Morgantown, West Virginia – Former West Virginia fullback Owen Schmitt, who played with the Mountaineers from 2005-2007, has been approved by the Greenbrier County Board of Education to join Greenbrier West High School as an assistant coach.
Following his final game with West Virginia – a 48-28 ass-kicking of Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, Schmitt said the following: “I was watching ESPN today and they showed the map about our game tonight in a poll and all of the United States was covered in red. The only state – the greatest state in the nation – was covered in blue and that was West Virginia and that’s why we won this game. We overcame adversity, we came together as a team and that’s why we won.”
When the sideline reporter reminded Schmitt that this would be the final game that he would play in a Mountaineer uniform, he started to cry and said, “You have no idea. I love this state. I love that I got a chance to play here. This is awesome and this is the way that I pictured it. I promised my teammates that I wasn’t going to go out without this trophy and we did it.”
That moment, watching Owen Schmitt, a player who gave his heart and soul to the West Virginia football program during his time in Morgantown, was chilling then and still is to this day.
He had a lot of great moments as a Mountaineer – bashing his helmet into his forehead before and during games, leaving his head bloody, to get himself fired up for games, his 57 yard touchdown during the aforementioned Fiesta Bowl, when the announcer compared him to a “runaway beer truck” – but Owen Schmitt truly became a West Virginia legend in his post game, on the field speech following his last game as a Mountaineer.
