Game day nostalgia

They're hardly the first to notice, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette does a fine job today on the ripple effects that, in retrospect, made Pittsburgh's last visit to West Virginia in 2007 one of the rare turning points that helped shape the current national landscape -- if the sad-sack Panthers don't hold the Mountaineers to a season-low nine points as 29-point underdogs in Morgantown in the final hours of the regular season, WVU goes on to the BCS Championship game instead of LSU, coach Rich Rodriguez probably doesn't jump to Michigan in the ensuing weeks, LSU's Les Miles might move on to Ann Arbor instead, Tiger assistant Bo Pelini takes Miles' seat in Baton Rouge, Nebraska hires former Husker quarterback Turner Gill instead of Pelini, we never hear Charles Barkley's insights on the plight of black coaches, etc.

Imagine a world where Jim Tressel averted his reputation for big game flops by winning his second national title over the Mountaineers in New Orleans, or where Rodriguez won his first title by beating OSU, thereby established his alma mater as a perennial power. It's hard to recall another single game at the spoke of a wheel spinning that many long-term contingencies.

None of them would have seemed as unlikely at the time, though, as Dave Wannstedt taking Pitt into tonight's return date in Mountaineer Stadium as a 9-1, top-10 outfit headed for a winner-take-all showdown against Cincinnati next week for an automatic BCS bid, especially when you consider that neither of the hyped freshmen who led the offense in that win, quarterback Pat Bostick and running back LeSean McCoy, has taken a snap for the Panthers this year. Wannstedt, veering toward the more intense sectors of the hot seat after three straight losing seasons, is 18-5 over the last two years and suddenly occupies one of the most secure seats in the Big East at the head of a rising, increasingly stable program; Rodriguez, meanwhile, is under more intense fire at Michigan than Wannstedt ever was at Pitt, and West Virginia fans still don't seem to have quite come around to his successor, Bill Stewart, who couldn't eke a Big East championship out of Pat White's senior season and has four losses to unranked teams in two years. We're still less than four years removed from White and Steve Slaton mercilessly gashing the Pitt D en route to outscoring the Panthers 90-45 in back-to-back blowouts in Wannstedt's first two season, but if anyone needs another tide-turning win tonight, this time it's the Mountaineers.