The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board Because that's our custom

WVU v. Baylor: How they drew it up

January 10, 2017 by Mike Casazza
20170110_171914

 

You are looking live at the propaganda issued by the Mountaineer Maniacs for tonight’s while-schools-in-session Big 12 opener for No. 10 West Virginia. The truly special occasion is that the nation’s No. 1-ranked team is on the Coliseum floor for the seventh time ever. The Mountaineers are 2-4 with wins against UNLV in 1983 and Kansas last season and losses in between against Temple in 1988, UMass in 1995, UConn in 2000 and UConn in 2006.

I don’t know how to qualify this, and I’m not even sure it’s true, but Baylor, a 6 1/2 point underdog tonight, feels like the most unlikely No. 1 in a long, long time. Probably since, like, St. Joe’s in the 2003-04 season, right? I’ve tried really hard to think of other possibilities — Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee team in 2008 was an oddity; Gonzaga’s spot at the top was a matter of time — but Baylor is the second team to ever start a season unranked and reach No. 1.

The other was Larry Bird’s Indiana State team in 1978-79.

We spoke earlier about what everyone may have missed about the Bears this season — “I don’t think anybody knew how good the big kid was. I think everyone knew how good Motley was going to be. Nobody knew how good the point guard was.” — but I think it’s fair to say people in the game have had their suspicions about Scott Drew. You can google around if you want. Maybe you’ll find out why Rick Barnes wanted to fight him once upon a time. He just hasn’t always been a popular figure in the business, but, woo, the guy can recruit. This seems to be the season when he gets more recognition as a coach, too. Being No. 1 and 15-0 will do that, but replacing the players he lost and doing this against that schedule will do it, too.

“There’s a bunch of great coaches in the league, so sometimes guys get overlooked, but he’s always done a great job,” said his counterpart tonight, Bob Huggins. “If you look at it, he’s always been in the mix. He’s always been in the NCAA tournament. They beat us three times in a row here. Obviously, he’s a better coach than I am.”

Burn?

Continue reading…

Baylor Bears: What’d we miss?

by Mike Casazza

A year ago, Baylor kinda-sorts folded toward the end with three losses in five games to end the regular season and then first-round losses in the Big 12 and NCAA tournaments, the latter to — let me double-check this — Yale. In person and from afar, the Bears seemed on the brink until they met their end.

Continue reading…

Football finishes No. 18, adds 10 players

by Mike Casazza

 

The final coaches poll came out early this morning, and Dana Holgorsen, who checked in at No. 18, has his second top-25 finish. Bobby Bowden had one! The Mountaineers finished the 2011 season No. 17 in the media poll and No. 18 in the coaches’ poll. They beat somebody in the Orange Bowl. Can’t remember who, though.

Monday wasn’t just the end of the college football season, though. It was the start of the spring semester and the start of the FBS experience for 10 players.

Continue reading…

Here comes Konate

January 9, 2017 by Mike Casazza

Bob Huggins said a later block reminded him of Kenyon Martin, and then he was clear in saying he was not comparing the present to the past. That wasn’t fair. Or accurate. What is fair and accurate is freshman forward Sagaba Konate is less like the soccer player born and raised in Mali and even less like the raw talent prone to technical fouls on the hardwood in Hermitage, Pennsylvania.

He’s beginning to look a lot like a difference-maker for No. 7 West Virginia as it heads into the second half of his first regular season.

“He just continues to get better and better,” said coach Bob Huggins, who will likely play host to the No. 1-ranked team in the country for the second time in as many seasons when Baylor visits the Coliseum Tuesday. “He’s really listening and trying to understand. I thought the blocks really got us going and got the crowd back in the game.”

Ron Crook gets away

by Mike Casazza
Jennings_Gibson_MMORAES

 

Ron Crook, allegedly nuts about peanut butter, sees you scratching your head. He’s the new offensive line coach at Cincinnati, a sudden and perhaps unexpected transaction Saturday night, and it’s apparent that does not unequivocally compute.

… wait, he’s leaving for that job?

Continue reading…

No. 7 WVU 82, TCU 70

January 8, 2017 by Mike Casazza

 

Don’t look now, but Daxter Miles has all three of WVU’s individual 20-point games this season and two have come in Big 12 play. He’s quickly gaining on Esa Ahmad for the team lead in scoring. Bob Huggins is OK with that and the Mountaineers are seemingly better for it.

Continue reading…

WVU v. TCU: A penny for your memories?

January 7, 2017 by Mike Casazza

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.”

Continue reading…

Friday Feedback

January 6, 2017 by Mike Casazza

Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which is booked through … well, we’re here today! And then we’re not next week. Same deal for basketball season as it was for football season: If I’m not traveling, I’m F Doubling. So, here we are, and before we begin, let’s tie up the loose ends around the football scheduling.

Youngstown State in 2018, JMU in 2019, Florida State in 2020 and Indiana State in 2021. FCS schools are going to be a way of life now, and the Penguins and Dukes are playing for their national championship Saturday in Frisco, Texas. If you’re going to go that route — and to repeat the position here, WVU should — it’s hard to do a whole lot better than those two. The Mountaineers are paying each $550,000, and that’s roughly half, give or take, what it would cost to get a game against a Group of 5 team. Indiana State is not as good, though the Sycamores should be able to fetch a good head coach and are better than 2017 soup can Delaware State. They’re getting $500,000 for their trip to Morgantown.

The financial fun is to be had in the Chick-fil-A game.

cfatix

Translation: PBI, which is the game organizer, Peach Bowl, Inc., is writing WVU a check for $4,250,000. WVU also has to buy this arrangement of 30,000 tickets. If it sells all 30,000, that’s cool. If it sells fewer than the 30,000, that WVU’s problem and not PBI’s. Good thing PBI “strongly urges” the schools to sell those tickets. The last time WVU played in the Kickoff Game, it wound up clearing about $3 million. That’s still $1 million more than a typical home game.

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, maintain a stream of consciousness.

I love you, Doug! said:

Indiana State — if only Larry Bird would attend!

So tree — uh, true.

SheikYbuti said:

Other than Stanford’s, the Sycamores are the most famous trees in college football.

They’ll spruce up the schedule.

Continue reading…

Football scheduling done through 2021

January 5, 2017 by Mike Casazza

The story includes dates and sites for four new games and the full non-conference schedule for 2018-21.

‘The league’s been great. This is not.’

by Mike Casazza

 

Confession time! I was in the air Thursday when West Virginia coach Bob Huggins had a teleconference to cover the week between games and preview the Oklahoma State game. After the win Friday, I asked Huggins if he was headed home, and he said he was and he wanted to get to a tournament at Morgantown High before he swerved into his issues with the schedule. So I wrote the post about his comments over the schedule, and then I had some people ask me why I brought that up when Huggins covered it on the conference call the day before.

Obviously, I didn’t know about that, and I hadn’t read about it anywhere.

Anyhow, add Tuesday’s postgame comments to the tally, and Huggins lowlighted the schedule three times in five days — and the Big 12 has its coaches’ teleconference this afternoon. Maybe I’ll ask Huggins about the schedule!

Huggins has a skill for manicuring a point, and the media has a habit of taking cues or giving time and space to that which arches the brow, but there’s a point here. WVU’s schedule isn’t the best, and the worst is yet to come.