WVU could put a scare into Penn St.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Your local oddsmaker – and they’re all local these days, no further away from you than your smart phone – says that West Virginia is a three-touchdown underdog to Penn State when they open the season before 106,000 fans at 7 p.m., Saturday in State College.
To be exact, the point spread is 20.5 points in the game that matches up a Nittany Lions team ranked No. 7 in the preseason national polls and a Mountaineer team ranked No. 14 and last in the Big 12 preseason poll.
You might say WVU has Penn State right where it wants it.
See, upsets happen, especially when WVU is the underdog.
A case can be made that there’s something built in with the Mountaineers when they are unranked and go against Top 10 teams that makes them even more dangerous than if the cleat is on the other foot.
Does the 2007 Pitt game ring a bell?
Now we’re not saying that WVU is likely to beat a superior team in these instances, but if they don’t beat them, they often scare the pre-game meal out of them.
We look in a moment at why this is so but suffice it to say right now that the Mountaineers should be spelled with a capital U on their chest for ‘Underdog’, a superhero without a cape that that has proven over and over that it can rise up and play some of its best football when it is expected to be crushed.
First, let us look at the numbers since Don Nehlen arrived in West Virginia in 1980.
West Virginia will be playing its 50th Top Ten team since 1990 and true, it has pulled off only seven true upsets with one tie.
But the Mountaineers have also played within three points of its opponent eight times, which means that 16 of the previous 49 games – about a third of them – were either WVU wins or unexpected thrillers. Four of the wins against Top 10 teams came when WVU was unranked itself, as was the tie.
So, it can happen, but current WVU fans have trouble remembering the last time such an upset was pulled off, having to go back nine years to a 41-27 upset of No. 4 Baylor in Morgantown as quarterback Clint Trickett threw a pair of fourth-quarter touchdown passes to Mario Alford and Kevin White to break a 27-27 for the upset.
That came in the midst, by the way, of a true killer season. While there’s been a lot of whining about how tough this year’s schedule is, in 2014 WVU wound up playing against four – count ’em, No. 2 Alabama in the opener, No. 4 Oklahoma and No. 4 Baylor, along with No. 10 TCU- during the season.
Yes, they lost three of them but beat Baylor and lost by a point, 31-30, to TCU.
Oh, and just for good measure, they threw in a 26-20 loss to No. 12 Kansas State in a game in which they allowed just 1 net rushing yard. On the negative side of the ledger, K-State did throw for 400 yards.
But the point of all this is that the pregame rankings and the point spread aren’t assurances of impending disaster for WVU.
What makes for an upset?
“I really think it starts with belief,” WVU coach Neal Brown, who has yet to pull off a Top 10 upset at WVU but while at Troy pulled off a stunning 24-19 upset at Nebraska, knocked off No. 16 LSU, 24-21, in Baton Rouge and suffered a heartbreaking 30-24 loss at No. 1 Clemson.
“You got to have belief in not only yourself but the people around you and the plan you take into the contest,” Brown continued. “You have to have strong belief and it has to be organization wide.”
That’s the start, confidence and belief in yourself. But there’s more, according to Brown.
“Second thing is you have to eliminate errors,” Brown stressed. “You can’t do things that get you beat whether it’s turnovers, procedure penalties, missed assignments.”
These, of course, are things that have plagued WVU since Brown’s arrival, but the staff made a point to emphasize correcting this in the off-season.
In the end, though, it comes down to execution.
“You’ve got to make plays. There’s going to be some 50/50 balls. There’s going to be a return or maybe a play on third or fourth down and you’ve got to make your share.” Brown said. “You’re not going to make all of them. We’re not going to go and make all the plays versus Penn State, they’re too talented.
“But we’ve got to make our fair share. And then your goal is you want to be there. You want to continue to hang in, hang in, hang in, and put yourself in position to win in the fourth quarter.”
There’s usually a lot of reasons why you would be a three-touchdown underdog. Rankings is one, being on the road, another, having an unproven team a third … all of it defining WVU for this game.
“I think anytime you’re a double-digit underdog and you go into enemy territory against a highly ranked opponent, there’s got to be some things that go your way, but you also got to have a good football team,” Brown said.
That are real unknowns here, from the quarterback play to the pass defense to the pass rush to the placekicking.
So much unknown, but Brown believes.
“My belief is we’ve got a good football team,” he said. “We just got to go prove it. It’s hard to stand on a soapbox until you go out and play a game. But I like our group and we’ll be hungry.”
It comes down eventually to the players. The one thing a player needs to take with him is a view that being the underdog is fun, a challenge rather than a conclusion.
“I like being an underdog,” WVU All-American center Zach Frazier said. “I like when people doubt us. Someone says you can’t do something, that’s when I want to do it.”