West Virginia Football: A Sad Ending for the Mountaineer Seniors

West Virginia fans, be forewarned. What I’m about to tell you is rather heartbreaking.

The Noel Devine era is over.

Yes, tears will surely be shed once the realization sets in that one of the most exciting football players ever to step foot in Morgantown will never put on a blue and gold uniform again.

What makes losing a running back the caliber of Devine and the rest of his departing senior teammates especially difficult is the less than lackluster way that they departed.

The Mountaineers were thoroughly outplayed in every phase of the game in tonight’s 23-7 loss at the hands of North Carolina State in the Champs Sports Bowl down in Orlando.

Miscues, turnovers and an overall lack of cohesion on offense doomed this West Virginia team and robbed us of the chance to see this group fly around the field and have fun one last time.

This turned out to be one of those games where the flow and the groove just never materialized. We saw it in the losses to Syracuse and UCONN, and we witnessed it once again tonight.

You can’t blame lack of effort or lack of preparation; all you can simply say is that it just didn’t happen tonight, for whatever reason.

There will be those that say the distractions of Dana Holgorsen’s impending arrival had something to do with the team’s shoddy performance, but whether that had something to do with it or not, the fact is West Virginia just didn’t get it done when it counted.

And now, the 2010 season is in the books. West Virginia will finish at a less than satisfying 9-4, and the fans and the team will be left wondering once again what could have been.

For the seniors, they’ll have their whole lives to ponder it.

Devine, Jock Sanders, Chris Neild, Scooter Berry, Brandon Hogan, J.T. Thomas—these were all names that the Mountaineer faithful came to know and appreciate over the last few years, and now they are all simply reduced to shadows lurking in the wings of Mountaineer Field, never to play a down at West Virginia again.

This is a senior group that absorbed the enormity of a BCS bowl game victory in the face of adversity early on in their careers, yet failed to recapture the glory in the following three seasons.

There will be those such as Devine and Hogan who will find themselves in NFL training camps next year, while the majority of the seniors like Eric Jobe, Anthony Leonard and others will now became just a few more names in the school’s history books.

As we say a heartfelt goodbye to this great group of seniors, we must now look to the future of West Virginia football.

Thankfully, it’s a future that won’t include Jeff Mullen.

Not to sound cruel, but watching this offense, which possessed so much firepower over the last few years under the guidance of Mullen, was at times frustrating and at times painstaking.

Nothing epitomized the Mullen offensive era better than tonight’s second half call of a rocket screen to Tavon Austin on 3rd-and-6 which ended up losing four yards.

Sure, it was a play Rich Rodriguez probably overused far too often during his tenure, but the difference is, Rodriguez knew how to use it in the right context.

It was undoubtedly time for a change, and I’ll admit I feel Oliver Luck made the exact right call bringing in offensive mastermind Dana Holgorsen. Sure, you have to feel for Bill Stewart, who is being pushed out of the job his life revolves around, but no one ever said the business of college football was a forgiving one.

If he handles things right and gets the proper support, Holgorsen has a chance to bring this West Virgina program to the level Chip Kelly has the Oregon Ducks at right now.

It won’t happen overnight, and next year we might have to expect a few bumps in the road instead of a seamless transition, but I’m confident this is the right move for the future of this team.

As for 2011, it’s all on the offense’s shoulders. The defense will lose some key players but they will be stout even though they won’t be one of the top 10 units in college football like they were this year.

The most important word for Holgrosen next season could be relationship.

What will Holgorsen’s relationship be with Bill Stewart, what will his relationship be with Geno Smith, and what will his relationship be with a West Virginia fanbase that just got done turning their back on the team’s previous offensive coordinator?

We’ll have a solid eight months to debate what West Virginia will be next season and how things will end up working out, but tonight let’s have a toast for the seniors.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the end of Noel Devine’s career and wonder where the heck those last four years went. It still seems like yesterday when we were sitting in the bleachers, watching on that hot September day as Noel scored his first career touchdown against Western Michigan and gave us all a reason to cheer and imagine what the future had in store.

It’s sad that we have to let No. 7 go, but the great thing about college football is that once you make a commitment to the family, the family makes a commitment to you.

Noel, just like all senior his counterparts, are forever members of the West Virginia family.

While another player will eventually pull a No. 7 West Virginia jersey over his shoulder pads at some point in the future, he won’t be able to erase the memories we all have of what Noel Devine accomplished in that jersey.

The great runs, the dazzling highlights, the big bling smile—we’ll certainly miss it.

Good luck, seniors. Wherever life takes you, there’s no doubt that you’ll never forget the times you had in Morgantown, and we’ll most definitely never forget the smiles you put on our faces over the last four years.

Thank you—it was a fun run.