oklahoma State, No. 14 Iowa State and No. 3 Oklahoma.
Think about that - half of WVU's regular-season schedule was against ranked foes, including a couple of top-10 teams.
Now that's a tough schedule!
Neal Brown's 2019, 2020 and 2021 Mountaineer teams played four ranked teams per year, which is also pretty daunting. Brown also faced schedules that included 11 power conference foes in each of the last three seasons. Neal Brown has already faced 17 ranked opponents during his five seasons coaching the Mountaineers (All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo).
In 1986, Don Nehlen's West Virginia team played No. 1 Miami and No. 2 Penn State, which turned out to be No. 1 Penn State and No. 2 Miami after the Nittany Lions upset the Hurricanes in the Fiesta Bowl.
Art Lewis, criticized for playing weak Southern Conference schedules in the early 1950s, beefed up the slate considerably toward the end of the decade. The late Eddie Barrett used to say Pappy Lewis was willing to play anybody anywhere.
"Bring 'em on," Pappy would tell his doubters.
Well, in 1959, Lewis' Mountaineers faced 20th-ranked Pitt, sixth-ranked Syracuse, seventh-ranked Penn State and sixth-ranked USC in a row, losing the last three by the combined score of 108-10. West Virginia then dropped its final two games of the season to Virginia Tech and Citadel after Lewis ran out of players.
The following year, Pappy was scouting for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Prior to Lewis, West Virginia pretty much steered clear of the top 20. During a 14-year period from 1936, when the Associated Press began rankings teams, until 1950, WVU played just seven games against ranked opponents – all losses.
Until Lewis' Mountaineers upset 18th-ranked Pitt 16-0 in Pittsburgh on Oct. 25, 1952, the best performance against a ranked team was Bill Kern's 21-14 loss at ninth-ranked Penn State on Oct. 25, 1947. Before that, WVU's other two meetings at No. 1 Army on Nov. 2, 1946, and at No. 4 Fordham on Oct. 18, 1941, resulted in scoreless defeats.
During the pre-poll era, West Virginia played some outstanding football schedules in the late 1920s – once again in response to the criticism the Mountaineers received in 1922 when they went unbeaten against a schedule that included Marietta College, Cincinnati and Ohio University.
WVU won both games that year against legitimate foes Pitt and Washington & Jefferson, but its lone blemish was a noticeable one – a 12-12 tie against Washington and Lee in Charleston. Coach Clarence Spears notoriously chose to let his assistants coach the team that afternoon at Laidley Field while he scouted the Rutgers-Bethany game in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers was West Virginia's opponent the following week.
In 1923, gone were Marietta, Cincinnati and Ohio and in their place were 6-2-1 Penn State, 5-3-1 St. Louis University and 7-1 Allegheny (Pa.).
In 1924, all but two WVU opponents had winning records and the combined opponents' winning percentage was .613.
As a result, West Virginia's 1923-24 teams were considered among the best in the country and were within a win over Washington & Jefferson in 1923 and a win over Pitt in 1924 of earning Rose Bowl berths.
The trend of .600 opponents' winning percentages continued throughout most of the 1920s. In 1925, Ira Errett Rodgers' first as WVU's coach, seven of the Mountaineers' nine opponents had winning records and the two that didn't, Penn State and Washington and Lee, boasted .500 marks. During Ira Errett Rodgers' six seasons coaching the Mountaineers from 1925-30, the combined winning percentage of WVU's opponents was .636 (WVU Athletics Communications photo).
Pitt (8-1) and Boston College (6-2) were considered among the top Eastern independent teams and Davis & Elkins (7-3), under coach Cam Henderson, counted a 14-6 loss to Army and a 6-0 loss to West Virginia among its three defeats that season.
In 1927, West Virginia went 2-4-3 against a grid slate that included 8-0-1 Pitt, which played Stanford in the Rose Bowl, 8-1 Georgetown, 7-2 Missouri and 7-0-2 Washington & Jefferson. The combined winning percentage of West Virginia's opponents in 1927 was .661.
