In his latest half-baked rant, Chas only brought up half of the argument I made last August, and then assumed that WVU’s less-than-impressive 19-16 overtime win at home over a much weakened Maryland team (which will probably wind up 4th place in the ACC at best) completely negated my conclusion that WVU is overrated. It doesn’t, and WVU still is.
But let’s look at Chas’s rant more closely…
For a couple days in mid-August, I found myself engaged in a little argument
with Lee over WVU. Lee was in a righteous fury over their preseason ranking.
His argument always came back to the fact that they were continually smoked by
Maryland.
Once again, that was only half of my argument. The main part of my argument was that because WVU hadn’t put together a top 30 recruiting class in decades, it was unlikely (although admittedly not impossible) for them to justify a sudden jump into the AP top ten — ESPECIALLY given that their last game (at the time) was a humiliating loss to Maryland in the Gator Bowl. But Chas isn’t done yet…
After the Pitt game, as we were listening for other scores, and learned
first that the WVU-MD game was tied, and then that WVU pulled it out, Lee
started his wonderful revisionism that winning for WVU wasn’t enough. They had
needed to have smoked Maryland from the beginning to the final whistle. That
merely beating the team that had beaten them soundly 4 times in the last three
years was insufficient.
Insufficient for what, exactly?
Once again, Chas chose to hear only part of what I said. I did indeed say that WVU needed to beat Maryland badly — but ONLY so that they could (1) validify the Big East as a conference, and (2) justify a spot in the national championship game should they go undefeated. I have a hard time seeing any part of this statement as revisionism (even just the fragment that Chas quoted), because I never stated anything to the contrary beforehand. And face it, a team that can barely beat a mediocre ACC team in overtime at home (Maryland giftwrapped the win with 5 turnovers) doesn’t deserve to play for the national championship IF that is their strongest win (as it likely will be). And it doesn’t say much for the Big East that our likely champion can barely beat what was then the 21st ranked team in the country at home.
But I, being a fairly unoriginal person, didn’t come up with this line of reasoning on my own. On Friday night’s SportsCenter, Fowler, Herbstreit, and Corso all agreed that WVU needed an “impressive showing” against Maryland to justify their ranking and a potential national championship run. At the end of Saturday night’s ESPN College Gameday Final, Corso — who, remember, originally picked WVU to play for the national championship — said (to some laughter) that he now regretted his pick. They were clearly unimpressed with what happened in Morgantown.
But the scariest thing I heard was on the drive home from the Nebraska game, on WEAE 1250, ESPN Radio Pittsburgh. Mel Kiper Jr. used WVU’s 19-16 win to trash the Big East conference’s inclusion in the BCS. He repeatedly asked how a conference whose strongest team could barely beat the 4th place ACC team at home (his stat, not mine) justified a place at the table while the Mountain West, Boise State, Fresno State, Utah, and company were all locked out in the cold. Good point. And a very scary point too. As overrated as I think WVU is, us Pitt fans ALL have to root for both their success AND the perception of their success in the national media for the good of the Big East.
Through absolutely no fault of their own, WVU has a very weak schedule. Maryland will probably be the only ranked team that they play this year. And already, their weak schedule is beginning to hurt them in the computer rankings. Look at ESPN’s latest mock BCS rankings. WVU dropped to #9 despite their win because of the computer rankings, which value strength of schedule more than humans do. How’s WVU going to justify passing a one-loss Oklahoma or USC team for a shot at the title should the need arise? Well, we shall see.
But to concede something to Chas, I did not see WVU beating Maryland at all. So I was certainly wrong that much. But what’s wrong with occasionally agreeing with Ron Cook? This piece is fine. The Mountaineers do have problems with their kicking game, discipline, and at times even Rasheed Marshall. And they probably wouldn’t pass a one-loss USC or Oklahoma team in the BCS. Sure, Cook is an idiot. But even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.
Hail to WVU’s surviving Blacksburg in two weeks. As much as I hate to admit it, we need the Mountaineers to win there…
…and so somebody can’t call this revisionism later (by the way, that was VERY Karl Rove of you, Chas), it wouldn’t hurt if WVU beat the Hokies badly!
