Sporting events, for all their much talked about unpredictability, tend to have a sameness about them.
Despite the “any given Sunday” refrain, the better team usually wins by doing what it normally does. Oddsmakers have a well-honed knack for not only anticipating the winner, but also predicting the margin.
It’s freaky how often they are right.
Then, occasionally, something happens; a game turns in such a way that, not only could no one have predicted it, no one in their right mind would have dared to imagine it.
If anyone, and I mean even your crazy old uncle, had the audacity to suggest at a holiday gathering that West Virginia would score ten touchdowns and beat a favored Clemson team by 37 points, you would have steered them away from the eggnog.
What happened at the 2012 Orange Bowl was so uniquely rare that Mountaineer Nation collectively dropped its jaw. All most could say on the busy social media was, “Do you believe this?”
I’ve often said that to be a Mountaineer fan is to know suffering, but West Virginia’s success of late in money games has made fandom like a stay at the luxurious Fountainebleau, WVU’s team hotel in Miami, where the biggest challenge is deciding at which pool to lounge.
The Mountaineers have made their BCS appearances their own personal venues of planetary alignment, with victories over Georgia, Oklahoma and now Clemson. In each case, WVU was the underdog. At what point are friend and foe alike going to notice that the Mountaineers of this era like the big stage?
Wednesday night’s game started like the predicted back-and-forth shootout, until Darwin Cook alertly grabbed a loose ball out of a scrum of players and raced 99 yards the other way to give the Mountaineers a 28-17 lead.
The 14 point swing, and the way it happened, stunned the opponent. Clemson was never quite the same after that. After West Virginia’s 35-point outburst in the second quarter, Clemson headed to the locker room more like petting zoo cubs, than feared Tigers.
Game over.
Whatever spark Coach Dabo Swinney hoped for was quickly snuffed out as West Virginia took the opening kick-off of the second half and drove the field for another touchdown.
Clemson and their likable coach were reduced after the game to falling back on their ACC championship and the honor of making it to the Orange Bowl. The problem is that, for the Clemson faithful, some losses are so unsettling that they cause you to wonder if the prior successes were a fluke more than a trend.
For West Virginia, the victory falls into the category of historic in the annals of WVU sports, especially given the peculiar and awkward coaching circumstances surrounding head coach Dana Holgorsen. Had the season gone another way, it would have been easy to blame the drama. But it didn’t, and so Holgorsen, his staff and the Mountaineers deserve all the credit.
Wednesday night, they didn’t just deliver, they performed at what appeared to be the highest possible level and produced a most enjoyable–albeit unlikely–result that is for the ages.