All week, they’ve denied it. The members of the Syracuse football team have tried to convince everyone that tonight’s game against West Virginia isn’t the biggest they’ve played all season.

They’ve said how every Big East game is just as important. Whether the SU football team really believes that or not, tonight’s game in Morgantown, W.Va., could prove to be one of the Orange’s most critical games of the season.

Syracuse and West Virginia are currently the only two undefeated teams in Big East play. But there’s one major difference: At the beginning of the season, Big East coaches picked the Mountaineers to win the league. They picked the Orange to finish fourth out of six teams.

But whichever team wins tonight’s game, which kicks off at 7:30 at Mountaineer Field, will be the Big East’s only undefeated team. And that team will control its own destiny in winning the Big East Championship.

‘It’s a chance to show the nation how good we are,’ offensive lineman Jason Greene said. ‘Everyone’s probably watching to see how good West Virginia is. We have to show them that we’re good enough to beat them.’

But it’s more than a chance to show the nation that the Orange has improved. All season long, Orange players have said their ultimate goal is to win the Big East. Though disappointed about their close loss to Florida State, many of the players – specifically quarterback Perry Patterson – said it was excusable because it wasn’t a Big East game.

Now, all of the Orange’s games are in the Big East. And, as Greene said, past history shows that to win an outright conference title, a team must go undefeated in the league.

Last season, Miami and West Virginia each lost a game and split the title. But Miami beat the Mountaineers in the regular season, which gave it the tiebreaker and sent the Hurricanes to a Bowl Championship Series bowl.

‘Every conference game is a big game,’ center Matt Tarullo said. ‘We still have our goals intact. In the Big East after this week, there’s only going to be one undefeated team.’

But just because the Orange could come out of Morgantown as the league’s only undefeated team means nothing. SU still has four more conference games to play. And some of the results in the conference thus far show that the playing field is quite level.

For example, last week, a struggling Pittsburgh team defeated Boston College. The week before, the Panthers barely beat Temple – a team that’s won 13 Big East games since 1991.

‘When you look at the conference, everyone’s knocking off everyone,’ tight end Joe Kowalewski said. ‘Every conference game is like a championship game.

‘We want the BCS so bad. But (Thursday) is just another championship game. Every game’s just as important as the next.’

Even with that in mind, it seems that the annual West Virginia-Syracuse meeting means a little more. It’s a rivalry game – the winner takes the Schwartzwalder Trophy – and Mountaineers fans take little pity on opponents. Also, with Virginia Tech and Miami gone, SU and West Virginia could be two of the programs in the future that pick up the slack.

With the departure of those Big East teams, each team was left with one less conference game this year. Now, each loss could be that much more devastating. The room for error is minute.

‘If we come out and get this win, we’ll definitely be in the driver’s seat,’ Patterson said. ‘But we can’t look too far ahead.’

Published on October 20, 2004 at 12:00 pm