Maryland Football Series Extended
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – (September 13, 2010) - West Virginia University Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Oliver Luck has announced today that the Maryland football series will be extended for four more years.

The current contract, which starts with this year’s game in Morgantown on Saturday, Sept. 18, is resuming after a two-year hiatus. Next year’s meeting will be in College Park, followed by a second meeting in Morgantown in 2012 and the final game of the current contract will take place in College Park in 2013.

The new contract begins at College Park in 2014, then twice in Morgantown (2015 and 2016), before ending at College Park in 2017

http://wvillustrated.com/wvufootball/topstory/id/1154

I hope we manage to continue this series beyond 2017. This is a great OOC rival for the Mountaineers, right in each other's backyard...

Yes, a fantastic series for WVU. Should be an annual thing.

Yea I caught this during a down period at work today and was very happy to see it. Glad that both sides are serious about keeping one of the east's rivalries going. I wouldn't mind Rutgers getting another 2 game set with Maryland on the schedule either.

Next step for WVU is to get Va Tech back on the schedule....heard somehwere in the media were Luck is trying to meet with the Va Tech folks in October

Jackson

Congrats to West Virginia on the extension of this series.

(09-13-2010 09:54 PM)Jackson1011 Wrote:  Next step for WVU is to get Va Tech back on the schedule....heard somehwere in the media were Luck is trying to meet with the Va Tech folks in October

I hope he manages that one. The Black Diamond Trophy means a lot more to me than the Friends of Coal Bowl, and it carries a lot more weight to it as well...

From the UMD beat writer:

Posted at 11:09 AM ET, 09/14/2010
Thoughts on West Virginia football fans in Morgantown
Maryland Coach Ralph Friedgen can blare John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in practice all week – like he has done before leading up to games at West Virginia – and it won’t really prepare players for the atmosphere they are about to encounter this weekend.

This is a spirited rivalry, and it’s good to see it will be played each year at least through 2017. From my experience, West Virginia offers the second-most hostile environment that Maryland has seen in recent years. I’ll keep Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium at the top of the list in the ACC. But the scene in Morgantown, W.Va., beats Clemson, it beats Florida State and it sure as heck beats anything else in the ACC (other than Lane, of course).

It’s also is a great place to watch/cover a game. I always enjoy going, although I’ve overheard small pockets of fans chant things I wouldn’t dare repeat here. Overall, the fan base is passionate and intense, much like Maryland’s basketball crowd. I covered Pittsburgh's victory over West Virginia up there a few years ago -- a significant upset that denied West Virginia a berth in the national title game -- and I can still picture tens of thousands of depressed fans trudging from the stadium into the black of night. They were crushed, and that image has stuck with me because they invested so much into their team.

And don’t think the players don’t care about this WVU-Maryland rivalry. I remember I asked Adam "Pacman" Jones a question after one West Virginia victory over Maryland – can’t remember the question – and he took serious offense to the question, as if I dismissed his program. He got fired up, his tone changed and he talked about how he’s not afraid of any school, etc., and that he’s from a rough neighborhood in Atlanta. That was the same game that West Virginia’s Kay-Jay Harris threw his hand in the air in the interview room and shouted, “We must protect this house!” mocking Maryland’s Under Armour commercial. He then said that was West Virginia’s slogan all week and asked, “Is Under Armour second-guessing why they didn’t come to Coach [Rich Rodriguez] to give him an endorsement deal?”

The trash talk is a prime ingredient in this rivalry. But regardless of whether any bad blood still exists, this will be a tough, competitive game on the field. Both teams are unbeaten, but significant questions loom for both. Should be fun. Can't wait.

I noticed the writer said he felt Lane Stadium was the toughest, and the fans voting had WVU leading the poll hands down...

The Thursday night game in 2006 was quite hostile. A noon game this year won't be. The team & gameday environment seem to take on the personality of the coach the past 2 years.

Maryland could have budding rivalry with West Virginia
Terps, Mountaineers resume series Saturday
By Jeff Barker, The Baltimore Sun

6:52 p.m. EDT, September 15, 2010

COLLEGE PARK — — Ralph Friedgen often sounds wistful when he talks about the subject of a true Maryland football rival, or rather the lack of one.

It's as if Friedgen, in his 10th year as head coach, is missing a dance partner. Friedgen, an offensive lineman at Maryland in the late 1960s, is fond of reminding people how he routinely played against West Virginia and Penn State. Or how, as Georgia Tech's offensive coordinator, he relished playing Georgia because "that's what gets the crowds going."

Maryland may not have a traditional last-game-of-the-year adversary in the sense of Auburn-Alabama or Ohio State-Michigan, but this season the Terrapins have the next best thing. Maryland's game with West Virginia on Saturday resumes a dormant series possessing key elements of a healthy football hatred. There's history (46 meetings dating back to 1919), close competition (West Virginia leads 23-21-2) and border-state proximity.

Coupled with the resumption of the Navy series earlier this month, the season has created the promise that one of the grudge matches could flourish and fill a long-missing void for many Maryland participants and fans.

