Thursday, December 5, 2013

WVU Consumed By Anger

As the pig-in-a-poke known as Big 12 membership continues to disappoint on several fronts, WVU fans are mad.

Some are strictly mad about losing regardless of conference or opponent of the day. These are also known as New Jerseyans, whose sports loyalties are usually tied solely to W-L records. Postgame analysis limited to attribution error-flavored 'We won - the opponent sucks' or 'They lost - they suck (in reference to 'their' team). They know nothing of history, tradition, or loyalty.  They arrive in Morgantown a) with inferior grades and test scores, b) a lack of funds (or an unwillingness to spend them) that would enable them to attend the plethora of schools in NJ and along the East Coast, and c) a desire to continue their fellow New Jerseyans' tradition of treating Morgantown as their personal dumpster, ashtray and bong.  Four or five years of beer pong, I'm Shmacked and blazing up and off they go.

Football, when they can be bothered to get out of bed to attend a game, is an afterthought - a long way down from its longstanding status as most visible demonstration of school spirit. But many of these students couldn't find Morgantown on a map prior to their junior or senior years in high school.  Buying tickets is too easy by half - click a mouse and that's it.  Camping out for tickets is so 20th Century, even though it's the kind of shared experience that creates a bond as well as an incentive to use a hard-won ticket.

A losing team is not worthy of their nicotine-stained, beer-soaked, selfie-taking presence.  They're mad, even if they're not sure why. They've posted all manner of duckface snaps on Facebook and Twitter in their WVU gear but their enthusiasm isn't enough to make the arduous trek to the stadium


WV true believers - at the university and throughout the state - are also mad.  Oliver Luck, the Teflon AD, is still regarded as a demigod because, well, he's intelligent.  The arrival - at an institution of higher learning chock full of advanced degrees - of one more intelligent person shouldn't be headline news but West Virginians, for all their positive qualities, are far too susceptible to the Cult of Celebrity.  The Cult has propelled a cliche-spouting, remarkably unremarkable Natalie Tennant into statewide office simply because she, er, put on some fringed buckskins and jumped around two decades ago.  So desperate are we for someone famous to disprove the stereotypes about West Virginia that any name appearing in large font becomes our Avenging Angel.  To extend the biblical metaphor, Oliver Luck is both an Avenging Angel (despite his origins in, er, Cleveland, Ohio) and a Prodigal Son.  He is, therefore, doubly insulated from criticism.

But when the football team loses, people get mad.  And if they can't direct their anger at the man who engineered the move to the Big 12 (actually, he's praised daily for his horse-trading), they will focus on the coach.

The coach, Dana Hologorsen, is an easy target.  Sold as a combination of James Dean, Jimmy Buffett and Sid Gillman, he has proven to be quite a bit more mundane than any screen, music or football icon. He's had injury problems, recruiting problems, in-game execution problems, assistant coaching problems and self-made problems when it comes to interaction with the fans.  All WVU fans want is to love their coach and get a fraction of it in return. When Rich Rodriguez returned home we had 7 years of mutual WV ecstasy. Spot The Ball and all that.

But when Rod left, we really got mad and we've been mad ever since. Even a nice guy like Bill Stewart got mad the night of the Fiesta Bowl and pep-talked his team to a staggering win.  But the fans were still mad at losing to Pitt and a shot at the national championship and eventually got mad at Stewart, along with newly-installed Oliver Luck who was mad, too, and ordered a coaching change of historically sloppy proportions. It made Obamacare look like D-Day.  Stewart, despite his gentle nature, got mad that his dream job was taken from him in agonizing slow motion and mad that he had to put a brave face on it all via the coercion of contract terms.  He then got mad when the new coach had a public (despite a desperate cover-up) incident of belligerent drunkenness and received a mere slap on the wrist - mad enough to ask a journalist or two to go beyond the official press releases and expose Holgorsen's true colors.  Eventually, Stewart was completely out.  And still mad. Mad enough that the poor man suffered a fatal stress-related heart attack, leaving his beloved only son without a father.

And now Holgorsen is mad that results have gone against him, that his team can't or won't demonstrate a working knowledge of his system or football in general, mad that the fans are mad, mad at the media. 

The media are mad at the coach for his haughty attitude.  They are mad at Oliver Luck's Berlin Wall of non-communication except for the rare press release. Some of them are mad that their monopoly - contractual or otherwise - on access to athletic coaches and broadcasting of games has been broken up.

Fans who like the Big 12 are mad at fans who liked the Big East. Fans who like(d) neither are mad WVU isn't in the ACC or SEC and mad that WVU is viewed as academically inferior and therefore unworthy of membership (despite the existence of member schools like Mississippi State, which is literally a cow college and has the deafening bells to prove it).

And so there is Anger - lots of it and with a capital A.  But with no bowl game and no football activity at all until spring, all that Anger has been bottled under extreme pressure and capped.  The Anger is now bouncing around, its particles colliding at high speed.  The Anger may fade over the bleak winter months.  It may be stilled partially by a resurgent basketball program, but it will still there in amounts large or small come August 2014.  Will the colliding particles produce useful energy or merely an uncontrolled reaction i.e. an explosion or a meltdown?