SOMETIMES THE BETTER TEAM WINS AND SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO BE HONEST AND ADMIT THEY DID NOT

“If we’d played them ten times, we’d win nine out of ten.” This is normally what you hear when someone is discussing the tenth game in that hypothetical series, i.e. the one that the 90% confidence-rated team just lost, and then made up a fake probability to feel better about themselves.

That’s bad, and is only surpassed by the bitter truth when the other team admits it. Sometimes a 10% team wins. Sometimes that 10% team wins when it’s the absolute worst case scenario for the 90% team. Sometimes it does that to a bitter rival, at home, in the last game of the season, when the 90% team was one seemingly winnable game from possibly advancing to a national title game.

Sometimes the 10% team does it in a 13-9 game where they only allow 12 first downs to the 90% team that scored 66 points the week before, and triggers a series of events that ends with the 90% team’s coach leaving for Michigan and the team losing their best chance at a national championship ever.

We’re sorry to bring this up again— even after ten years, West Virginia, we know it’s not over, and will never be.

We swear there’s a point, and the point is this: If we could, we would give Pat White a full replay where he doesn’t dislocate a thumb on his non-throwing hand in the first half, and where Pat McAfee doesn’t miss two field goals in the first half in what would end as a 13-9 game, and where we get to see the alternate universe where LSU or Ohio State gets to fight out a freewheeling brawl with the best offense Rich Rodriguez ever rolled out in Morgantown. (Instead of the 2000s worst running gag of Ohio State losing a title and/or big bowl game under Jim Tressel.)

SO, dear reader: This serves as an example of the kind of game you’d want rematched, because you sort of want to see what just one of the other nine times would look like. We know we want to see 2007 West Virginia/Pitt rematched, but there are others. Oh, so, so many other games we want replayed. Some of them don’t even involve Wes Byrum, or even Auburn, we swear.

The question, to be answered in the comments below is: Name that game for you, and be very, very specific as to why, and why you didn’t choose Ohio State vs. Miami in the 2002-3 BCS Title Game, because COME ON HOW IS CRAIG KRENZEL DOING ANYTHING ON A FOOTBALL FIELD AGAINST ALL THAT. HOW.