West Virginia will face Virginia Saturday night in Charlotte, North Carolina. Make no mistake, this is a matchup that has been circled on the calendar. It’s an out-of-conference game against a ranked opponent and should be a great litmus test for where the Mountaineer football program stands. Read more: Virginia can keep its pearls, we’ll keep Country Roads.
The Cavaliers are coming off an impressive season in which they sort of won the ACC regular-season title. I think. Apparently, the ACC gives away titles like Oprah gives away cars.
Virginia finished atop the regular-season standings and went to the ACC Championship Game, where it lost to Duke. But the ACC was so bad that its actual champion didn’t even make the College Football Playoff. Miami did, despite not playing in the ACC Championship Game, and then went all the way to the national championship game.
So, I guess Virginia won something last year. Maybe? I’m still confused.
Provocateur
But it’s what Virginia did after beating NC State in the first game of this season that has stirred up some fun between the two fan bases. After beating the Wolfpack, they decided to play “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Which is fine. The entire planet has embraced the song over the past few months. It materialized during the World Cup, where it was heard countless times, and went viral during the West Virginia baseball team’s improbable run to the College World Series.
But this wasn’t exactly done as an homage to perhaps the greatest fight song that isn’t actually a fight song in college sports. It immediately brought back the tired old trope about the song not actually being about the state of West Virginia.
Explaining this again is so tiresome that I’ll just provide a link to my previous column that explains the history of the song. Besides, we’re not going to spend the week going back and forth over the geography of “Country Roads.”
Related: The road leads home: How “Country Roads” became part of WVU
This is just another example of a certain segment of the Cavalier fan base being hilariously out of touch. They’re a wannabe Ivy League school. They don’t have a campus, they have “Grounds.” They’re not freshmen, they’re “first-years.” Their historic campus is called the “Academical Village,” and students who live on the Lawn are called “Lawnies.”
I mean, for God’s sake, when former Virginia coach Al Groh tried to get fans to wear orange to football games instead of the traditional shirts, ties and sport coats, traditionalists were upset enough that a Facebook group called “Guys in Ties, Girls in Pearls” emerged.
Puke.
Wahoo wit
We’ve all grown up with these people. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that when Virginia and West Virginia get together, somebody eventually decides it’s time to make fun of the hillbillies. In fact, Virginia has had to apologize more than once for its tiresome and played-out “humor” about West Virginians.
The last regular-season meeting between these schools came November 2, 1985, in Charlottesville. At halftime, the infamous student-run UVA Pep Band — of course modeled after the irreverent scramble bands at places like Stanford and other elite universities — staged a “Family Feud” parody about West Virginia.
The comedy was cutting edge. West Virginians didn’t have indoor plumbing. They weren’t educated. There was a birth-control joke and even a reference to toxic gas. Really original stuff.
Virginia apologized afterward.
Seventeen years later, the schools finally met again in the inaugural Continental Tire Bowl. The location? Charlotte.
And, wouldn’t you know it, the UVA Pep Band was back at it. This time it performed a parody of “The Bachelor,” with the Virginia woman portrayed as sophisticated and the West Virginia woman showing up in overalls and pigtails, accompanied by the usual collection of hillbilly stereotypes.
Virginia had to apologize.
Again.
Eventually, UVA replaced the Pep Band with a traditional marching band. I’m not saying West Virginia got the Virginia Pep Band fired. I’m just saying the timeline is interesting.
Moral inferiority
None of this is meant for the thousands of Virginia fans who do it the right way. Every fan base has idiots. God knows West Virginia isn’t immune.
But with Virginia, the act toward West Virginia has always felt less like hatred and more like condescension. And honestly, it’s just corny. The same tired hillbilly jokes in 1985. The same jokes in 2002. Now we’re arguing about “Country Roads” again.
The funny thing is, Virginia is actually good right now. The Cavaliers won 11 games last season, reached the ACC Championship Game and are ranked again this year. There’s plenty to talk trash about.
So have at it this week. But I suggest keeping it online.
Because the last time Virginia and West Virginia had a serious enough disagreement that we had to pick sides, we saw how that turned out.
If you need a refresher, I believe Ken Burns made a documentary about it.
