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WVU v. TCU: A penny for your memories?

Oh boy, if you don’t recognize and laugh at this, well, you’re not necessarily new, because this is more than 5 years old now, but you’ve been deprived of so much laughter. You’re in for a treat.

This business card is part of West Virginia’s attempt to clean up its act before the start of the 2011 football season. It was part of a coordinated response to the WVU v. Pitt game at the Coliseum in February 2010. That game is legend. It was Deniz Kilicli’s surreal debut. It was when Bob Donato maybe pushed Joe Mazzulla … and Donato is an official. It was when Brad Wanamaker and Gilbert Brown combined for zero points. They averaged 23 points a game that season.

And, more memorably, it gave us these two indelible moments in Coliseum lore.

First, someone — and the identity and allegiance of exactly who will forever be unresolved — threw a coin at Pitt assistant coach Tom Herrion and hit him in the face.

Herrion could, um, embellish, but I saw this particular thing happen. I’ll never know why, but I was watching the bench and saw something come into the scene, and I saw Herrion react. It was crazy. The building was in a frenzy that night.

And then, the second image: Bob Huggins grabbed a microphone.

That was a great time in this here space. I think back, and it was one of the periods when we got our footing and became something — and we’d been around for almost three years at that point. But there was a great F Double at the end of the week which wrapped up everything that came before it. There was signing day. There was the nutty WVU v. Louisville game the prior weekend, which the Big East addressed and we discussed. There were the tasteless chants aimed at Rick Pitino during that game and some subsequent conversations about fan decorum.

With that as well as Pitt’s imminent move to the ACC as our catalysts, we decided to do an extraordinarily rare TFGD for a basketball game. The game was bonkers, and the texts were sublime.

Anyhow, WVU’s fans were getting a bad wrap and image control was important because the Big East was deteriorating and WVU wanted a good rep to carry with it into board rooms.

“We don’t want to lose any of the raucous, home-field advantage that we have because this is a hard place to play,” said WVU Athletic Director Oliver Luck. “At the same time, we’ve got opposing fans who travel to WVU, and we want them to leave Morgantown with a good impression of the University, the city, the state and of our fan base. We also want our fans – from kids to grandparents – to enjoy the game.”

Expansion wasn’t the sole reason this happened, and WVU did have to do something to address the behavior, but it’s hard to separate the two. The response was sort of sweeping, part proactive and part retroactive, but this business card — look at No. 4! That’s the finalized version, and it remains part of WVU’s code of conduct. We’ve had so much fun with that through the years, and really, it all goes back to the foils once found at Pitt who you can find on the sideline today. Herrion is a special assistant at TCU, and he again works for Jamie Dixon, who is now the head coach at TCU, which is his alma mater.

Dixon is 5-4 in the Coliseum and 12-7 against WVU, but he holds his foes and their fans in high regard.

His opinion about one of his many rivals and their fans was forever changed after his sister Maggie, the head coach at Army, passed away unexpectedly following the 2006 season.

“I’ll always remember all the email and the letters from the people of West Virginia,” Dixon said. “When you can make a mother who lost a loved one feel well and feel like her family’s appreciated at that time, that’s why the West Virginia people will have a special place in the hearts of the Dixon family.”