By Bob Hertzel
PITTSBURGH — Moments earlier his 28th and final pass had floated far above the reach of 6-8 Wes Lyons, who had done everything but pull out a hatchet on his defender while committing offensive interference, and with it West Virginia University’s last chance at pulling a Panther out of a hat was over.
The scoreboard twinkled a tale of West Virginia woe:
Pitt 19, WVU 15.
Patrick White walked quietly toward the Mountaineer locker room, located fittingly enough in the bowels of Heinz Field. His helmet was flipped back on his head and the look of despair that encompassed his face said more than he ever could say in an interview.
His coach, Bill Stewart, would relate later that “I got a hurting quarterback in there. He’s taking it tough, real, real hard.”
It was something White would admit to later, saying it was the toughest loss he had suffered as a Mountaineer, which is a mouthful considering the devastation that came with last year’s Pitt upset in Morgantown, costing WVU a shot at a national title.
When asked why this one was so painful, White simply said:
“Because I feel it was personally my fault.”
While it’s true that White did throw two interceptions, one an indefensible misread that led to a critical touchdown for Pitt, this is not a game to put upon White’s shoulder pads.
Statistics sometimes are quite misleading, but in this 101st Backyard Brawl you can analyze the outcome rather easily.
Pitt and West Virginia have two star runners, LeSean McCoy and Patrick White, respectively.
Final tallies — McCoy 33 carries for a career high 187 yards and two touchdowns, White 12 carries for 93 yards and one touchdown.
McCoy carried the ball 33 times, the rest of his teammates carried it 11. White carried 12 times — three of those carries being scrambles — while the rest of his teammates carried it 20 times.
If you want to know how this team that had national championship aspirations and had in White a Heisman Trophy candidate could lose four games — as many as it had lost in the past two seasons combined — look no further than the bizarre play calling of offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen.
Success in football, as it is in most sports, basically comes down finding a way to take advantage of your best player’s greatest skill. Patrick White is West Virginia’s best player. His greatest skill is running the football and to not recognize that and have him run but 12 times while throwing 28 is simply not giving yourself a chance to win.
There is a reason this WVU football team scored fewer than 21 points in five games this season (Cincinnati counts for the Mountaineers had but 20 in regulation) and it wasn’t because it didn’t have the personnel to put points on the board.
Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt, a man who has been around national championship teams and who coached in the NFL, understands this principle, if nothing else. That is why, when the game was on the line, McCoy was toting the football.
In the fourth quarter, McCoy carried 13 times for 83 yards. White carried twice for 2 yards.
Guess who won the game?
“LeSean McCoy came through today and had a career high 187 yards rushing. I think that was obviously the difference in the game today when we were struggling throwing the ball,” Wannstedt said.
As Wannstedt saw it, “Our only chance to win was to play defense and run the ball.”
Oddly, that was WVU’s only chance to win, but they opted to throw 28 times while running just 32 times.
And, of course, there was the inability of the Mountaineers to get into the end zone from the 1 for the second time in two games, settling for a field goal and eventually losing by those very same four points.
At the 1 on second down, WVU opted not to bring quarterback Jarrett Brown, the big back who had had some success in short yardage earlier this year, into the game to run straight ahead and power into the end zone.
“We did the same play (that Brown would have run) with Pat. We felt he could get it in and he lost three yards,” Mullen said.
So now on third down from the 3, they brought Brown in, put White out as a flanker, ran him in motion, handed him the ball and had him throw for Wes Lyons, a rather complicated, convoluted trick play that wound up incomplete.
If you can’t gain a yard on the goal line, you can’t win and 11 games into the season WVU still doesn’t understand that you don’t have to stop at the goal line, you can actually go across it.
Now Mullen had reasons why White didn’t rush more, something about Pitt taking the option away from him, but what he forgets is that White doesn’t need a good play to break a touchdown run, that he turns broken plays into broken dreams for the defense, as he did when he started left, ran into a swarm of tacklers, reversed field to the right, evaded linebacker Greg Williams, got a block on the corner and scored WVU’s only touchdown of the game from 54 yards out.
Not running White as often as McCoy is one thing, but what they did to him leading up to that disastrous interception was quite another.
Talk about setting a player up for failure, WVU took over at its own 16, leading 15-7 with 9:41 left to play. It was hardly a time to gamble, a time to maybe work on the clock. If you have to punt without a first down, so be it. Patrick McAfee was having a spectacular game, averaging 47.6 points a punt.
Certainly, calling a first-down pass would have been hard enough to explain … but a first-down pass to little used fullback Ricky Kovatch, who had one catch all season, that earlier in the game, was simply a mistake.
And incomplete.
Next came a run … not by White, but by Noel Devine, who had been stopped all day and had but 17 yards on 12 carries, for no gain.
Finally, a pass was called and White messed it up, trying to hit Dorrell Jalloh but not coming close.
“Bad read, bad ball,” said White. “I threw it right to him. It looked like he was on our team.”
He was Jovani Chappel, who had been benched for a couple of games and didn’t start this one, but who made the play and ran it to the WVU 16.
“I’ll take the blame for that,” said Mullen, who has been a standup guy all season. “I have to coach him better than that to read it and told hold the ball.”
Maybe he can work on that this week, the final week of the regular season, but in truth it’s really too late to make any difference in a season that by any standard is a failure.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
