JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Move over, Cal Ripken Jr. Make room for some real ironmen of sports.

Oh, what you did was truly amazing, playing in 2,632 consecutive baseball games. You did it through headaches and body aches, through strains and sprains, day in and day out.

But you are not alone.

While history will never recognize them the way you have been recognized, their feat may be equally as amazing.

They go by the names of Capers, Jobe, Madsen, Jenkins and Barclay. While that might sound like a high class New York City law firm, it is, instead, the most tireless offensive line in college football … the West Virginia University line that plays one last game together on Jan. 1 at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., against Florida State.

If the WVU statistics can be believed, what they did was truly unbelievable.

The Mountaineers ran 799 plays during the regular season.

They played 99 percent of those snaps, through bumps and bruises, strains and sprains, a dislocation could not change their location.

This is how it went:

• Selvish Capers, 797 of 799 snaps

• Josh Jenkins, 797 of 799 snaps

• Eric Jobe, 796 of 799 snaps

• Joe Madsen, 784 of 799 snaps

• Don Barclay, 783 of 799 snaps

Think about that for a moment. While Jobe and Madsen flip-flopped between guard and center, depending upon the base defense of the opponent, the five players were together for every snap of importance — and quite a few that weren’t important — throughout the season.

“We’ve only played with five guys on every offensive rep. That’s got to be a first,’’ WVU offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen said late in the season. “I would really wonder how many Division I programs have played the same five guys on every rep the whole year. They’re beat up. We knew going into the year they were young, so now they’re young and they’re beat up. That’s a bad combination.”

Beat up, but they made it through.

“It’s a grind. In a 12-game season, the body goes through a lot of pounding,” offensive line coach Dave Johnson said. “I’d of liked to have played more guys but they’re young and they just weren’t ready.”

Both head coach Bill Stewart and Johnson point to Mike Joseph, the former Fairmont State star running back who is the Mountaineers’ strength coach, for keeping them ready due to a move toward “position specific” lifting which is aimed at building strength, agility, stamina and, most important, avoiding injuries.

This was a young line, Capers being the only senior and as a converted tight end he wasn’t overflowing with experience.

Now it is an experienced line.

“They’ve gone hard for 16 or 17 weeks now,” Johnson said. “They are getting better. When we watch film of an opponent from last year, they look at themselves and bring it up … ‘Man, I was bad last year,’ they’ll say.”

This has been especially true of Capers.

“He’s come a long way,” Johnson said. “You see a lot of maturing in him.”

Capers really wanted to play tight end at West Virginia and, at first, offered resistance to the move.

“Playing offensive line requires a different work ethic,” Johnson noted. “There’s a different mentality. You come in wanting to catch touchdown passes, but that isn’t going to happen. The only time you are noticed is when they call your number for holding.”

Johnson knows something about that. He came to West Virginia as a tight end.

Then one day Coach Don Nehlen called him in.

“It was humbling. He told me he was moving me to center,” Johnson said, who started his junior and senior seasons at center.

Playing the offensive line is different than almost anything else in sports. In baseball, everyone bats except the pitcher, who is out there in his own limelight. In basketball everyone handles the ball, the same in hockey or soccer.

Football is a game with a ball but the linemen don’t handle it. They must take pride in their ability to allow the ball-handlers or playmakers to excel.

“The elite players, the good ones prepare themselves. It becomes almost a passion. You enjoy the blocking, picking up different twists,” Johnson said.

And, as odd as it may seem, offensive linemen almost always are among the most intelligent players on the team.

“You have to be,” Johnson said. “There are so many intricacies in technique.”

And there is so much thrown at you. Each week it is a new and different challenge, just as it will be with Florida State, which has month to get ready and a pair of coaches — Bobby Bowden and defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews — who are coaching their last game and will pull out all the stops.

“We’ll adjust to whatever they throw at us,” Johnson said. “We saw a lot the last few weeks. Rutgers threw every blitz known to mankind at us and they don’t normally blitz. Syracuse ran all the zone blitzes. Pitt ran man to man defense and had great athletes up front. I’ll stack Pitt’s front seven up against anyone.”

And West Virginia’s offensive line handled it well enough that the Mountaineers won the game.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.