I’m hoping for a successful WVU football season, just like all Mountaineer fans.
I hate the term “cautiously optimistic,” but that applies here, and I suspect many in Mountaineer Nation feel the same.
Optimism, even the cautious kind, is a characteristic of the preseason. No games have been lost. No star players (usually) are injured. During interviews, coaches and players talk confidently about improvement, camaraderie and expectations.
All the talk creates a momentum that feeds a belief in the possible.
And it is good to have hope, which is why it was appropriate, perhaps even necessary, for head coach Neal Brown to address head-on the pre-season media ranking of the Mountaineers as 14th in the 14-team league.
“I am upset about the media poll,” he said at the Big 12 media days last month. “I definitely do not agree with that. The positive thing is that the media, as far as picking the Big 12, has not been very successful in recent years, so I think that bodes well for us.”
Normally I cringe when coaches take shots at the media, but I’ll make an exception this time. I like the fact that Brown took umbrage with the poll, rather than giving the usual coach speak by saying he doesn’t pay attention to such things.
“Your best opportunity is to just confront it,” he said. “We had a team meeting … where we talked about it in detail and probably in more colorful terms than I did here.”
Coaches love to use the “nobody respects us” line as motivation, even when they’re picked to win the national championship. In the case of this season’s Mountaineers, the disrespect line absolutely applies.
I hope for a successful season for a lot of reasons, both professional and personal.
On the professional side, our network provides nine hours of game day coverage and, candidly, it is much more interesting when the team is winning. The pregame and late-night postgame after a loss when the record falls to 3 and 5 is not fun.
Personally, as an alum, WVU could use something positive. The Huggins debacle was the biggest story of the summer and now the university is going through a difficult and controversial restructuring that may lead to the elimination of 32 programs and the layoff of 169 faculty members.
A winning football season will not make those other issues go away, but it will be a pleasant distraction. A disappointing season and the possibility of a second coach firing in the same year will add to the perceptions that the state’s flagship university is teetering.
And that brings me to the WVU-Penn State game.
What a terrible way to start the season. It is unfair to Coach Brown and the Mountaineers to play two Power Five teams in the non-conference schedule. Yes, I know how much fans are looking forward to the game against the old rival, but I’m not. I have been around too long and witnessed too many embarrassments at the hands of the Nittany Lions to rationally believe this game will be different than so many other trips to Happy Valley.
In fact, I’m not even going to count this game as part of the season. Let’s call it a high-profile exhibition that hopefully will have little bearing on the rest of the year. Bring on the Duquesne Dukes!
It has been said that hope and despair are the constant companions of fandom. The despair will come, because there are always disappointing losses. But right now, before anything good or bad has happened, you’ve got to have hope.
