Coaches, players want the Brawl
Passion of rivalry evident Saturday
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Not long after Pitt and West Virginia tipped off Saturday at WVU Coliseum, a familiar, vulgar chant broke out from the Mountaineers’ student section to welcome its visitors.
If the matchup didn’t feel different from the Panthers’ others in the days, hours and minutes leading up to it, it wasted little time in establishing that, yes, something about this game seems more important.
For major-conference programs in college basketball, non-conference schedules are dull almost by design, a two-month period for a team to fine-tune its imperfections and pad its resume with wins against smaller, often overmatched opponents. Sprinkled in there, though, are longstanding rivalries, the kind that can help define a season even if it has no bearing on a team’s conference aspirations.
With Pitt in the ACC and West Virginia in the Big 12, torn apart by the forces of conference realignment, the future of a series dating to 1904 is fundamentally precarious with no sort of guarantees to play one another as there had been for nearly two decades when both schools were in the Big East. But following the Mountaineers’ 69-59 victory Saturday in the second game of a fouryear series, there remains hope for the Backyard Brawl’s continued existence.
“I think it’s good for both schools,” West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said. “Obviously you’re going to get a big crowd, although there were some empty seats. I think there were quite a few people who missed a heck of a game. But yeah, I mean, they sell their place out, we sell our place. What’s bad about it?”
A contract signed in September 2016 between Mountaineers athletic director Shane Lyons and then-Pitt AD Scott Barnes — helped in part by support from Huggins and then-Pitt coach Kevin Stallings — restarted a rivalry that had been dormant for nearly five years.
There are two games remaining on that deal, with a Dec. 7, 2019, meeting at the Petersen Events Center and a Dec. 12, 2020, game at WVU Coliseum. After that, its fate will be left up to the universities’ athletic administrators and, to an extent, their coaches. For his part, firstyear Pitt coach Jeff Capel isn’t opposed to the idea of the rivalry’s continuation. In his first experience with the Backyard Brawl, Capel saw the raw emotion the rivalry elicits and even embodied it himself at times.
The teams were whistled for double technical fouls on two separate occasions, first when Pitt’s Jared Wilson Frame and West Virginia’s Lamont West were verbally sparring with each other before a free throw moments after getting in each other’s faces and later when Kene Chukwuka of the Panthers and Andrew Gordon of the Mountaineers were whistled after fighting over possession of the ball.
After picking up four technical fouls in its first nine games, a total of 360 minutes, Pitt’s had two in the opening 7:25 Saturday. In the second half, with his team trailing by 14, Capel, apparently upset over a call, was also hit with a technical.
Part of that abundance of fouls could be attributed to officials who opted to blow whistles instead of talking out problems between players, but the multitude of whistles was also indicative of a rivalry reborn.
“I know it means a lot to me, growing up in West Virginia,” Mountaineers forward Logan Routt said. “I mean, this is the biggest game of the year, so it means a lot to everybody.”
On a Pitt team featuring five key players in their first year eligible with the program, that passion was seen routinely on Saturday, but not always felt.
“To be honest, it really didn’t feel like a rivalry,” Pitt freshman guard Xavier Johnson said. “I really don’t know. But I guess it’s a rivalry so I’ll treat it like a rivalry.”
The win Saturday was the Mountaineers’ second in the current phase of the rivalry, an unsurprising fact given they went to the Sweet 16 last season and entered this season as a top-15 team, while the Panthers were 8-24 last season and are in a rebuild.
Given that situation, particularly with the programs not jockeying for position in the conference standings, there’s some question of whether what the Backyard Brawl once had can be recaptured.
“Honestly, I think it’s going to take a while before West Virginia-Pitt becomes what it was,” Huggins said. “I think it’s still a rivalry because it’s close enough for the fans to get either place, but it’s not what it was.”