Here's an interesting bit of second guessing history...from Rivals

What if …


Four years ago, The Dash witnessed one of the biggest upsets in recent college football history: Pittsburgh 13, West Virginia 9. The Panthers had a losing record. The Mountaineers needed only to win to play in the BCS Championship Game. They were favored by a whopping 29 points. But from the start, things went wrong for West Virginia. Star kicker Pat McAfee stunningly missed a couple of short field goals. Star quarterback Pat White was injured. And when the Panthers refused to buckle, an unfathomable result helped alter the course of college football. Four years later, with the rivals poised to play Friday, The Dash wonders: what if West Virginia had won?

A few theories:

Ohio State (23), freed from having to face the SEC speed of LSU, would have won the national title over the Mountaineers.


Tressel
Jim Tressel (24), with two national titles in five years, would have been much harder to move out last spring amid the NCAA violations on his watch. He may well have survived the storm.

Rich Rodriguez (25) would still be the coach of the Mountaineers. The school would have done whatever it took to keep a guy who brought them to the brink of a title. The Big East would have more cache – and maybe more members. Arizona would still be searching for a new coach.

Nobody would ever have heard of sunny Bill Stewart. And Dana Holgorsen (26) would be the rookie head coach at Pitt.

It would have been a heck of a recruiting battle between Rodriguez and Tressel for Terrelle Pryor (27). If Rodriguez had won the battle, the tattoo disaster may never have hit Ohio State.

Les Miles (28) would be the coach at Michigan. Without a national title to play for in ‘07, he would have left his damn strong LSU team for the Wolverines when they called. Michigan never crash lands, never goes on probation, and in tandem with Ohio State keeps the Big Ten from slipping off the sport’s top tier.

His replacement at LSU, Bobby Petrino (29), would be winning big while Arkansas struggles in the post-Houston Nutt Era under Jimbo Fisher (30), who left his successor gig at Florida State to take a big-money offer from the Razorbacks.

Without a successor in place, Bobby Bowden would have been given one more year in 2010 before giving way to Gus Malzahn (31).

And the SEC (32) would not have five straight titles.