You can make the case, and I do and I have repeatedly, that this game, played fifteen years ago (on December 1) between Pitt and West Virginia was the most shocking, and the most impactful, upset in the history of college tackle football.
WVU was playing at home against their most bitter rival in exactly the 100th game between the two schools. The "Mountaineers" were 10-1, ranked second in the country and a 28.5 point favorite. They would have played for the national championship had they won. But they did not. Pitt was 4-7, and going nowhere in coach Dave Wannstedt's third season, yet won the game 13-9.
The immediate effect of this game was devastating to West Virginia, it cost them a sure game for the national championship. In the short and long term for the "Mountaineers" the game was very similar to the Confederacy's defeat at Gettysburg. Not recognized as such at first both the battle and this game marked the "high water mark" for the losers. West Virginia never came close to equaling its final sixth-best ranking in subsequent seasons, and never so much as sniffed a national championship again.
For Pitt the immediate impact was negligible, four wins versus three. In the short term the"Panthers"immediately made gigantic strides, nine wins in 2008, ten wins in 2009 and a final ranking of 15th. WVU was never to out-rank Pitt in the final AP poll again. The schools parted ways in 2012, West Virginia relocating to the Big XII conference, Pitt to the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2013. The schools did not play from 2011 until this year when a four-game series commenced.
The outcome of the game was met with stunned silence from Mountaineer fans while a large number of Pittsburgh fans in attendance were cheering in similar shock.At Pitt's campus in Pittsburgh, large numbers of students began forming in different locations of the Oakland neighborhood.In addition to the crowds a sofa chair was burned in front of the university's Cathedral of Learning, mocking the WVU tradition of burning couches after big wins.When interviewed in 2017 for an SB Nation 10-year retrospective on the 2007 college football season as a whole, Owen Schmitt, fullback for the 2007 WVU team, apparently still had problems coming to grips with the result, telling the reporter, "And then you get to the fucking last game of the season and blow it against the shittiest fucking team in the fucking world."[2]
Several football recruits that were visiting West Virginia for the game ended up cheering with the Panthers on their sideline by the end of the game. Several of them later decided to play for Pitt over West Virginia.[3][4]...The trickle-down effect of West Virginia being knocked out of the BCS Championship has been speculated to have had a major impact on the bowl placement of many teams and the filling of various head-coaching positions. Most prominently affected was LSU, who slid into WVU's slot and ended up winning the BCS Championship.[4]
The game turned out to have a profound impact on the future of Michigan, which was in the midst of a search to replace retiring coach Lloyd Carr.Two weeks after the loss, Michigan hired Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez as Carr's successor. Had West Virginia beaten Pitt, Rodriguez likely would not have left West Virginia and passed up the chance to play for a BCS National Championship, and Michigan would have had to look elsewhere for its coach.
This is from Sports Illustrated yesterday:
Long before he evolved into a wrestling and broadcasting star, even
before he burst onto the scene as a prized NFL punter, Pat McAfeedrove
aimlessly across the American terrain.
It has been 15 years since, and he recalls very littleabout the drive
and says he has not spoken publicly about it. He remembers brushing away
the broken beer bottles in his driveway that West Virginia fans hurled
at his Jeep Wrangler amid the violent aftermath of Dec. 1 2007, the
worst night of his life when his reliable foot partially cost the
Mountaineers a chance at a national championship. His car was
vandalized, his yard destroyed, his life threatened.
Outsiders might think it is silly that one game could mean so much to a
person, or that it could forever fracture a relationship between a
coach, Rich Rodriguez, and his one true love, West Virginia.
[Um, at least one insider is feeling that way about now.]
[Per above I have always held that it was the greatest upset in the history of the game. I had no idea though how profound and permanent those scars were on WVU individuals.]
...
“My life changed immediately that day. It was a terrible fucking
night, to be honest with you,” McAfee says. “It was like something out
of a movie. I just drove. I got all the way to Virginia through
Maryland. I was gone for a couple days.I drove, parked, slept and kept
driving. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was headed. I
didn’t know what was coming next.
“And I didn’t know if I wanted to live anymore.”
[Okay, this is not fun and this is not funny and I have no taste to celebrate such pain in anyone not named Donald Trump. I am going to post this in its entirety because I've had it in the queue for a whole year. I'm not going to change it but I do, sincerely, regretfully, I do take back entirely any note of celebration. I had no idea of the pain.]
...
“I had a bunch of people I thought I was friends with sending me DMs to
never show my face, kill myself or that, if they could, they’d try to
kill me,” he says. “I cried for probably seven or eight hours straight. I
remember listening to what people were screaming into the house. It was
at that moment I was like, ‘I should disappear probably.’”
