Don Nehlen and Grant Wiley are two guys whose opinion carries some weight when it comes to WVU. The former is a Hall-of-Fame coach. The latter was a consensus All-American linebacker.

They’d like to see some familiar names on the Mountaineer football schedule. And they’ll get some in the coming years, but they’d like to see them a lot more often.

From Nehlen:

“One thing our football program needs is a Virginia Tech or Pitt or Penn State back on that schedule continually, not just one time and then, 10 years later, play them again,” he said this week. “We don’t really have a game to hang our hat on. I’m talking about ‘we’ the fans. We need to be able to drive down to Blacksburg or Pittsburgh or Happy Valley. It would really be nice to have one of those teams back on the schedule.”

Wiley remembers the post-game madness in Morgantown in 2002 … in a game that was played in Blacksburg.

“Everyone was telling us Morgantown was on fire. We heard the students had broken into the stadium and had torn down the goal post. We heard they were carrying the goal post down High Street. If there wasn’t that tension between us and Virginia Tech these extraordinary celebrations wouldn’t have happened.”

I’m sure most Mountaineer fans share their pain, but there’s no telling when that pain gets soothed. Look at the future schedules link earlier in this post. WVU’s non-conference dance card is booked at least partially until 2025. Now, from 2020-25, that card includes at least one team in a combination of Maryland, Pitt, Penn State and Virginia Tech, but there’s no telling whether those series continue past that. And as several school can attest, future schedules sometimes are written in pencil rather than pen.

So, what do you think? Should reviving those rivalries be the primary goal in non-conference scheduling moving forward? Should that goal come before or after these lucrative neutral-site games?