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The West Virginia Mountaineers and Pittsburgh Panthers have a true rivalry, one of college football's oldest, but it was interrupted as a yearly meet by realignment terrorism within the sport.
While West Virginia & Pennsylvania are separate states, Morgantown and Pittsburgh are just 70 miles apart. For context, the distance from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia—two cities that do share a state—is 305 miles.
The proximity made them perfect rivals, which is why the game was first played in 1895, a decade before the forward pass was legalized and at a time when teams still traveled slowly by train wherever they had to go.
While the game they call the Backyard Brawl was pushed off the annual calendar, the schools have renewed the contract multiple times over the last several seasons as an out-of-conference game. Another generation of fans is getting to experience the Folk nature of a real intercollegiate rivalry and, if the sport has its old magic, they will pass it down to those who come after them.
Part of the heritage of this game is that it was picked to become a landmark event both for college football and the development of commercial radio in the United States. It was 1921, at the schools' 17th meeting, when the Brawl entered American history as the first commercial broadcast of a college football game.
KDKA-Pittsburgh was the country's first federally licensed commercial radio station. As part of their expanding business horizon the station decided to make Pitt/WVU its first live football game.
At that time nearly all radio programming was created to sell radio components and radios to the audience. That was so they could buy and build more radios and listen to more to KDKA. The entertainment was purely a lure for the product itself in this era before sponsorship and commercial advertising emerged as radio's primary revenue drivers. A ferociously contested college football game looked like as strong an entertainment option as the station was likely to get hold of, so they set it up.
The “First Station in the Nation" had hired engineer Harold Arlin as a part-time broadcaster and put him on the game call. Arlin called the primitive microphone that he talked into, which looked like a tomato can lined w/felt, his "mushophone." Almost everything about this venture was new to everyone involved.
At one point during the Pitt/Nebraska game later in that same season Arlin, caught up in the timeless excitement of college football, bellowed so thunderously into the can after a Pitt touchdown that the modulator popped off his equipment and the game went off the air for several minutes as the engineers scrambled to fix it.
But during that first broadcast in 1921 Pittsburgh—coached by the legendary Pop Warner—beat West Virginia at Forbes Field with Arlin on the call. It was the beginning of powerful and lucrative relationship between college football and commercial radio. The sport and its enormous popularity would force the industry forward in multiple ways, from its technical and commercial aspects, to the art of the play-by-play call, which has been a popular performance medium ever since.
Radio and college football blew up right alongside each other as mass-entertainment mediums during the Roaring Twenties. While universities across the country built on-campus stadiums to hold the colossal autumn crowds that assembled to watch their games, radio went from 400,000 units in American homes in 1921, to 1.2 million by 1923, 3.6 million by 1924, and 10.8 million by 1926. After 1924, more than 2-million radios were sold every year for the rest of the decade until the country was saturated with the technology.
College Football and its rivalries are inseparable from American history and culture in unique ways, and this connection to the commercial radio industry is another example of that.
BONUS STORY:
In 1922 a Pitt sophomore on the call for KDKA secretly had $100 cash riding on the outcome of the Brawl. That was back when $100 cash was some serious shit. The stipend from his parents may have arrived just in time.
The overwrought undergrad toted his microphone up and down the sideline all afternoon, sometimes tangling the cord in the legs of players along the bench, and was nearly out on the field calling out the action for the listening audience.
With Pitt trailing by a field goal late, the Panthers mounted a desperate drive. The Panthers were on the verge of punching it in for a scintillating victory when the ball popped loose near the goal line and was recovered by West Virginia.
"THE GODDAMN BONEHEAD FUMBLED IT!" he shouted into the mushophone, a call that went out over the air live.
Pitt lost the game, and the undergrad did not call another game for KDKA.
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