Game Time: 09/13/2007 07:45 PM -
By: Mike Rose | who2beton.com
Maryland has not played well on Thursday nights and West Virginia has three straight wins in this series. Tonight, that turns around as the Terps stay within this spread.
I’m having deja vu for the fourth straight year. Is it just me, or have these teams hooked up in the third week of the season the last three years? Well, the answer to that question would be yes. The Terrapins and Mountaineers have gone up against one another under the bright lights of an ESPN Thursday night telecast three years in a row, and tonight’s game will mark the fourth straight meeting under these circumstances.
Terps head coach Ralph Friedgen is hoping the fourth time will be the charm as Rich Rodriguez’ Mountaineers have handed him three straight losses over that time. In fact, Maryland is a poor 1-4 straight up the last five years on Thursday night and they’ve been throttled in those contests losing by an average of 23 PPG. Tonight will be different though as the Terps have the talent on hand to put a little scare in this Morgantown bunch, and they’re being given an awful lot of points in their own backyard.
Maryland boasts the more experienced club this time around, and they know exactly what they’re going to see from WV when they have the ball: A ton of QB Pat White and RB Steve Slaton with a little bit of WR Darius Reynaud mixed in. The Mounty’s rushed for 340 yards on the ground last season at home, and that was only a year after they rushed for 300 in their 31-19 win at Maryland in ’05. The Terps raw offense was able to move the ball on the WV defense a year ago, but shot themselves in the foot with a total of five turnovers (3 INT/2 FUM). The game was pretty much done after the first stanza once WV took advantage of Maryland’s gifts and bolted out to a 28-0 lead. However, the Terps never gave up and managed to outscore the Mountaineers 24-17 the rest of the way.
West Virginia suffered a big blow to their defensive line last week when DT Keilen Dykes sprained his ankle, and that allowed Marshall to pick up some huge yardage straight up the gut of the Mountaineer’s stack defense. If he isn’t able to go, 'The Fridge' will certainly be one of the happier coaches in all of college football this evening. He will attack the Mounty’s with his underrated ground attack all night long, and do his best to win the time of possession battle.
Don’t let the 'Slaton got his scholarship pulled by Friedgen' angle cloud your judgment in this spot. That angle has already cashed in the last two seasons, and this is an entirely different Terps team. This one will be a heck of a lot closer than this number suggests. WV has gotten off to slow starts in each of their first two games, and Maryland is a team good enough to take advantage if indeed they stumble out of the gates once again.
Grab the points here as I foresee a game very similar to the one back in 2004 when the Mountaineers squeaked out a victory in OT by a 19-16 final count.
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