By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — This is about you, Mountaineer Nation.
It’s about your passion, about your heart, about how you’ve changed over the years for the better and about how you haven’t changed, also for the better.
A couple of weeks back SI.com did a survey on fans in the major conferences.
They named you the rudest in the Big East, which was fine with me, because it shows how little they know and I’m tired of these national publications passing judgment on West Virginia.
What’s SI stand for, Stupid Idiots?
They ask a Pitt fan, a Rutgers fan and a Louisville fan to pass judgment on West Virginia in a survey and think they have a story out of that?
What do they know? They still think the streets of Morgantown are aflame with burning couches after every victory.
No more.
Not since the price of furniture went too high.
No, West Virginia fans don’t burn things in the wake of victory and there hasn’t been a good hanging in effigy since the Bobby Bowden days, although who knows what might have happened had Rich Rodriguez done a statewide, goodwill tour after losing to Pitt in 2007.
West Virginia fans can appear rude at times. You ride on the Pittsburgh team bus and you might get a few birds flipped your way. Might even feel the bus rocking a time or two, but it isn’t an angry mob, just a bunch of college kids out having fun with the enemy.
Even the “Eat s--t, Pitt” cheer, while hardly politically correct, is a harmless way of expressing one’s First Amendment rights. Let’s just say WVU fans aren’t about to be greeting the Backyard Brawl opposition with “Who luvs ya, baby?” are they.
See, you have to understand that this is a fan base with a heart.
Rude? These are the same WVU fans that last month paid tribute to Connecticut and its fallen star, Jasper Howard, that hung a banner that read “Today we are all Huskies.”
They were so rude that Dick Weis of no less a paper than the New York Daily News was moved to write “it was heartwarming to see the compassionate way the West Virginia fans reacted to the Huskies’ grief.”
The fans were so rude that UConn coach Randy Edsall was moved to write a letter of thanks to them for their actions and behavior, not only at the game, but the week leading up to it.
If West Virginia fans were so rude, why do you suppose that when fans were asked which stadium ranks as their favorite to visit, West Virginia ranked
first in the conference, 20 percent more fans than said they enjoy visiting Connecticut, which supposedly has the most “polite” fans in the conference.
That group of fans that was mulling around on the field after beating Pitt last Friday night wasn’t a rude group. It was a happy group. They were hugging each other, high-fiving each other. Only the players seemed to be enjoying it more.
There were police there, just in case, but being down in the middle of it I saw nothing but pure love pouring out of them. Players and fans were mingling, wearing looks of joy.
Now you want rude, do you know that the parents of Pitt quarterback Bill Stull stand and watch their son play from the rotunda? According to Joe Starkey of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, they do not sit in the crowd “because that’s where some fans booed their son’s play earlier this year.”
That would be Pitt fans booing the parents of the Pitt quarterback out of the stands, and West Virginia fans are rude?
Not that West Virginia fans are above expressing their displeasure with the way things are going. When Bill Stewart opted to bypass a field goal early in the Pitt game to try for a touchdown on fourth down at the 3, the boos rang out heavily.
And rightfully so. The call was the wrong one, period. You take the points.
Coaches get criticized, period. Ask New England’s Bill Belichick, who gambled on fourth down at his own 28-yard line a couple of weeks back near the two-minute warning. He lost, and minutes later so did his team, to the Indianapolis Colts.
They booed the call; they booed the results. And yes, on the next series, they booed the play-calling and the results when the Mountaineers went into a conservative shell after making numerous mistakes.
But booing is part of the game. Coaches know it; players know it; fans know it.
But you know what, it’s difficult to remember a situation where a WVU player was booed by the fans for his performance, as Stull was, where he’s been taunted by his own, where his parents have been driven from their seats.
Mountaineer fans innately understand that it is rude to be booed … if you are one of their own.
As for the opponents, well, hey, it’s all in good fun, folks. Live with it.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
