Win over Pitt would cap turnaround year for West Virginia
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) – West Virginia is one of college football’s success stories this season after going from 3-8 to 8-3 in a year. Second-year coach Rich Rodriguez can earn the school’s best finish since 1993 when No. 24 West Virginia travels an hour north to play at No. 17 Pittsburgh.
Each team is 8-3, 5-1 in the Big East. West Virginia is ranked for the first time since 1998, and it’s the first time in 13 years that both teams are in the Top 25 when they meet.
Rodriguez doesn’t have a special speech in mind. He’ll say simply what he has each previous week: “Just play to the end. That’s why we’ve had success, because we’ve done that.
“We’re not going to go out there and dominate most folks,” he said Monday. “We have to go out, just plug away and hope something happens.”
That’s been the equation for five wins in the last six games, including the first over a ranked opponent in nine tries.
“Did I expect us to go undefeated and win a national championship? No, we didn’t talk about that,” Rodriguez said. “But we did expect to go a bowl and we did expect to compete better.
“And we thought we’d have a better football team because of some of the things we put in place last year.”
His players now have a better grasp of his system and are healthier than the team that closed with a 23-17 loss to Pittsburgh last year to finish with its worst season since 1978.
Pittsburgh native Rasheed Marshall, a sophomore, has taken over the no-huddle, spread offense, which is 19th in total yards nationally and a surprising second in rushing yards at 292 per game.
“We anticipated having to be able to throw more,” Rodriguez said.
The defense, retooled this year to simplify the schemes, was the spark last week in a 21-18 win at Virginia Tech, coming up with a goal-line stop and an interception in the end zone in the fourth quarter.
That win set off a celebration among Mountaineer fans that included dozens of fires set in the streets of Morgantown.
With students on Thanksgiving break, a similar problem isn’t likely this week. That’s good news to Rodriguez, who urged students who did stay in town to celebrate a possible win “within the legal limits,” then return home to study for finals.
As a Mountaineer player, Rodriguez was 2-1 against Pittsburgh from 1982-84. He admits he “wasn’t particularly fond of them at the time. Without question, Pitt was the one we wanted the most.
“You wanted to win, but you could still sleep if you lost,” he said. “It’s a lot more important now than when I was playing.
“Our fans would probably say ‘you’ve got to beat Pitt worse than anybody,”‘ he said before interjecting, “They all count as one.”
Maybe so, but he doesn’t want to be known as the coach who went into a slump against Pittsburgh. The Mountaineers dominated the series in the 1990s with eight wins but now have lost two straight.