By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Boo!
That was the word being uttered by fans around West Virginia a half hour or so after the final play was run in the Mountaineers’ football game at South Florida Friday night, and it had nothing to do with Halloween.
Talk about your season turning into a pumpkin.
Final score: South Florida 30, West Virginia 19.
Raymond James Stadium became a haunted house for the Mountaineers, who suffered their first Big East loss of the season and their second overall, a loss that will make them huge underdogs in their bid to win the Big East.
Who would know that B.J. Daniels would come out on Halloween Eve dressed like some kind of modern day Galloping Ghost, a running, throwing ghoul who turned every West Virginia trick into his very own treat.
Oh, they flushed him out of the pocket. They rushed him. They had him running for THEIR lives.
By halftime he had passed for 193 yards and two touchdowns and run for 64 more yards.
He alone had outgained the entire West Virginia team, which has a pretty fair offense itself.
Over and over he teamed up with receiver Carlton Mitchell to soap up Keith Tandy’s windows, picking on the cornerback for three completions that covered 124 yards, 41.3 per catch.
It was a great performance by a freshman who was supposed to be understudying Matt Groethe this year.
Groethe, you will recall, broke former WVU quarterback Patrick White’s Big East record for total yardage, racking up more than 10,000 yards, which is about six miles of real estate. But his season – and college career – ended shortly thereafter when he blew out a knee.
That forced coach Jim Leavitt to put the burden on his freshman, who started off fast but struggled the past two games, both losses to Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
South Florida came into this one as a desperate team, feeling it had nothing to lose. With that in mind, they turned Daniels completely loose, putting the game in his hands so much that even on their first possession they opted to gamble on fourth and 1 and let him run with the ball.
After he made that, Leavitt figured it was time to put a real scare into West Virginia. Sitting on the Mountaineer 49 he sent Carlton Mitchell deep, going past Tandy without so much as saying hello as he breezed by for a game-tying touchdown.
Right then you knew that you were watching a game in a fun house mirror, with everything distorted, especially that No. 21 ranking the Mountaineers had.
Offensively and defensively, the South Florida Bullies knocked the Mountaineers around.
It was as if they had had a pre-game meal of witch’s brew and the team mascot had turned into a black cat.
When defensive ends George Selvie and Jean Pierre-Paul weren’t harassing Jarrett Brown, making him run around in circles in his own backfield, the Bulls’ defenders were making Noel Devine’s return to his native Florida anything but a vacation.
A week after he gained 171 yards in the second half against Connecticut and pulled off a heroic late run for a 58-yard game-winning touchdown, he managed only 42 yards on the ground against South Florida and had a bruise for each one of them.
No matter how they tried to use him, there were at least two South Florida players hanging on his legs, his back or trying to rip his head from his body.
If he came into this Halloween evening game dressed as a Heisman Trophy candidate he left wearing the emperor’s new clothes.
As good as Daniels and South Florida were, they could not have accomplished the victory were it not for a few goblins that kept interfering with what should have been big moments for WVU.
There was Brown doing a marvelous job of getting loose and finding Alric Arnett on the sideline for what would have been a first-down at the Bulls’ 20, only to have the ball slip through the fingers that latched on to 6 passes for 84 yards.
Then there was one of the few mistakes that Daniels made, throwing a truly miserable pass that safety Sidney Glover had measured, only to have the ball hit him in the worst place – the hands – while in full stride heading the other way for what would have been an easy touchdown, had only he caught the ball.
And then, in WVU’s final drive, on a fourth-and-28 play, Brown scrambled around, found 6-foot-8 Wes Lyons downfield past the first-down marker, threw a perfect pass, tall enough that he could get his hands on it, only to have another poltergeist somehow knock the ball from his grasp.
That was the last gasp. The final indignity came when South Florida was running out the clock, Daniels broke out of contain again. He came face-to-face with Tandy, made a cut to the inside as Tandy missed him and he disappeared into the Florida night.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
