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The saga of Rodriguez, White & Slaton

File Photo Pat White hands off to Steve Slaton during their playing days with the Mountaineers.

MORGANTOWN — It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens had it right 148 years earlier in “A Tale of Two Cities.”

It was 2007, West Virginia football was at its best; West Virginia football was at its worst.

And in the middle of it all was Rich Rodriguez, Pat White and Steve Slaton.

It was the year when West Virginia was ready to take home the national championship, but it didn’t happen. Now Rodriguez, the coach, is back. Seventeen years have gone by, and Rodriguez is trying to put it together again.

His failure at that moment shows how difficult it is but, at the same time, it shows that it can be done.

Key in the middle of it all were three things Rodriguez did. He judged talent. He coached talent. And he let talent take over on the field. It came through in Slaton, his running back, and White, his quarterback.

Steve Slaton was going to Maryland done deal…then Maryland undid it.

They yanked his scholarship.

As the recruitment was reestablished, other schools were after Slaton, but there was a fatal flaw in their approach … they wanted him as a defensive back.

Rodriguez and his head recruiter in the effort to sign Slaton, longtime assistant Bill Kirelawich, wanted him to play running back.

“They were constant on me playing running back,” Slaton said the other day. “I felt that was going to be best for my career, and they stood tall on wanting me to play running back while the other schools wanted me to move to defensive back.”

Slaton was adamant and he was willing to do what it took to win the job even though the competition was tough, headed by Jason Colson, who had gained more than 700 yards in 2004, and even though the star running back recruit in 2005 was a heralded 240-pound running back out of North Babylon, N.Y., Jason Gwaltney.

That was Amos Zereoue territory, and Gwaltney’s statistics were as good or better than his. He had offers from Ohio State, USC and Michigan State, but Rodriguez landed him in Morgantown.

He couldn’t, however, keep him on the field or out of trouble. Gwaltney gained 186 yards with three touchdowns before academic problems and a bad knee led to him leaving school. He returned in 2007, after having played back home in New York and running into legal problems, but the second chance Rodriguez was giving him never worked out as he was arrested and never played.

Slaton, meanwhile, was exactly what Rodriguez wanted and Rodriguez was exactly what Slaton wanted.

“They told me the truth,” Slaton said. “They told me who was coming in and that there would be nothing guaranteed and I’d have to work for it. I wasn’t scared of hard work but the honesty of these are the guys coming in, this is what you are going to face and you are still going to get the opportunity to be a running back.”

Rodriguez coached Slaton hard. He coached all his players hard but the ones who could handle it were the ones who made it.

“It’s like Rich Rod said…good players want to be coached. That was the main thing. I wasn’t scared of coaching. I wasn’t scared of competition. Any sport you play you can’t be scared of competition. Nothing’s a guarantee,” Slaton said. “My NFL coach, Gary Kubiak, would tell me, opportunity comes through injury. Friendly competition is healthy. You have to earn your stripes every day.

“That’s what Coach Rod’s system was. You have to earn your stripes.”

“At that time, we had a great pedigree of running backs … Avon Cobourne, Amos Zereoue, Quincy Wilson, KJ Harris. We liked to run the ball. That enticed me to come there.”

In the first three games of 2005, Slaton carried 8 times for 42 yards, all against Wofford, before being inserted into a key role against Virginia Tech, the No. 3 team in the nation. While WVU lost to the Hokies, 34-17, Slaton carried 11 times for 90 yards and caught a couple of passes.

Rodriguez knew what he had.

“Rich Rod is good at finding a diamond in the rough,” Slaton said. “I feel like me and Pat were diamonds in the rough. That first year with him was probably one of the toughest years I’ve been through, not just coaching wise but training wise. These guys that come into this program will be in great shape and be able to compete for four quarters.”

Rutgers was next, and in a 27-13 road victory, Slaton had his first 100-yard game with 135 yards on 25 carries with a touchdown and that set the stage for magic to occur.

Sophomore Adam Bednarik was the starting quarterback, but a 2005 freshman was splitting time with him. That, of course, was Pat White as the Louisville game dawned at Mountaineer Field.

Louisville was No. 19 in the country and opened a 24-7 lead with 6 minutes left in the third quarter, and with Bednarik having to be taken from the game with an ankle injury:

White entered, and the rest was history.

