I suspect some of their fans have a bit of a complex about their status in the football pecking order right now. In basketball, a couple of decades or so ago as you probably know, they stopped playing us for a different reason.

And that reason was ?

It obvious that OCF is our official Historian Emeritus

Not an overstatement at all. They actually did!!!

That status is on shaky ground originating from SEC expansion.

I wasn't around back then, but I'll happily spread the tale that WVU is scared of old OHIO.

Getting a little off topic but in an 8 game series with 3 at home and 5 at WVU, Ohio split it and they haven't played us since. I think that lately Ohio basketball has had bad luck with its heath. The last relatively positive year injury wise was, I think, 2015. But none of the past few years have been so devastating, except for maybe the fact that when Tony Campbell went down for the year that one injury by itself was pretty devastating to that team, where the team was just in a state of utter chaos figuring out who to play where. In 1997 OUr basketball team had the sort of injury plagued season that maybe only happens every 40 years or so. If you can't remember that then think of the 2012 football team. It was kind of like that. That was a long time ago and I don't recall a lot of the individual names or circumstances. I don't remember specifically how heathy Ohio was against WVU in 1997 but WVU was quite good. I was surprised in looking at this that Ohio "only lost by 26." We had been a good enough program in the early-mid nineties that we had a home and home with UK where, of course, the home game with UK was in the 97-98 season. Kentucky beat us pretty much as badly as Tubby Smith wanted to.

2000-12-19 West Virginia 67 at Ohio 79 W
1999-12-11 West Virginia 64 Ohio 75 W
1998-12-17 West Virginia 72 at Ohio 90 W
1997-12-13 West Virginia 89 Ohio 63 L
1996-11-30 West Virginia 83 Ohio 68 L
1995-12-16 West Virginia 94 Ohio 69 L
1994-12-20 West Virginia 70 at Ohio 84 W
1993-12-18 West Virginia 90 Ohio 81 L

+1

Cant wait to hear what they say when they lose to said "small school."

Then we gave them that confidence boosting TD on the runback of the kickoff. They probably thought, "Boy is this going to be an easy win in this little bush-league town."

P5 team (for the moment, anyway) coming to Athens? Better make this one High School band day too!

(Edited to add: sorry, couldn’t resist!)

Genius. Filling the seats with high school bands will prevent WVU fans from taking over the stadium. We are playing checkers while the athletic department is playing chess.