Home » Mountaineers » Coal Bowl: Food for thought

Another Friday night means high school football is here again in the Mountain State! Wait…what’s that? The two largest universities are playing each other on national television that night and thus taking attention from the prep athletes under those same Friday night lights? Though it isn’t visible on the surface, there’s a greater sense of history repeated at play with the entire situation.Anyone who has studied the history of West Virginia can tell you that despite vast amounts of mineral resources, the state has traditionally been among the poorest in the country. When you take a deeper look at how this happens, one notices that this happens because many out-of-state interests have come into West Virginia and used this land, its people and most of all its resources (specifically, a four-letter resource of the bituminous variety) to make themselves very wealthy while leaving little of that wealth to stay in West Virginia. Now, in the 21^st century the same thing is happening again and in entirely modern ways. Two prime examples have now happened within the last couple weeks.

Last week, West Virginia University and nine other schools took part in the unveiling of Nike’s Pro Combat line of uniforms. These are intended to draw special interest in rivalry games…or to sell more merchandise…or both. Nike designed West Virginia’s to pay homage to the state’s coal mining heritage with touches of the design intended to serve as a tip of the cap to miners who’ve toiled hard under the Earth in our state’s signature industry. This will surely generate a generous slice of revenue for Nike and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. They’re pretty shrewd about finding new streams of income after all these years. But will any of that money see its way toward causes that help those miners and their families. Not that Nike has an obligation to do so, but I doubt they’ll send any of those profits in the direction of West Virginia miners after using their plight and imagery to evoke enough goodwill among Mountaineer fans to sell some jerseys, T-shirts and hats.

Then you take a look at the WVU-Marshall game on Friday night. We all know it isn’t either university’s choice to play the game on a Friday night. That’s dictated by television contracts, and more specifically a certain cable sports behemoth with a four-letter name. When you look at the situation as a whole, that sports network is the only one that stands to win out of everyone involved. The game will probably sell out, but it would’ve done so with these two teams even if they’d played on a Wednesday morning. High school games will either move to Thursday or Saturday and stand to see fewer fans no matter when the game is played other than Friday. Fans that work on Friday won’t be as interested to be out at a football game on Thursday while Saturday boasts a pretty impressive slate of college football games on television that’ll keep more than a few people at home. The games that stay on Friday will surely see smaller attendances and smaller gate receipts. But the four-letter sports network will do just fine, because they’re using a West Virginia resource (WVU-Marshall) to extract profits from the state and damage another resource (high school football) in the process. And ironically enough…the college game is called the Friends of Coal Bowl, so again coal becomes involved in the extraction of riches. Just another way someone from out of state is making money on something related to West Virginia without regard to the collateral impacts.