(I didn't want to scare anyone with an actual picture of Chuck Landon)
Seemingly unhappy in just being a Marshall beat writer for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, Landon has started to devote more and more time to the Mountaineers. He started with topics that had ancillary connections to Marshall, such as the Coal Bowl series, present and future. That led to more and more focus solely on Oliver Luck, skewing further from his original topic with each passing article. This past weekend, he reached a crescendo, penning a column that mentions Marshall and the Thundering Herd only twice. Want to know what really gets mentioned? Oliver Luck -- 10 times, in fact.
In the past, I have accused Mr. Landon of being staunchly pro-Marshall. That's not a big leap, mind you, as this is a man that left the press box to celebrate with the Marshall team and fans towards the end of this past annual edition of the Coal Bowl. Not to cover the celebration or interview players and coaches, oh no -- to take part in the celebration, white suit and all. Now, it goes without saying that WVU spoiled that celebration by staging a dramatic comeback, but I think Mr. Landon's antics are pathetic enough to warrant me mentioning them several times.
So, with that in mind, we're left with his column today, which is nothing short of a desperate attempt to disparage WVU by any means possible. This falls right in line of his pattern of writing stories about WVU that have nothing to do with the actual football game played between the Thundering Herd and Mountaineers. Instead, Mr. Landon crafts articles about spider-pads, practice time, post-game handshakes, Luck's quotes on the series as a whole, and now, hiring and hiring practices. And with his antics painted clearly above, that's quite a leap for someone with absolutely zero journalistic objectivity. There's a saying about stones and those in glass houses, though I would venture Mr. Landon has never heard it.
Still, with WVU and the Big East expanding horizons and finally ready to leave Marshall and this atrocious series of games in the past, Mr. Landon has acquired a very acute sense of not only WVU's hiring process, but also WVU's actual hire, Dana Holgorsen. Here is Mr. Landon's sage, passive-aggressive advice to the school up north:
That's a tall order despite Luck's rhetoric that Holgorsen is "one of the outstanding coaches in college football today." I wonder if Luck would have thought that if he had been seated in Edwards Stadium on Oct. 29, 2008? That's the night Holgorsen's high-powered Houston offense didn't show up in a 37-23 loss to Marshall that wasn't nearly as close as the score.
Ah yes, the time Marshall beat Houston. I suppose since Marshall can't beat West Virginia, a win more than two years ago over a school Dana Holgorsen no longer coaches has to be good enough. So Mr. Landon has that going for him...which is nice.
Mr. Landon, just stick to covering Marshall and leave WVU to the real journalists.
[dog mullet image via t3.gstatic.com]