If you’re trying to figure out what occurred between Dana Holgorsen’s ears last week, it was a severe case of clear-air turbulence.

When the third-year West Virginia coach went out of his way to cite Marshall and East Carolina as examples of schools hindering the progress of college football, Holgorsen displayed not only a disgusting disregard for the sport’s history but also an alarming lack of knowledge about the way federal law Title IX operates.

In case you missed the story, Holgorsen told the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail newspaper that schools “like East Carolina and Marshall … are the ones holding us back from being able to feed our players three times a day or from being able to pay them just a small stipend to make their lives a little bit easier so they're not starving to death at specific times of the year…

"If you're not one of the big boys, don't hold the big boys back from being able to make their program better. Why should Marshall be fighting for the same prize as West Virginia? Let's be honest. Why should East Carolina be fighting for the same prize as North Carolina? That's absurd.”

Insult to Marshall’s spirit

Perhaps Holgorsen doesn’t understand - or care - what Marshall, its fans, administration and players had to go through in the early 1970s to even have a football program.

Following a 17-14 loss at ECU on Nov. 14, 1970, the Marshall team plane crashed while trying to land in Huntington. All 75 people aboard were killed, including 37 players and eight coaches.

The catastrophe perpetually linked Marshall and ECU in a mission of joint remembrance. While Huntington mourned, ECU and its fans raised money for Marshall’s recovery projects, memorial funds and scholarships.

For Holgorsen to so blatantly disrespect Marshall’s courageous effort and commitment to recover from the tragedy is beyond callous. It’s a disgraceful insult to the spirit of all West Virginians, whether they are Mountaineer fans, Herd fans or neither.

Two memorable films have been made to commemorate the challenge Marshall eventually overcame: “Marshall University: Ashes to Glory” in 2000 and “We Are Marshall” in 2007.

Holgorsen would be well served to watch both repeatedly until he can gain some deference for the state in which he works, not to mention the relative unimportance of athletics when compared to human disaster.



Selective stipends illegal

That’s the most pressing aspect about the coach’s rhetoric last week.

Another part of it is the fact that Holgorsen, a 42-year-old Iowan, got his first coaching breaks at Valdosta (Ga.) State and Mississippi College and Wingate (N.C.), which is hardly a “big boy” lineup. He then moved on to Texas Tech and worked on the same staff as current ECU coach and former Pirate player Ruffin McNeill.

Class guy, huh?

And to top it all off, the misguided point Holgorsen really wanted to make had to do with paying football players stipends, which he seems to think (for some unknown reason) is being blocked by schools with smaller football budgets than West Virginia.

Holgorsen suggested that schools in the Big 12, SEC, ACC, Big Ten and PAC 12 would secede from the NCAA, form their own alliance, write their own rule book and pay the football players.

Ah coach, it’s not quite that simple. Whether there’s a super division formed or not, the specifics of Title IX, which has been United States law since 1972, require that all college athletes must be treated equally. That means women, men, football players, softball players, you name it.

If a scholarship football player is entitled to a weekly allowance, so too is a walk-on gymnast.

For a school with, say, 400 athletes, to pay a weekly stipend of $50 each, would cost roughly $80,000 a month. Over the course of an entire year, the tab would be almost half of Holgorsen’s $2.3 million annual salary.

And if athletes deserve a stipend, why not members of the marching band, cheerleaders, student managers and trainers? All of those folks are instrumental to the athletic framework.

As long as a stipend policy can be implemented in a balanced manner, fine. But for any coach to suggest that football players alone are only worthy of an allowance is completely inane.

And finally, Holgorsen’s observations about “big boy” programs and “starving players” came only a few days after one of his players was dismissed from the team after being arrested for armed robbery and holding two people at gunpoint in Morgantown.

Something tells me police didn’t see the robbery motive as a 240-pound guy simply trying to get his hands on enough burger money to stave off malnutrition.