Mountaineers set to visit Bearcats at noon Saturday | News, Sports, Jobs - News and Sentinel

Nov 8, 2024

West Virginia head coach Neal Brown calls out at the start of a new practice period.(Photo by Kevin Kinder, BlueGoldNews.com)

MORGANTOWN — It comes up nearly every time West Virginia runs across Cincinnati on its football schedule, this idea that this should be a rivalry.

And so it was this week when Mountaineer coach Neal Brown, who has far more on his mind than just whether or not building a rivalry with Cincinnati is important, was asked the inevitable question.

His answer was only three simple sentences, but it cut through to the heart of the matter with the precision of a noted heart surgeon.

“You can’t manufacture it. You have to make it on the field,” he said “But I think it’s a game that should be played every single year.”

Amen to all of that.

What makes a rivalry?

History is the simple answer.

Not that geography doesn’t count, but you must build it first on the field through bitter competition, close games, memorable moments.

That just doesn’t exist here now.

Oh, there’s history that goes all the way back to the Roaring Twenties when in 1921 – 103 years ago – WVU hosted Cincinnati even before Old Mountaineer Field was built and won 50-0.

The one-sided aspect of that initial game has hung over the rivalry throughout. WVU owns a 17-3-1 advantage in head-to-head victories. This is Penn State in reverse, and while many consider Penn State a rivalry game, it is only so in the minds of one side, that being WVAU.

You have to not only win games but win respect and WVU has never really done that in the Penn State series.

And so it is here. There have been long gaps between games. They were in different leagues often. While only about 3 and a half hours of driving separated the two schools, it was as if they existed on different planets.

Now that didn’t make sense and, as time has passed, there is a certain magnetism that draws the two schools together.

In basketball, Gale Catlett played at West Virginia, coached at Cincinnati, then returned to WVU for his finest seasons. Bob Huggins followed the same path in his Hall of Fame season.

WVU has recruited Cincinnati hard over the years, the Queen City sending the likes of Deuce McBride to the basketball program and John Thornton and David Long Jr., among others, to the football program.

And this mingling among athletes will grow in the coming years, as the two are now competitors in the Big 12, eastern outposts in a national league.

If they work it out to play each other annually, as they must between Kansas and Kansas State, in the Big 12, a familiarity will grow and feelings will build between the two fan bases.

Even in this year’s revival, which will be played at noon on Saturday and shown on FS1, the Bearcats rely heavily on the pass rushing of Jared Bartlett, who compiled 14.5 sacks in the first four years of his collegiate career, all of them played for, not against, This season he has added more to his game and owns 5.5 sacks 8 TFLs and 42 total tackles.

In the portal era, expect more and more traffic of players moving both ways across Kentucky to get from Cincinnati to Morgantown and vice versa.

This is WVU’s first trip to Cincinnati since 2011 and playing at Nippert Stadium can only help recruiting efforts in the area, unless, of course, this turns out to be a sour effort from the Mountaineers, something that would be most unexpected.

The Mountaineers have won on 8 of their 9 prior trips to Cincinnati.

Certainly, a rivalry can develop between the two areas.

Professionally, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals consider themselves rivals as they play in the same NFL division and in the glory days of both franchises the Pirates and the Reds spent the 1970s despising each other, as you might guess as teams who would put on display the likes of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Dock Ellis in Pittsburgh and Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan in Cincinnati.

It’s important to establish this rivalry right now as Cincinnati looks for football respect in the Big 12 and WVU aims to regain its football respect with a strong close to its season for the second straight year.

The Bearcats went out and picked a great deal of talent out of the portal this past year, landing in addition to Bartlett a quarterback from Indiana, Brendan Sorsby, and Ohio State tight end Joe Royer as their second-year coach Scott Satterfield tries to establish their role in Big 12 football.

Perhaps nothing signifies the fact that the rivalry is ripe to blossom than WVU’s travel arrangements for the game.

This will be different. No flight. They have gathered a fleet of buses to drive to Cincinnati, with a stopover in Columbus, Ohio, home of Ohio State, for a practice to break up the trip.

“If you think of it this way, to fly we have to bus to Clarksburg, fly, then drive to the hotel,” Brown said, without putting it in so many words saying the trip will probably be of the same length with less hassle. “We did it a lot in Troy, right, wrong or indifferent, so you save some money and you break up the trip a little bit.

“We’ll go about two and a half hours, stop in the Columbus area, practice, eat lunch and then finish up the trip. We will fly back because it’s an early game.”