MORGANTOWN, West Virginia.
By Brad Smith
The new polls are out, and they delivered the verdict Mountaineer Nation was dreading. Oklahoma State, the team that walked into Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday night and hung 41 points on West Virginia, debuted at No. 19 in the AP Top 25. Five Big 12 teams are ranked: BYU at No. 10, Texas Tech at No. 12, Utah at No. 13, Oklahoma State at No. 19, Houston at No. 20.
And West Virginia? Zero votes. Not one single AP voter looked at a 3-1 Mountaineer team with a 38-27 win over No. 25 Virginia and thought it belonged anywhere near a ballot. The 3-0 start, the Gold Rush, the Walter Camp National Player of the Week performance, all of it meant nothing to the Associated Press. Zero.
But then there is the other poll, and buried at the very bottom of it is the strangest little detail of the entire college football weekend. In the coaches poll, after UTSA’s two votes and Western Michigan’s two votes, at the very end of the others receiving votes list, there it sits: West Virginia, one vote. One. A single solitary vote.
Somewhere in America this morning, one college football head coach filled out a ballot, looked at a 3-1 West Virginia team coming off a 17 point home loss, and wrote the Mountaineers in at No. 25. One coach believes. Every other coach in the country looked at the same team and said no.
And here is the part that will eat at you all week: we are never going to know who it was. The coaches poll keeps every individual ballot secret. The list of the 65 voting coaches is public, but the votes themselves disappear into a black box. One of the most powerful men in the sport went on the record for West Virginia, and the system is designed so you will never learn his name.
So let us do what fans do and speculate, because the speculation is the fun part. The voter list is public, and one of the 65 names on it is Rich Rodriguez. Yes, that Rich Rodriguez. He votes in the coaches poll this year. And here is the delicious part: coaches are allowed to vote for their own teams. There is no rule against it. So the simplest theory, the one your group chat already landed on, is that Rich Rod looked at his 3-1 football team, picked up his pen, and voted for the Mountaineers himself.
Would you blame him? Somebody had to. Sixty four of his peers looked at a team that beat a ranked opponent by double digits and could not find room at the bottom of a ballot. If the head coach will not stand up for his own 3-1 team, who will?
Of course, it might not be him. Maybe it is a coach who watched the Virginia film and saw what the AP voters refused to see. Maybe it is someone who remembers what Rodriguez teams look like in October and decided to get in early. Maybe it is a Big 12 coach who just watched Oklahoma State need 609 yards of offense to beat this team at home and walked away impressed by the loser. We will never know, and that is exactly why this one vote matters more than it should.
Because here is the truth buried inside the joke: one vote is both nothing and everything. It is nothing because one vote does not get you ranked, does not get you respect, does not change a single thing about Saturday at noon in Ames. But it is everything because it proves the season is not a punchline yet. Somewhere, one coach with access to the same film the AP voters have decided this team is still worth writing down. When the entire country is telling you that you are done, one believer is a place to start.
And let us pour one out for the real losers of poll day, because it is not West Virginia. Pitt went 4-0. Pitt hung 59 points on Bucknell. Pitt watched its quarterback make ACC history. And the AP voters gave the Panthers 52 votes and left them home too. All weekend Mountaineer fans braced for a Pitt ranking, and the voters looked at that cupcake schedule and said the same thing WVU fans have been saying for a month. Sometimes the pollsters get one right.
The road is clear now, and it is brutal. Five ranked Big 12 teams. A trip to Iowa State on Saturday at noon on TNT against a 2-2 team that just got embarrassed 31-17 at home by Utah and is starving for someone to take it out on. Nobody is voting for West Virginia this week. Nobody outside of one anonymous coach believes.
Good. Let them keep not believing. The Mountaineers have been at their best this season when everyone counted them out, and there is a full October of football left to make 65 coaches regret their ballots.
All it takes is one believer to start. West Virginia already has one. Time to earn the other 64.
