Interesting Facts

In honor of the upcoming Sugar Bowl, here's some interesting information about Mountaineer sports. Use it as you see fit...

West Virginia football ranks 17th in all-time Division I-A wins...which is pretty impressive. They rank ahead of teams like Pittsburgh, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech and Florida. They currently have 641 wins, just 10 wins behind #15 Colorado. They still have a long time to go before reaching Michigan's current win total of 848 wins.

It's a shame those wins couldn't translate into bowl wins. The Mountaineers are 9-15 all-time in bowl games which is pretty dismal. Out of the 37 teams in Division I-A with 20+ bowl appearances, only 4 have worse post-season records than WVU - Arkansas (11-20), TCU (7-13), BYU (7-16) and Texas Tech (8-19). If WVU loses to Georgia, they will fall below Arkansas. Additionally, in its 24 bowl appearances, West Virginia has been outscored by 179 points...only BYU is worse being outscored by 189 in their 24 appearances. Georgia Tech has the best percentage with a 22-11 record (67%). Alabama has appeared in the most bowls (52) and, for those Notre Dame supremists, they are only .500 in bowls with a 13-13 record.

As far as Mountaineer basketball, how about 26th all-time in victories with 1428 through 2004. Naturally, those wins increased by 24 last year and that may move us up in the rankings a little...but we still have a long way to go to catch Kentucky with 1876. The bad news is that as recently as 1999, WVU ranked 18th all-time in basketball wins. So, a lot of teams have won some games in the past 5 years and by-passed the Mounties in all-time wins. But, it's still pretty impressive.

Not as impressive is WVU's #58 rank in attendance last year with just over 8,500 average attendance. That was a major improvement over the previous year though when West Virginia ranked 76th with just over 7,000 at a game. I'm guessing those numbers should shoot up again this year following the miraculous Elite Eight run last year. The last time WVU finished in the Top 25 in attendance was 1982. It is almost an impossibility for them to get back in the Top 25 in attendance now because of the size of the Coliseum versus some of the larger basketball venues that are in existence now, such as Syracuse which holds over 25,000.