Slaton ran wild. In the fourth quarter, he scored on a 4-yard TD, Pat McAfee kicked a 29-yard field goal and then with one minute to play, Slaton scored on another 4-yard run and McAfee kicked the extra point to send the game into overtime.

Back and forth they went, Slaton scoring three times to give him five touchdowns on the ground, where he gained 188 yards, and one TD receiving for six. When White hit Dorrell Jalloh with a two-point conversion on the final score and the defense stopped Brian Brohm trying to do the same, the game belonged to WVU.

White and Slaton were joined at the hip from then on. White had 69 rushing yards and 49 passing yards on 5-of-11 passing in the game, and Rodriguez’s march toward a chance at a national championship was underway.

In truth, White and Slaton had become friends and roommates from the beginning.

“I always said, Pat and his family were the down south version of what my family was,” Slaton explained. “They were close. He had his brothers. It got to going out onto the field where we were competing every day. We had blood, sweat and tears together.

“We had a comradery that spilled over off the field.”

WVU would finish that season at 11-1 with the Virginia Tech loss as the season’s only black mark.

They played the Sugar Bowl against No. 8 Georgia in Atlanta, New Orleans devasted by a hurricane, and won a thriller that involved all three men … Slaton, White and Rodriguez.

Georgia never really had a chance since Slaton took the football 52 yards three minutes into the game for a touchdown, followed quickly by White throwing 3 yards to Darius Reynaud for a TD and then three minutes later Reynaud taking a reverse in for a 13-yard score.

But Georgia battled back into the game, and Rodriguez’s daring wound up saving the day as with a fourth down near midfield and needing a first down to run out the clock, the coach called a fake punt if the look was right and Phil Brady, who was neither Steve Slaton nor Pat White, ran 10 yards for the first down to clinch the victory.

Slaton finished his greatest day with three touchdowns, two of them on 52-yard runs, while rushing for 204 yards while White ran for 77 yards on 24 carries and completed 11 of 14 passes for 140 yards and a touchdown.

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In 2006 Rodriguez refined his offense, White playing a completely equal role with Slaton and the Mountaineers went 11-2 and beat Georgia Tech, 38-35, in the Gator Bowl.

Slaton was injured in that game and had only 11 yards on three carries while White rushed for 145 yards and a touchdown and passed for 131 yards and two touchdowns. Owen Schmitt carried 13 times for 102 yards and two touchdowns.

Down 35-17 in the third quarter, White threw for two scores and ran for another in the third to pull the game out.

That brought WVU into the 2007 season expecting to contend for the national championship, but after winning four straight games to open the season by lopsided scores, No. 18 South Florida stunned the Mountaineers in Tampa, 21-13, on a Friday night when White was injured midgame.

They put things together to win six in a row and go into the Pitt game at 10-1, ranked No. 2 in the nation. They were 28.5 point-favorites, and there wasn’t anyone outside the Panthers locker room who believed they would lose. But the Pitt defense was magnificent, holding WVU to just 104 rushing yards with Slaton and Noel Devine gaining only 11 each and White being injured and finishing the day with less than 100 total yards.

It was a crushing blow to the Mountaineers with Rodriguez leaving the next day to take the Michigan coaching job after failing to reach a contract extension with WVU and Slaton announcing after WVU bounced back to defeat Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl that he was going to turn pro in the next draft.

“It was a tough decision,” Slaton admitted. “West Virginia was my second home, but at the end of the day it becomes a business. To me, it was a business decision. How realistic was it to win any other awards, to get any other stats? What would that have done for me?

“You know, the NFL stands for ‘Not For Long’. The average time for an NFL running back is four years, and that’s how long I played. I had to seize the opportunity I had.”

He sat down with Bill Stewart after the Oklahoma Bowl game, in which he was injured on his first carry for -2 yards, and broke the news to him that he was not coming back.

“I talked to Coach Stewart — God Bless the dead. We had a meeting. I was being honest, telling him there was nothing left for me to achieve at that level. I’d finished fourth in the Heisman voting. There were no more accolades for me to accumulate.”

By that time, he already had told White of his decision.

“We always had conversations. We were roommates. We’d had that conversation before I told the team about it. He was the first person who I told the decision to,” he said.

White stayed for his senior season, 2008, WVU won 9 games against 4 losses with Noel Devine as the starting running back and squeaked out a one-point bowl victory over North Carolina to give White four bowl triumphs, but Slaton and Rodriguez were gone and so was the luster.

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