But what school, if any, is best suited to emerge as Maryland's leading rival? Is it West Virginia, where the Terps (2-0) travel Saturday to play the 21st-ranked Mountaineers (2-0) for the first time since 2007? Is it Navy, the nearest Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) opponent to College Park? Is it Virginia, which the Terps have played more than any other team? Or even Penn State, which dominated Maryland continually until the schools' last meeting in 1993?

Maryland and Penn State have a natural connection in that both schools recruit heavily in each other's states. There's plenty of fan interest — at least from Maryland — about resuming the games.

Penn State said the schools had discussions several years ago, but no agreement was reached and nothing appears forthcoming. "I have not spoken with anyone at Penn State since taking over as [athletic department chief financial officer] in May of 2008," Maryland's Randy Eaton said in an e-mail Wednesday. "I would never say anything is dead, just that nothing is currently on the radar."

With the help of players, coaches and fans, The Sun looked at the other prospects:

• West Virginia: Maryland and West Virginia recently announced that the series has been extended through 2017. That makes the Mountaineers the only Maryland rival — other than Virginia — locked in on the schedule for years to come. The annual games may, for now, vault West Virginia-Maryland ahead of the other rivalries.

Friedgen said he told Gator Bowl officials in 2003 that the schools "could probably play this game four times a week and sell it out." The Terps beat the Mountaineers 41-7 in that game — Maryland's last victory in the series.

Maryland players said they were excited about the series' restoration. "They're awesome fans [in Morgantown] — loud, obnoxious, everything you want," senior linebacker Alex Wujciak said.

"I think it's something that should happen every year," said senior safety Antwine Perez. "West Virginia and Maryland being so close to each other, it's definitely a rivalry-type game."

Many fans agreed. "I would want it to be West Virginia," one reader wrote after the rivalry question was posed on baltimoresun.com's 'Tracking the Terps' blog. "I root for the [Navy] Midshipmen as long as they don't play Maryland. I don't root for West Virginia for anything."

But there is one downside that West Virginia shares with other potential rivals — they are already, in a sense, spoken for. The Mountaineers play Pitt each year in the "Backyard Brawl." Navy has Army, and Virginia has Virginia Tech.

Despite West Virginia's rivalry with Pitt, first-year athletic director Oliver Luck thinks the Mountaineers and Terps — after playing on a yearly basis — have history on their side.

"We haven't had a continuous annual game, but if you look back to the early 80s, we played them a lot more often than not," said Luck, a former Mountaineers quarterback who played the Terps in 1980 and 1981. "For our alumni, certainly in the D.C. area and outside the state of West Virginia, we've got more alumni in the D.C. area than anywhere else. It's a very important game, Maryland's a great institution. They've had strong football over the years. I think it's just an easy play for folks here to go and vice versa."

Luck believes that Maryland would be a great "natural" rivalry outside the Big East and even a bigger rivalry than with in-state Marshall, which West Virginia beat in overtime last Friday night in Huntington.

"There's a lot of respect for what Marshall has done in building up their program and Conference USA has become a stronger conference as a result of that. … A lot of Mountaineer fans would say it's not really a rivalry because they haven't beaten us, they came awful close on Friday. But I think the Maryland series is more of a rivalry in a sense that we played more, we go back further and it's always good in our system — whether you agree with it or not — in BCS conferences a Big East school plays an ACC school that matters. To me the rivarly makes a lot of sense. I'm hearing only positives from Mountaineers fans. If Maryland is looking for a permanent rivarly outside the conference, it's hard not to say this would be the ideal matchup for them."

• Navy: Maryland's 17-14, season-opening victory over Navy at M&T Bank Stadium seemed to rekindle this rivalry.

Incoming Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson indicated it was premature to assess the chances that the series will resume on an annual basis. But both schools appear genuinely interested. The rivalry even has a nickname — "The Crab Bowl" — and a trophy presented to the winner by the Touchdown Club of Annapolis.

• Virginia: The two schools have met every season since 1957, and there's no team the Terps have played more. But something about the series seems to leave Maryland wanting more.

"It would be nice to have UCLA- USC, but this is what we've got," then-quarterback Chris Turner said before playing Virginia a few years ago.

jeff.barker@baltsun.com

twitter.com/sunjeffbarker

Baltimore Sun reporter Don Markus contributed to this article.

Just another reminder of why Maryland (and of course BC too) is an Eastern school playing in a Southern league. When the two leading candidates for your primary rivalries are OOC and traditional Eastern schools it says something about why you're playing in the ACC and not somewhere more appropriate. Hell if Maryland and Rutgers started playing long-term and regularly it'd probably become a great rivalry for both. There was plenty of vitriol for our two game set.

WVU and Maryland is and will be a great rivalry. I hope they sign a long term deal. I have always wondered why Maryland and Navy don't play each other every year. That would be a great in-state rivalry. Penn State-Bama brought back some memories as a kid growing up in PA. They should bring back Pitt-Penn St.