Sep 12, 2023 By Bob Hertzel for The Observer-Reporter newsroom@observer-Reporter.Com 5 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va – Experiencing one of college football’s greatest rivalries as a coach or player should be enough to last one a lifetime, but West Virginia’s Hall of Fame coach Don Nehlen has had the unusual opportunity to be part of two of the game’s most heated rivalries – West Virginia’s Backyard Brawl with Pitt and Michigan’s annual Big Ten battle with Ohio State.

As this year’s 106th renewal of the Backyard Brawl at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in Mountaineer Field approaches, Nehlen took some time out to talk about both.

“The fans make them intense,” Nehlen said. “The one here has been out of view for a while, but when I came here (in 1980) the Pitt-West Virginia rivalry was nastier than Michigan-Ohio State. The sayings on the shirts, some of the stuff they did and said I didn’t like.”

There’s a difference between being nasty and vile, between good-natured, clever combatants trying to get under each other’s skin and those who want to cut open the other’s skin.

“I got rid of them, to be honest,” Nehlen said. “That wasn’t my ball of wax. Some of the stuff was too nasty or too personal or whatever you want to call it.”

If the rhetoric cooled while he was at WVU, the rivalry didn’t.

Nehlen points out that the roots in both rivalries are deep, going back a long time, and though Michigan was one state and Ohio another, they played for bragging rights. Ohioans didn’t like those from Michigan, Ohio State’s legendary coach Woody Hayes coined the phrase “That team up north” so he didn’t have to say the word Michigan while the Wolverines’ head coach Bo Schembechler, when Nehlen was the quarterback coach there, always called Ohio State “those sumbitches down south” instead of using the school’s name.

Nehlen found when he came to West Virginia, there was a similar attitude between West Virginia and Pitt.

“You know, we didn’t like those guys and they didn’t like us,” Nehlen said.

And that’s what makes the rivalries of college football so special, even as they are becoming less and less contested.

“One of the big things that made it different here when I was coaching was that the players knew each other so well,” Nehlen said.

There was a lot of locker room cross-breeding between players from the area of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania at both schools who had faced each other in high school or in all-star games and built a familiarity even in the pre-Internet era.

It took Neal Brown a while to really catch on to the intensity of the rivalry. Being from Kentucky he knew about it and had seen it on television, but the temperature was hotter than he could have imagined. That came to him last year when the rivalry was revived after a decade of not playing each other.

Before WVU let the game slip away, 38-31, at Acrisure Stadium, Brown was asked to make a congratulatory video to Chuck Smith, the coach at Boyle County High, where he had played. Smith was entering the Hall of Fame the next day.

As it often is, the problem was location, location, location for they picked the one wrong to shoot it in the stadium … in front of the Panther student section as they were revving up for the game.

“I’m out there shooting a video and I had no idea the students were already there,” Brown said of his first real live lesson in the rivalry. “Here I come out of the tunnel with my son, Dax, and he learned some new words. He wants to know why they were giving us the No. 1 signal with the middle finger.

“From that point on I had a good understanding of what this is all about.”

The decade away made it no less intense for the fans.

“It’s fun. Rivalries make college football. A lot of rivalries have gone by the wayside, which is disappointing,” Brown said. “I’m in favor of playing this game and this makes a lot of sense to be our non-conference Power 5 opponent each and every year. It’s a game that our fans and their fans like to see. This is heated and we understand that and our players look forward to getting back into that.”

Nehlen is in total agreement.

“When you think about it, we ought to play them every year,” Nehlen said. “They are 75 miles up the road. We don’t need to go all over the world to find somebody to play. Our fans are interested; their fans are interested. It’s a natural game.”

As rabid as the Pitt fans can be, and as nasty as they got back in Nehlen’s 20 Backyard Brawls, he said the fans from Pittsburgh never really bothered him.

“I don’t know how they treated the players but no fans – well, a few of them yelled at me – but I never had any bad experience with Pitt’s fans,” he said.

And those games in Pittsburgh, Nehlen noted, were played in Pitt’s stadium on campus, not in the more sterile pro football stadium in which they now play.

“I think that’s hurt their program personally,” Nehlen said, who, of course, coached the first game in WVU’s new Mountaineer Field, a boon to college football in a college town. “Pitt’s old stadium was a nice stadium.”