There is no question that the Backyard Brawl brings out the best and worst between the fans of WVU and Pitt. The best? The strong passion that both fan bases display before, during and after the game, has brought Backyard Brawl to the national scene. The worst? Countless acts of verbal and physical abuse displayed by fans of BOTH universities, despite the fact that Pitt imagines themselves as angels. Not to mention the message board fabrications, as well as obscenities hurled back and forth over facebook and twitter.
The players of both schools have had no problem over the years getting up for the game. Both rosters are filled with athletes from the same regions of the country and are often recruited by both schools. Many players often feel the pressure and importance of this game, before it even takes place, early into their fall semester of freshman year.
Dana Holgorsen and Todd Graham are no strangers to each other. They have met on the gridiron three times before and both started getting national recognition in the southwest region of our country. Dana Holgorsen coaching at Texas Tech, Houston and Oklahoma State. Todd Graham was the head coach at Tulsa.
One year while Holgorsen was the offense coordinator at Houston and Graham was the head coach at Tulsa, Coach Holgorsen accused Graham of cheating. “Yeah, they were cheating,” he said. “We’ve got some inside information on how they did it.”
“They’ve got a signal for it. We know they’ve got a signal for it. We see it on film that they’re actually doing the signal, and then all of a sudden, one of their guys just comes down with a bunch of cramps. He falls down and then the other 10 players kind of jog over to the sideline, and they use it as a timeout.”
The following year Holgorsen’s offense ran the score up at Oklahoma State while facing Tulsa.
Both coaches have down a good job of down playing their dislike for each other this year however. Holgorsen recently spoke about the bad blood between the two as, “completely irrelevant and highly blown out of proportion.” Graham later said, “I have nothing but respect for him as coach,” he said. “He’s one of the best offensive coaches in the country. I think people are probably making more of that than there is” in reference to Holgorsen.
Only 75 miles separates both campuses, up and down I-79. At the end of the day, we can all be thankful for how truly great this rivalry has become over a century of games. Friday marks the 104th Backyard Brawl.
WVU fans occupying Heinz Field earlier this year.
This entry was posted on November 24, 2011 at 11:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
