We Need the Magic Back for Night Games
· Yahoo Sports
A night game in Morgantown. Those words used to strike fear into the hearts of college football teams across the country. And for good reason. Mountaineer fans have always been a rowdy bunch, regardless of what time a visiting team stepped onto Mountaineer Field. But give us a few extra hours of pregame festivities in the Blue Lot, let the sun start to disappear behind the hills, and that rowdy crowd would turn downright rabid.
But it wasn’t just the people in the stands that made those nights special. The WVU team that took the field was even scarier. Put those two forces together and you had an atmosphere that became known as one of the toughest places in the country to play. It wasn’t a reputation that was simply handed to us. It was earned. During Rich Rodriguez’s first stint as WVU’s head coach, the Mountaineers went 11-1 in night games at Milan Puskar Stadium over a seven-year stretch. The average score in those games? 40-18.
Visit moryak.biz for more information.
God, we were spoiled.
There was a magic to being in those stands with the lights shining down and the sun setting behind the West Virginia hills. You knew you were going to see something special. And part of that magic came from the feeling that you weren’t just watching those games. You were participating in them. You and 60,000-plus other Mountaineers were going to scream so loud on third down that a couple of false starts and delay-of-game penalties from the visiting team felt inevitable. The crowd wasn’t just reacting to what happened on the field. The crowd was influencing what happened on the field. That was a night game in Morgantown.
Somewhere along the way, we lost that magic. I don’t think there was one single moment when it disappeared. It was more of a slow trickle brought on by years of mediocrity. A death by a thousand cuts. And we didn’t give it up easily. We kept showing up. We kept buying the tickets. We kept screaming. But what was once an almost automatic win for the Mountaineers slowly became a long shot.
Since 2011, WVU is just 6-13 in home night games against Power Conference opponents. Think about that. Nineteen night games. Six wins. That’s how you turn one of the toughest places in college football into just another road game. That’s how you take a rabid fan base and slowly turn it into a lap dog.
So how do we get it back? How do we make night games in Morgantown feel like Almost Heaven for Mountaineers and absolute hell for everyone else? The easy answer is that WVU needs to start winning more. And, yeah, that would be a pretty good start. String together a couple of 10-win seasons and I have no doubt you’ll see those night games start selling out a lot faster.
But we don’t have to wait two or three years to start bringing it back. We can start Saturday.
The Mountaineers just played their guts out and knocked off a good Virginia team in Charlotte. Now they return home with a chance to start the season 4-0 for the first time since 2018. And standing across from them will be Oklahoma State.
WVU is currently a 1.5-point favorite, according to FanDuel, in what should be a close game. In other words, this is exactly the kind of game where the crowd can matter.
The team has done its part. Now it’s time for us to do ours.
Let’s bring the magic back to night games in Morgantown. Show up. Wear gold. Get loud.