I’m sorting through texts, e-mail and comments the past few weeks and wondering if people are perhaps a bit too down on WVU. I mean, has your season gone so poorly that a friggin’ beach ball screwed with the outcome of a game? I can’t recall a WVU loss like that … and a fan contributed to it. 

The Mountaineers, after all, are 7-2 and, if nothing else, find themselves in a position in November to win the Big East title.

Has it been picturesque getting here? No. Not at all. Should that change the reality? Probably not. The season changes one way or the other Friday and it seems to be it’d be unwise to give WVU no chance to do something remarkable. It seems unfair to forget what’s happened in WVU’s past to get here.

Tommy West’s farewell rant has people talking and thinking. You see — rather, you are told — things can always be worse.  The touchiest subject in his monologue is similar to the touchiest one the last few weeks around here.

There is a negativity and it seems to me it circles around a discontent in the stands. People are booing, yawning, criticizing, leaving or just not even coming.  I get that. I’m not condemning it at all. I have good friends who remain loyal. I have good friends who are done with this season. It makes no difference to me.

Thirty years ago today, though, the last game was played at old Mountaineer Field. The old place had its quirks, its advantages, its disadvantages and flat-out absurdities, but it was dated and the school needed a new place to play.

The new Mountaineer Field, the one people sometimes frown about today, made the future of the program possible.

“From my class and the class behind that with Robert Alexander and Fulton Walker, I think the new stadium was crucial to the recruiting process,” Luck said. “If the new stadium hadn’t been on the drawing board I doubt West Virginia would have gotten the classes that graduated in ’81 and ’82.

“To me, if the university was really going to develop a top-notch football program year-in and year-out, a massive upgrading to the facilities needed to take place,” added Luck. “It was fun to play in old Mountaineer Field and I’ve got some fond memories of my first college game, it was quaint and very intimate, but it was not conducive to developing the program.”