Sometimes college football teams are subtle in the ways they negatively recruit against their rivals. West Virginia is not being subtle with this point:
West Virginia calls out 4 rival schools in its NFL draft bragging
It’s a fair argument, even if the framing’s a bit silly.
That’s a collection of first-round pick totals in the last five NFL drafts by West Virginia and its most immediate geographic competition in the Power 5 conferences: Penn State, Virginia Tech, Pitt, and Maryland. It’s hard to argue with the totals; West Virginia has, indeed, placed more first-rounders in the draft since 2012 than all of those other schools combined. It’s not a bad pitch when recruiting elite high schoolers.
WVU’s first-rounders in that time: Bruce Irvin in 2012, Tavon Austin in 2013, Kevin White in 2015, and Karl Joseph last year. Austin’s struggled mightily since the Rams picked him eighth overall four years ago, but he is still technically a first-rounder.
Is 2012 an arbitrary endpoint? Of course. It cuts off 2010 and 2011, when the only schools on that graphic with first-rounders were Penn State and Pitt (via Jared Odrick and Jonathan Baldwin, specifically). But I’ve seen worse. This isn’t that misleading.
Where it’s a little silly is that most of these teams have had head coaching changes sometime since 2012. Pitt, Virginia Tech, Penn State, and Maryland all have different coaches now than they did that year. More than that, Holgorsen had only been in the WVU job for a little more than a year. Irvin and Austin weren’t even his recruits.
If those schools wanted to clap back at Penn State, they could try something like what Will Muschamp did last year at South Carolina:
Coaches develop players as much as programs do. You could argue fairly that Tech coach Justin Fuente produced an extra first-rounder from his time at Memphis (Paxton Lynch), that Maryland coach D.J. Durkin produced plenty as a top assistant at Florida and Michigan, and so on and so on. There are no rules in the recruiting graphic arena, except those specifically set forth by the NCAA.
Previously in “WVU’s greatest Twitter graphic hits,” there was the time Holgorsen dropped a casual Eat Shit Pitt in announcing the renewal of the Backyard Brawl:
College football is our greatest and pettiest sport.