WVU got somewhat of a breather in 1928, playing West Virginia Wesleyan, Washington and Lee, Fordham, Oklahoma State and Washington & Jefferson (all teams with losing records), and not surprisingly, the Mountaineers ended up with an 8-2 record.
Even the Panthers, at 6-2-1, were down by coach Jock Sutherland's standards. West Virginia beat Pitt 9-6 in Pittsburgh for its only victory over Pitt during a 19-year period from 1928-47. WVU went four years from 1929 until 1933, and then eight years from 1936 until 1944, without scoring points against the Panthers.
That leads us to 1929 and what must be considered one of the most difficult schedules in school history.
That year, after opening with 4-6 West Virginia Wesleyan (featuring Pro Football Hall of Famer Cliff Battles), WVU played 10-1-1 Davis & Elkins, 9-0-1 Duquesne, 9-1 Pitt, 3-5-1 Washington and Lee, 4-3-2 Oklahoma State, 7-0-2 Fordham, 7-1-1 Detroit, 5-2-2 Georgetown and 5-2-2 Washington & Jefferson.
Pitt had wins over Duke, Nebraska, Ohio State and Penn State before falling to USC in the Rose Bowl.
Fordham, which defeated 7-3 NYU, 7-2-1 Boston College, 8-2 Bucknell and 6-4 Holy Cross, was tied by West Virginia and Davis & Elkins.
Duquesne, under coach Elmer Layden, outscored its opponents 154 to 33 and counted a 19-13 win over Catholic University and a 7-6 win over Haskell Institute.
The Detroit Titans, under the leadership of College Football Hall of Famer Gus Dorais, lost just once to Oregon State, and counted victories over Loyola (La.), Michigan State and Georgetown, which defeated NYU and tied Navy.
Washington & Jefferson was still playing the likes of Pitt, West Virginia, Temple and Carnegie Tech before deemphasizing its grid program in the 1930s.
Washington and Lee's football slate in 1929 included games against N.C. State, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, Virginia and Florida.
The performance of the year was West Virginia's scoreless tie at Fordham played on Election Day, Nov. 5, in the Polo Grounds in New York City. The Rams drove 72 yards in the game's closing minutes before backup quarterback Johnny O'Shea dramatically fell a foot short of paydirt as the gun sounded.
Fordham had the ball inside West Virginia's 30 eight times and outgained the Mountaineers 232 to 114, but the Rams threw two interceptions and fumbled once. West Virginia's Russell "Box Car" Larue dropped two punts and the Mountaineers turned the ball over four times.
Four days later, Fordham upset Boston College 7-6 at Fenway Park while West Virginia lost 36-0 at home to Detroit.
Three weeks after that, more fourth-quarter goal line defense preserved another scoreless tie at Griffith Stadium against Georgetown.
The Hoyas took over at their 41 and used a 29-yard pass from John Scalzi to a backward-falling Bill MacZees to get the football inside WVU's 15. Short runs moved the ball to the 3 where backup Mountaineer defender Gene Joseph recovered a fumbled snap at the 9. West Virginia's lone scoring opportunity came in the third quarter when Francis Glenn tried a 47-yard field goal that was blocked by Georgetown tackle Paul Liston.
Those two ties, and a 6-0 Thanksgiving Day victory over Washington & Jefferson, were the highlights of the season.
The W&J game was played in a driving snowstorm at Mountaineer Field and featured 35 punts, 21 coming from the victorious Mountaineers following Glenn's first-quarter touchdown plunge. The two teams combined for four first downs and 92 total yards, and just nine passes were tried, one completed to WVU's Nelson Lang for 11 yards.
It was a fitting ending to a 1929 season that saw West Virginia face eight teams with winning records and a boasted a combined .719 winning percentage.
That was the only year West Virginia's grid opponents had a combined winning percentage greater than .700.
