Re-listening to Bill Stewart’s portion of the Big East coaches’ teleconference from Monday, I stumbled across a point he was making about his team’s mental and physical approach to the games. Apparently, Stewart got a little advice from college football’s finest historian before WVU played at Colorado. Jump ahead to 34:15.

“I talked to Coach Holtz and I said, ‘Coach, what am I going to do out there?’ People kept putting this (altitude) in our guys’ heads. We had this chamber built — I didn’t have a chamber built, but we had a chamber — and then there’s this Rocky Mountain thing. I said, ‘Hell, I coached out there for four years. I jogged 20 miles a week for four years and I’m not a big jogger. That was at 7,000 feet, 6,800 at Air Force.’ You know, Boulder and Denver are a mile high (5,280 feet). And Coach Holtz told me, he said ‘Billy, you just have to strain for six seconds. Six seconds of effort.’ And that’s what we’ve been doing. I’ve got to attribute all of that to Coach Holtz. He said, ‘Just six seconds of effort and maximum effort.’ That’s what we did and from that moment on we haven’t looked back.”

Interesting point, don’t you think? Oh, that rapscallion!