By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Never has a meaningless game meant more than West Virginia University’s “Midnight Madness” meeting with South Florida on Saturday.
Considering the two top goals the Mountaineers set for themselves every season — first to win the Big East, second to win a national championship — are gone and both teams are bowl qualified, if not bowl quality, this would seem to be nothing more than a made-for-TV spectacular.
When one looks at the way both teams’ seasons have melted down, you might as well just call it “Jeopardy.”
Facing the possibility of finishing with more losses this year than they had combined in the last two, the Mountaineers are already in “Double Jeopardy.”
You know, “I’ll take ‘The Running Game’ for five hundred, Alex.”
To begin with, West Virginia’s bowl future is at stake. If they win, they could find themselves in sombreros and serapes in El Paso, Texas, for the Sun Bowl, which means absolutely nothing to the Mountaineers or their followers but is considered the No. 2 bowl on the Big East scale this year.
Lose and it’s what, a weekend in Charlotte?
Or Birmingham?
With all due apologies to quarterback Patrick White, who would be going back to his home state in Birmingham, after you’ve been to Atlanta and Phoenix, played — and won — in BCS bowl games, a trip to a lesser bowl doesn’t carry quite the same aura.
Perhaps the one thing that makes this game meaningful to the fans and will help attract a full house despite rather frigid weather forecasts is that it gives the people of West Virginia a chance to see White play his final home game.
It is time for us to give a thrill to him after he has spent the past four years giving nothing but thrills to us, doing things on the football field we had never seen before and doing it with class and style.
It is time to honor him and the other seniors who comprise his class with a “White-Out,” where everyone wears white to the game or brings a white towel to wave, a tribute to a kid who put WVU on his shoulders and carried the Mountaineers to heights they had seldom seen before.
“He’s more popular than the governor,” said coach Bill Stewart when asked about White.
Why not? It’s as Babe Ruth once noted when informed that the $80,000 he was asking for was more than President Herbert Hoover made, saying “I had a better year than he had.”
Even South Florida has been gracious enough to allow WVU to wear white jerseys for the game, something that Stewart said will always “be remembered as a gracious act.”
Perhaps it is because, unlike Babe Ruth, who was notorious for late-night antics and unquenchable thirst for the fast life, White became a hero the right way.
“Honest to God, he’s something special,” Stewart said.
He’s so special that he didn’t even want to have the “White-Out” because it would take the focus off the other seniors.
“I’m just one of 19 seniors,” he said.
One who has lived through the glory days that he helped carve out, days that Stewart will have to find a way to recapture if he and his staff are to survive because everyone now realizes that Rich Rodriguez is gone and not coming back.
It appears his style of football is gone, too, and the Mountaineers must find a way to make their new style of football work. That this season has been an offensive disaster cannot be denied. You can show it in the statistics and find it the season’s record which stands at 7-4.
Stewart maintains he’s not about to change what he’s been doing.
“I know I’m doing what I should be doing,” he said. “We’re headed in the right direction. I know we have to pass the football and I know it’s not a one-man team. There are a lot of things I know. It will just take time to get there, but I know we have enough knowledge and enough guts and determination to put a package together that will take us higher than we’ve ever been. That’s my aspiration.”
He even promised more of the same against South Florida, the team that first figured out a way to stop Rodriguez’s no-huddle, power spread, saying “we have to pitch and catch the ball, much like we did Friday.”
The only problem with that is that he lost to Pitt on Friday and scored only 15 points, which is not exactly an endorsement for repeating it this week.
Prove you can run on South Florida and you have them beat and to run on them you need White as the featured runner, but Stewart argues against that.
“You can’t run the same guy 50 times,” Stewart maintained.
Agreed again, but there is a lot of space between the 12 carries he had against Pitt and “50 carries.” When White carries 20 times, however, WVU normally wins.
In his career White has 12 games in which he has carried 20 times.
WVU’s record in those 12 games is 9-3.
Stewart’s belief in the passing game and a new offense may well be best for life after Patrick White, but for this one last home game and whatever bowl in which the Mountaineers land, WVU must take optimum advantage of his unique skills to regain the respect that has been eroded this season.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
