West Virginia Gets an Eyeful of Ohio State

Don Nehlen figured Saturday that he had seen the best team in college football. That might have made it easier to deal with what happened to his West Virginia team at Morgantown.

“I hope that team is No. 1,” he said while shaking his head after Ohio State slammed the door on Nehlen’s 11th-ranked Mountaineers, 34-17.

Stepping out after two years as backups, Joe Germaine passed for 301 yards and two touchdowns and Michael Wiley ran for 140 yards and another score for Ohio State.

On defense, cornerback Antoine Winfield, linebacker Andy Katzenmoyer and crew throttled the high-powered West Virginia attack, limiting it to 78 yards on the ground and 310 overall.

“They have a lot of weapons to defense,” Nehlen said. “But their defense is really something special. Their offense is darn good, but we weren’t able to sustain anything and got behind. Defensively they kept wearing us down.”

David Boston returned a punt 20 yards to the Ohio State 45 to set up the go-ahead touchdown with the score tied, 3-3. Wiley then went off right tackle for 37 yards before being pushed out of bounds at the West Virginia 18.

On the next play, he went the other way, for a 10-3 Ohio State lead.

No. 13 Penn State 34, No. 21 Southern Mississippi 6--Cordell Mitchell ran for 99 yards in his first start for the Nittany Lions, who held Southern Mississippi to nine rushing yards in a victory at State College, Pa.

Mitchell led a corps of Penn State backs who ran for 255 yards. Eric McCoo, a freshman, broke a 41-yard run to set up a touchdown by Omar Easy. Fullback Mike Cerimele ran for two scores in his first start.

Kevin Thompson started at quarterback for Penn State and was in for each of the Nittany Lions’ four touchdowns, finishing 10 for 15 for 140 yards, with a 12-yard touchdown pass to Joe Nastasi that put Penn State ahead, 27-0, in the third quarter.

Minnesota 17, Arkansas State 14--Adam Bailey kicked a 17-yard field goal on the game’s last play to enable the Golden Gophers to win at Minneapolis and narrowly avoid a second successive season-opening embarrassment.

Minnesota had lost to Hawaii last season in Coach Glen Mason’s first game.

The Gophers blew a 14-0 halftime lead, fashioned in part when Tyrone Carter returned the opening kickoff 86 yards for a touchdown, and had to overcome a two-point conversion pass that was tipped into a receiver’s hands and tied the score with 4:25 to play.

They then drove the length of the field to score, helped by a 15-yard penalty when quarterback Billy Cockerham was hit out of bounds early in the drive.

Iowa 38, Central Michigan 0--The Hawkeyes apparently found a replacement for All-American return specialist Tim Dwight in Kahlil Hill, who scored on a 62-yard punt return and an 88-yard kickoff return in a victory at Iowa City.

Hill, a freshman and the son of former Buffalo Bills’ wide receiver J.D. Hill, helped jump-start an Iowa team that led, 7-0, at halftime and had difficulty moving the ball against a defense that gave up 481 yards a game last year, part of the reason the Chippewas have lost nine games in a row.

Northwestern 41, Nevada Las Vegas 7--D’Wayne Bates, who suffered a season-ending injury when he broke his right leg in last season’s opener, and then broke his left foot in spring practice, made his return a big one, catching nine passes for 156 yards and a touchdown in a victory at Evanston, Ill.

Sophomore Gavin Hoffman completed 19 of 28 passes for 265 yards, 50 of them on a touchdown hookup with Bates.