Post by cviller on Aug 31, 2007 15:52:41 GMT -5
By Jack Bogaczyk
Daily Mail Sports Editor
MORGANTOWN -- I like Bill Cubit's attitude. He understands that to be somebody, you have to beat somebody.
"We're not a team that's going to shy away," Cubit, the Western Michigan football coach, told his local newspaper in Kalamazoo the other day. "(West Virginia) is a great team. They really are.
"They're one of the top three teams in the country ... We're not like some teams and go play a bunch of nobodies and get the record up there. I'd rather go play those types of teams."
Understand this as Cubit's Broncos visit Mountaineer Field on a season opener Saturday:
There's no way WVU would be ranked No. 3 in the Associated Press preseason poll had the Mountaineers not beaten Georgia for a first Bowl Championship Series victory after the 2005 season. That's when the profile of Coach Rich Rodriguez's program changed.
Going 11-2 last season, finishing second in an improved Big East Conference, winning a Gator Bowl over unranked Georgia Tech, and having Steve Slaton and Patrick White returning wouldn't have gotten WVU into a preseason neighborhood.
Remember, WVU started at No. 5 a year ago -- because it was coming off 11-1 and had stunned the Southeastern Conference champion Bulldogs in their Atlanta backyard in a Katrina-transplanted Sugar Bowl.
(As an aside, do you think Alabama would have come within a "Beat Auburn" bumper sticker's width of hiring Rodriguez away from home last December had he not gotten the SEC's attention in its bowl game 11 months earlier?)
Cubit's team may be about a four-touchdown underdog, but it's not one of your father's Mid-American Conference middling programs that visited here often during the Coach Don Nehlen era.
Western may be 0-18 all-time against ranked teams, but when the Broncos won before nearly 60,000 at Virginia last September, people paid attention. Rodriguez understands how that works.
A lot of times, you have to beat a Top 25 team before you can be a Top 25 team. You have to be a Top 25 team before you can be a Top 25 program.
That's what Rodriguez wanted to eventually achieve back in 2002, when the Mountaineers went a surprising 9-4 -- a five-game reversal from his 3-8 debut -- and finished 25th in the final poll.
He's been on a track as fast as his no-huddle spread offense since.
When did it turn for the Mountaineers?
Well, following a 41-7 Gator bowl pasting by recent nemesis Maryland to end 2003, it appeared WVU had things figured out the next September when it upended the No. 21 Terrapins in overtime at Mountaineer Field.
However, the 2004 season-ending banana-peelers by Boston College, Pitt and Florida State followed. Then came October 2005, and the unranked Mountaineers rallied from 17 points down in the fourth quarter to win at home over No. 19 Louisville in three OTs.
The rest is almost heavenly history for WVU.
In Rodriguez's first nine games against ranked teams, WVU was 2-7. It's 6-5 against poll-sitters since. That's happened because as WVU has gotten better talent, the Mountaineers also have learned how not to beat themselves.
Mostly in 114 football autumns, West Virginia has come from nowhere when it has had success. Nine times, the Mountaineers finished in the polls after not appearing in the preseason top 25.
On five occasions, WVU has started in the rankings, but has finished on the outside. Only five times has WVU opened and finished in the poll in a season (1953, '55, '88, '89, 2006). In 2007, it will be trying to make it five top 10 poll finishes in the last two decades.
WVU's schedule might be the most difficult in a softened non-conference year in the Big East. The Mountaineers go to USF (better than people think) and Rutgers (six home games and a trip to sickly Syracuse before WVU visits). Louisville comes to Rodriguezville.
As it opens against the Broncos, WVU obviously has the horses. There should be only one reason the Mountaineers shouldn't finish at least as high as they start in the polls.
With those great expectations on their shoulder pads like never before, the toughest team the Mountaineers will face is in the mirror.