...
On the 15th anniversary of the Backyard Brawl’s most stunning chapter,
one of college football’s greatest rivalries returns Thursday after an
11-year hiatus.
...
The series has literally produced brawls —in...’70, when the Bobby
Bowden–led Mountaineers squandered a 35–8 halftime lead and forced the
coach to keep his players in the locker room for an extra hour to avoid
an angry mob of fans.
[I was there.]
... No single chapter of the Brawl featured bigger heroes and battle wounds than “13–9.”...Fifteen years ago, on a cold night in Morgantown, the Mountaineers missed their latest chance at destiny.
...
The 2007 outcome affected LSU more than any other team, paving its way
to the title game. Late that Saturday night, the score reached the
Tigers as they were returning to Louisiana after winning the SEC
championship in Atlanta. As the team plane descended into Baton Rouge,
the pilot announced the score. Players and coaches erupted with such
force that the jet dangerously dipped.
[Dear God.]
...
[WVU QB PAT] White has never watched a replay of the game and won’t unless tied down
and his eyes are taped open, he says. His memories are somewhat lost.
“You know how people go through traumatic stuff and they forget about
things?” he asks.
...
[WVU radio sideline reporter Jed] Drenning attended the game with a friend who was so distraught that the
man decided, in the middle of the night after the game, to walk home. It
was 12 miles away. “He was in a dark place. He’s told me about the
things that went through his mind that night,” Drenning says. “These are
the kind of stories you hear from West Virginians.”
[I wish we had never won that game.]
...
[Head coach Rich] Rodriguez returns to the state, and Morgantown, every couple of years to
visit his brother and 83-year-old mother. To this day, though, he’s
never returned to campus, visited the facilities or been invited back
for a game. He says it bothers him. “I hope we can go back, all of us at
some point.”
...
At 3 a.m., the Panthers returned to a city alive. Bars stayed open
late, welcoming players and coaches for beer and pizza. Couches burned
on the street.
“There were no rules,” [Pitt linebacker Scott] McKillop says. “We could have done about anything, and no one would have cared.”
McKillop, the Pitt linebacker who famously stopped Slaton on a
fourth-down run in the fourth quarter, is notoriously outspoken about
the feud between the two programs. He once told a reporter for a
published story of West Virginia, “I fucking hate the university and I
fucking hate the state.”
... The impacts of the upset were far reaching. West Virginia held a big recruiting weekend for the Brawl game, with at least a dozen prospects watching from the Mountaineers sideline. Some chose between the two schools. Pitt signed roughly eight of those players. Some even left their WVU official visit to join Pitt in its postgame celebration. That December, the Panthers sent prospects Christmas cards with the short message: “13–9.”
...
McAfee, meanwhile, has evolved into the biggest celebrity from that
game. Several people have invited him to Thursday night’s game. He says
he will unlikely attend but will be watching, rooting on his
Mountaineers, 15 years after that long, lonely drive with a destination
he’s still in search of.
-------------------------------------------------
I didn't watch the game live but I have watched replays several times.
There are strange things in mountains and hollows. The places there are hard to get to. Things go in but don't come out. The people there are different. Strange, uncanny things happen. Both have some mystery about them that and that mystery plays on "outsiders." They imagine things that are not there. Beings that exist nowhere. Actions that don't take place. I'm thinking of the Whiskey Rebellion. Of the terror that overtook John Buchan and his guide in Alps. And I'm thinking of this game. The final score is strange. 13-9 is a very uncommon score in college football and the reason that this game is known by the score alone. Thirteen is the number of bad luck. Fate was written in the date, December 1, 2007. The first day of the twelfth month, the numbers give you 13; a comma, similar to a dash, and then 2 followed by two zeroes and then 7. That's nine. The date gives you 13-9.
From my first watching there was something eerie and strange that came over the stadium and all those within when Pat McAfee missed the first field goal. The West Virginia fans grew quiet as in a collective intake of breath and mountain people are never quiet. Air went in but never came out. The West Virginia players, so fast, were slow. Maybe the mountains played on my perceptions but I swear they were slow that night. Pitt players were invigorated by the brisk mountain air but it was as if some being in the form of a deadening, ill wind descended out of the mountains and enveloped everything West Virginia. That bad air has never come out. Pitt people came out, they came out and went back to "a city alive." West Virginians never came out, they had nowhere else to go. They had to stay there in their nightmare, dead in that awful deadening air. Anybody who does not now, at the conclusion of this SI article and this entire post, believe that 13-9 was the most eerie night producing the most shocking, impactful upset in the history of college football has never been to the mountains.
After eleven years the “Backyard Brawl” resumes tonight at 7 p.m.