MORGANTOWN — Remember when you were a really little kid, when everyone was picking on you and you didn’t know which way to turn?
Remember how you’d arch your back, glare at your tormentors, and spew forth the words that had worked for as long as there were kids and bullies?
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”
There were times during the past year or so when Billy Stull felt like just standing there at midfield on Heinz Field, turning to the crowd and screaming out the old sticks and stones line.
See, he knew about the broken bones up close and personal, and then he was learning about the names, some of them names that even a kid out of Youngstown, Ohio, which isn’t exactly hoity or toity in any respect, had never heard.
“I’ve been through some rough times, the lowest of lows,” the Pitt quarterback said as he took some time during an off week before beginning preparations for the Nov. 27 Backyard Brawl meeting with West Virginia University to chat with the Mountaineer media. “Now we’re starting to get some high points here.”
Two years ago, Stull was supposed to be the Pitt starting quarterback but a stick or a stone or some such thing broke one of his bones, that being his throwing thumb, and his chance to prove himself as a starter after doing nothing but mop-up duty behind Tyler Palko ended in the season-opening game.
That meant, of course, he was not the quarterback in the most crucial game in Pitt’s modern football history, the night they upset West Virginia and kept it out of the 2007 national championship game.
Stull came back last year and had a rough go getting into things, becoming the whipping boy of the fans, the object of their disaffection. It reached its greatest depths when he was yanked in a terribly embarrassing 3-0 defeat in the Sun Bowl.
Pitt changed offensive coordinators, bringing in Frank Cignetti Jr. during the offseason, and Stull was back to Square 1.
“It was tough for me. Having a system for four years, and knowing it like it was the back of my hand, it was tough. There was some doubt whether I was going to be able to pick it up and feel comfortable with it,” he said.
Cignetti, the son of the former West Virginia coach who became one of the great Division II coaches at Indiana, Pa., got him through it with some patient coaching, getting him ready physically for the opener.
But no one could get him ready mentally for what would transpire. After his second pass of the season, Stull was booed heartily by the fans and yes, name calling can hurt.
Stull was hardly ready for that, but he wasn’t going to let it ruin his career.
“The criticism is going to be there,” he said. “I’m my own worst critic. The things I heard are nothing compared to what I put on my own shoulders.”
He just shrugged off the latest round of criticism and moved forward.
“I wouldn’t change things,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d be the type of player or person I am without it. It makes you stronger mentally.”
Stull said the injuries he has suffered, led by the broken thumb, have been harder to handle than the name calling, but he has handled it.
All of a sudden, as Pitt comes into this Backyard Brawl, the Panthers are 9-1 and need only to defeat WVU and Cincinnati to earn the Big East championship and a BCS bowl spot.
While freshman running back Dion Lewis has been the star and wide receiver Jonathan Baldwin has been spectacular, Stull has been the glue, the blue collar worker who is the foundation.
He ranks fourth in the nation in passing efficiency, behind only Kellen Moore of Boise State, Max Hall of BYU and Ryan Mallett of Arkansas. He’s thrown 294 passes, and only four of them have been intercepted.
And that is pretty much what coach Dave Wannstedt and Cignetti are asking of him, to conduct the game efficiently, without mistakes and without turnovers. Do that, toss in the running game and a strong defense and football becomes a rather simple exercise.
You might say it becomes almost a kid’s game.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN: Panthers’ Stull quiets criticism with his play
- Bob Herzel
-
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Patrone finally gets his due
Lee Patrone says he remembers it vividly, even though more than 50 years have passed, and while it was the greatest accomplishment in his life it has nothing to do with the West Virginia University basketball career that has lifted him into the Class of 2012 that will be inducted into the Mountaineer Sports Hall of Fame in September.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: No doubt WVU made out well
There was a cold, ill wind blowing in from the north on Friday.
It was the kind of wind that blows whenever a Pitt man opens his mouth, as the Pittsburgh athletic director Steve Pederson did. -
Tears and memories: VIDEO
It was mid-Thursday afternoon at the Morgantown Event Center and the crowd stood mostly silently in line that wound out of the Events Hall and into the hallway toward the staircase.
A young lady was there holding a singular golden rose
“I wish,” Rebecca Durst said, “it could be gold and blue.” -
HERTZEL COLUMN: Stew fondly remembered by players
The tributes have poured in all week for Bill Stewart, the former West Virginia University football coach whose sudden and unexpected death from a heart attack at age 59 on Monday stunned the state, but it wasn’t the administrators or executives or politicians who really knew him.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: White right there with Hall of Famers
Back on New Year’s Eve, 2008, shortly after West Virginia University had edged North Carolina, 31-30, to win the Meineke Car Care Bowl, an attempt was made to put Mountaineer quarterback Patrick White into his proper historical perspective.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Pat Beilein follows in father’s path
In a day filled with the sorrow of former West Virginia University football coach Bill Stewart’s sudden and unexpected death, there was a ray of sunshine that managed to slip through, a happening that shows us all that even in death there is life and as one son grieves, as does Stewart’s son, Blaine, somewhere else a father basks in pride over his son.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN - Stewart’s gift was giving
It was the kind of cosmic happening that defies description. We all come across them from time to time, leaving us in a state of disbelief.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: This ‘Maniac’ makes music with Kilicli
Mike Martin wasn’t long removed from his New York roots, a somewhat rare import in these parts compared to the migration of New Jerseyites who matriculate at West Virginia University.
-
Van Zant fired as WVU baseball coach
West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck believes with a new coach and a new stadium the Mountaineers can compete with the likes of Texas and Oklahoma for the Big 12 baseball championship but understands it will not come easily or quickly.
-
SEC, Big 12 team up for bowl
Even before the full impact of West Virginia University’s 2014 season-opening meeting with Alabama in Atlanta has been grasped, the opportunity presented itself for the two to meet again later in that season or future ones in a bowl agreement between the Big 12 and SEC that is much like the Rose Bowl agreement between the Big Ten and the Pac-12.
- More Bob Herzel Headlines
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Patrone finally gets his due
