RU ready for some football?

And other Friday football questions involving this Rutgers-West Virginia fray in a curiouser and curiouser Big East:

1. Coach Bill Stewart maintains that he refuses to throw his players under the bus, but would you consider this tossing tailback Noel Devine into the Bonzai Pipeline? "Stay in the wave," he said he counseled Devine, after No. 7 gathered 88 of his game-high 125 yards rushing against Marshall on whoa-Neillie, reverse-field runs. "Ride the wave. [Exhibiting patience is] the biggest thing Steve [Slaton] did here, Quincy [Wilson] did here and Avon [Cobourne] did here, everyone we've had. Patiencew to the hole, speed through the hole. Patience to the hole, speed through the hole. He's given up on the wave. I want to see the wave crest. What do you tell a guy who does one of those Nintendo runs? "OK, good job. But you better watch, you need to ride the crest. . . . We're not riding that crest. We're dnot doing everything we need to be doing right now. We're getting better. We're getting closer. And we're gaining on it. What I'm still trying to tell the coaches, we're going to come to a game [where Nos.] 5 and 7 need help. We've got to be able to become more than one-dimensional -- that's No. 7 -- or more than two-dimensional -- that's No. 7 and No. 5 -- football team."

If nothing else, credit the old-school Stewart for invoking Nintendo instead of, I dunno, Atari.To help out, we've invited Coach Laird Hamilton to provide Devine intervention (see bottom).

2. Could senior stalwart middle linebacker Reed Williams truly consider a red-shirt? He has, under NCAA rules, two more games to play before deciding whether to punt the rest of this season and petition to return for one more because of his aching shoulders from offseason labrum surgery. It was instructive that Tuesday, when reporters asked the normally voluble Williams to stop for player-interview questioning, he rushed off saying he had a class project. Stewart said earlier that Tuesday, in advance of the Rutgers game Saturday at Mountaineer Field: "We're going to watch him and see how he does. Last Saturday he was good, but the guy's hurting. He's his own best doctor. You can take MRIs, you can take X-rays, you can see doctors. But you're your own best doctor. Every guy that's sick [or hurt] here, I tell them, 'I want you to be honest with me, becuse you're the expect on your body.' Then we make a calculated decision"

3. Could Rutgers tailback Kordell Young, earlier this week left for season-ending injured, make a return Saturday at Mountaineer Field? Tom Luicci of The Newark Star-Ledger has the details.

4. Do you see progress in these Mountaineers? Stewart does, though he seems to be admitting they were overrated at No. 8 and unready for what awaited them at the starting gate: "I saw it in Boulder. I knew in Boulder we had a chance to be a good football team. Great football team? No. Eighth in the country? No, never. Not yet. Not yet. . . . Are we back? No. Are we on the way back? Yeah. I don't think we ever lost it, we just weren't real good early. We went to East Carolina and got whacked, got tagged. I think that's all been rectified. Will we get beat again? Could. Hope not. Those two games, at East Carolina and at Boulder. . . , I think made our football team grow. I really do, I believe it. Now did it grow for the better? We'll see. We'll see."

Stew asks so many questions, he oughtta be a reporter.

5. DId you see where one of Mountaineers' fans least favorite sports writers (present company excluded) opined, with a colleague, that West Virginia and Rutgers were among college football's biggest disappointments thus far?

Finally, a Big East thought: Pitt's rousing upset over No. 10 South Florida could, in the short-term, further present a deletirous affect for the conference in the polls and perhaps even early BCS rankings. Without one dominant team, or a couple of sturdy ones, the conference appears to finally become the prophecy of skeptics years ago after the departure of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College: a mediocre football conglomeration of basketball schools. Watch the polls Sunday afternoon. If undefeated Connecticut falls at North Carolina on Saturday and tumbles from the rankings along with USF, it's quite possible that no Big East school will appear in the Top 15, Top 20. . . perhaps even the entire Top 25, though that's doubtful. See, with Louisville on the borderline  and UConn still not considered among the big boys, the league needed either West Virginia or Rutgers, or both, to remain strong alongside either USF or Pitt, or both.