Sweet as Sugar: The 70th Anniversary of West Virginia’s Sugar Bowl Season – West Virginia University Athletics

This group of players helped West Virginia win seven football games in 1952 and crack the Associated Press top 20 rankings for the first time in school history. With nearly everyone returning, even greater things were expected of Lewis’ fourth team in 1953. 

A couple of events away from the playing field greatly impacted West Virginia’s season. The first occurred in January of that year when the NCAA abolished the free substitution rule allowing the use of two-platoon football, first introduced by Michigan.

Lewis had taken great advantage of the two-platoon system by developing two fully intact units of offensive and defensive players. Some of those impacted, such as safety Bob Snider, linebacker Don Wilson and defensive back Bill Jarrett, excelled specifically on defense and were relegated to the bench in 1953 because the players in front of them were considered much better offensive players.

“We go into our second year in 1953 and we’ve got 21 of 22 starters back,” Wyant once recalled. “The NCAA changed the rules and 10 of those kids couldn’t play. You couldn’t get into the game. You almost had to die to get out of the game.”

Then, later that spring, seven key members of the Southern Conference – Clemson, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Duke, NC State and Wake Forest – announced at the league meetings held at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, that they were leaving immediately. The Southern Conference’s two football powers, Clemson and Maryland, were adamantly opposed to a conference-wide decision not to participate in bowl games, and when both accepted bowl invitations in 1951, they were effectively blackballed by the league.

Maryland didn’t play a single Southern Conference opponent in 1952 while Clemson faced just one – rival South Carolina – and both spent the year exploring their options. Clemson’s and Maryland’s solution to their dilemma was to join North Carolina, NC State, Duke, Wake Forest and South Carolina in new league, which became known as the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Ironically, two of the leading members of the league’s anti-bowl delegation, North Carolina and Duke, opted to join forces with Maryland and Clemson. Virginia was later added that fall to make eight schools, while West Virginia and Virginia Tech remained under heavy consideration as its ninth and 10th members.

Naturally, West Virginia was caught off guard when the seceding schools announced their departures and WVU athletic director Legs Hawley spent the rest of the year walking a fine line between supporting the current conference and putting out feelers to the new league. 

But neither West Virginia nor Virginia Tech could garner enough support for a variety of reasons. In West Virginia’s case, the public explanation given was the great distance from Morgantown to the other schools in the ACC. The city didn’t have access to a fully equipped airport nor an adequate highway system, making weekly road trips to West Virginia unpractical.

Privately, WVU officials suspected the school’s land-grant institution status also had something to do with the decision, along with a festering dispute with Maryland, which began when the Terps called into question the eligibility status of some of West Virginia’s wartime players in 1947 and continued in 1951 when WVU retaliated by supporting the Southern Conference’s anti-bowl legislation.

“(Maryland coach) Jim Tatum was not a fan of West Virginia,” late Morgantown Post sports editor Tony Constantine recalled in 2001. “Maryland was invited to play in the (Sugar Bowl), and at the time, it had to be approved by vote from the other conference members and WVU refused to approve. Tatum never forgot that.”

Duke, North Carolina, Wake Forest and Clemson were not part of West Virginia’s annual football slate, but Maryland was, and removing the Terps from the schedule eliminated a major obstacle to having a great season.