After 10 seasons without a Brawl, Pitt, WVU find natural rival right down the road

The night the Backyard Brawl faded away, Pitt quarterback Tino Sunseri was sacked 10 times in a 21-20 West Virginia victory in Morgantown.

Panthers coach Todd Graham said the loss “devastated” him.

That was Nov. 25, 2011.

The schools separated by 75 miles of Interstate 79 haven’t met since. The next season (2012), there was no Brawl between Pitt and West Virginia for the first time in 70 years.

Finally — and long overdue after 10 seasons without one — the game has been brought back to life, thanks to both schools’ administrations seeing what was obvious: The Backyard Brawl was and can be again one of college football’s great rivalries.

The first of eight games over the next 11 seasons will be contested in front of perhaps a record Acrisure Stadium crowd of 70,000 people at 7 p.m. Thursday. ESPN’s “GameDay” crew will handle the pregame analysis, with Matt Barrie doing play-by-play and former Pitt defensive back Louis Riddick the color commentary.

Dating to 1895, Pitt holds the all-time advantage (61-40-3), but from 1983 through 2011, the Mountaineers won 18 of 29, with two ties. Included were two WVU victories by shutout (21-0 and 34-0, the last game of 1995 and the first of 1996). Pitt’s losses in that time were far more devastating than Graham’s (44-6, 52-14 and 52-21, also in the 1990s).

WVU will take a three-game winning streak into the game Thursday, including a 35-10 rout in 2010 that helped get Dave Wannstedt fired. Wannstedt, appropriately, will be Pitt’s honorary captain for the game. After all, he orchestrated the greatest Pitt upset victory of all time: 13-9 in 2007, knocking the Mountaineers out of the national title game.

Johnny Majors won a national championship at Pitt in 1976 but was only 3-5 against West Virginia. Yet, he always enjoyed the Backyard Brawl.

“It was the big-city guys against the hillbillies,” Majors, who called himself a hillbilly from Tennessee, told the Tribune-Review in 2012. “(The boosters) pretty much just hated each other.”

For the Pitt faithful, the game is not unlike the dormant rivalry with Penn State. Yet, it’s different in one key aspect.

John Antonik, WVU historian and director of its website, WVUSports.com, articulated the difference in an article he wrote before the 2010 game.

“One longtime Panther supporter likes to remind me that Penn State has always been the school they want to beat most,” Antonik wrote. “West Virginia? That’s the school the Pitt people say they don’t want to lose to.”

Said Majors in the same Antonik piece: “When I came to Pittsburgh, it didn’t take me long to realize that Penn State was awfully big historically. But my friends who loved Pitt told me, ‘Oh, man, you’re going to hate West Virginia.’ So I learned quickly the importance of beating West Virginia. It sounded very exciting to me, and it turned out to be a very exciting rivalry.”

Related:

• Backyard Brawl: WVU players 'recognize their legacy could be authored on Thursday night'
• Backyard Brawl breakdown: Pitt's top 5 wins in the series vs. WVU
• Backyard Brawl breakdown: West Virginia's top 5 wins in series vs. Pitt

In years past, when the Pitt team bus arrived in Morgantown, it was assaulted with batteries and rocked by spirited West Virginia fans.

Pitt junior cornerback M.J. Devonshire, an Aliquippa graduate whose first scholarship offer came from West Virginia, is trying to teach his out-of-town teammates the significance of the rivalry.

“I told (freshman cornerback Ryland Gandy) Sept. 1 will be the craziest game you ever played in,” Devonshire said. “I know the fans are going to go back and forth. There are probably going to be some fights somewhere in the crowd or outside. Hopefully, it doesn’t involve my parents.”

Pitt junior running back Izzy Abanikanda, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., was barely 9 years old in 2011. He is just now learning about the rivalry.

“Coaches are playing (WVU’s) theme song (“Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver) to make us mad, even the workouts,” he said. “New to me, so I just can’t wait to see.”

Bob Junko, longtime Pitt assistant coach and administrator (now retired), said there was no hatred from him toward the Mountaineers.

“No, I respected them,” he said. “When you respect somebody, you want to beat them so bad. It’s a statement game.

“If the kids can’t get up for that game, there’s no game they can get up for.”

But if the hate is under control, why not?

“There’s a lot of hatred on their end,” Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said. “But there’s got to be a lot of hate on our end. That’s what it comes down to in rivalry games. We’ll get our guys coached up.”

As it should be, the sites will alternate between Acrisure Stadium and Morgantown, W.Va., for the next seven games. But from 1900-62, there were only 14 games played in Morgantown. Pitt home games were played at Pitt Stadium or Forbes Field.

“West Virginia needed to play Pitt because that was West Virginia’s gateway to national attention,” Antonik said. “Morgantown at the time was so inaccessible. A lot of the national writers wouldn’t come to Morgantown to cover the team.”

It was even a struggle to get Sports Illustrated to come to Morgantown to do a story on WVU basketball star Jerry West, Antonik said.

“When West Virginia had an NCAA basketball regional in 1972, the sportswriters from Philadelphia complained they flew into Pittsburgh and swung down by vines to Morgantown. That’s kind of what it was like.”

Perhaps the rivalry will gain new legs with Pitt ranked No. 17 in the Associated Press preseason poll and coming off an ACC championship.

“I go to Pittsburgh a lot,” Antonik said. “I’ve seen more people wearing Pitt T-shirts and hats than I have in years past. There is more interest in the Pitt Panthers up there than I can recall.”

The game is such a natural event that it’s hard to believe there was a 10-season hiatus.

“Financially, it just makes sense for both teams to play it,” Antonik said. “Easy drive. You don’t have to charter an airplane to play.”

In years past, the game would feature friend vs. friend, high school teammate vs. high school teammate, even brother vs. brother.

“For many, many years, a lot of these guys co-mingled (in the offseason),” Antonik said. “People who interacted in the summertime. Not a lot of rivalries like that.”

In Pitt’s 13-10 victory in Morgantown in 1963, Paul Martha ran 46 yards for the decisive touchdown in the final minute. His younger brother, Rich, was a West Virginia defensive back. Their parents reportedly sat on opposite sides of old Mountaineer Field to support both sons.

Pitt has been hunting a natural rival since it joined the ACC in 2013. All along, it was just 75 miles down the road.

“When I got here, it was all the Penn State rivalry,” Pitt quarterback Nick Patti said. “Then we finished that, and I said, ‘What’s up with this West Virginia rivalry?’ And they said, ‘It’s worse.’ ”