xii · football
The Silent Room in Morgantown Where the Megaphones Go to Die
Saturday's conference opener in West Virginia left behind more than cleat marks; it left a paper trail written entirely in grease pencil.
They say the conference office in Irving is quiet on a Saturday night, but they have never sat three feet from 'One-Eyed Larry' while he stared at a five-inch high-definition monitor playing a routine fair catch on loop for fourteen uninterrupted minutes. Larry, who earned his moniker during the 2011 Russell Athletic Bowl when he briefly mistook a marching band tuba for a defensive holding infraction, is the man entrusted with our collective sanity. As Eric Morris and Rich Rodriguez exchanged polite nods in the handshake line following Saturday’s absolute barnburner in Morgantown, Larry was busy frame-stepping a third-quarter incompletion to determine whether the ball brushed a blade of bluegrass or merely the existential dread of the side judge.