MORGANTOWN — While surfing the net the other day, a posting of West Virginia University’s “Mount Rushmore” of sports.

Not surprisingly — in fact, almost unarguably — the four figures superimposed on the famous South Dakota site were Jerry West, Sam Huff, Don Nehlen and Patrick White.

After giving it a moment’s thought, an idea began to take short. While there may be only one true Mount Rushmore of WVU’s top athletic giants, certainly the hills are alive with the sound of the West Virginia Marching Band performing Fight Mountaineers and Hail West Virginia.

If West Virginians are, indeed, Mountaineers, then the Appalachians should have an entire range of WVU football sculptures to pay homage to its greatest.

With that in mind, let us get out our chisel and sandblaster and begin sculpting away and begin with the aptly football Mount “Rushmore”, dedicated to the school’s four finest running backs.

While there is a cast of nearly thousands to choose from, one would probably wind up with Steve Slaton, Amos Zereoue, Avon Cobourne and Noel Devine.

Now that group churned out 10.23 miles of rushing yardage during their careers and, oddly, each had his own unique style of running from Zereoue’s power to Cobourne’s stamina to Slaton’s speed to Devine’s shiftiness, they were the creme de la creme of Mountaineer running backs.

Most would put Slaton at the top of the list, but he was just fifth in career rushing yards. But he and Devine, who played one more year than Slaton, each averaged 5.9 yards per carry. Zereoue averaged 5.2 per try and Cobourne, whose 5,164 yards are the school record, averaged 4.9 carry, his 1,050 rushing attempts being nearly 300 more than any other runner.

One might need an even bigger mountain than normal to truly capture the best rushers in WVU history, for Pat White actually rushed for the second most yards in WVU history with 4,480, averaging an awe-inspiring 6.6 yards per carry.

And he did that out of the quarterback position, which made him along with Major Harris forerunners of what the game has evolved into today with offenses built around dual threat QBs.

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Mount Crushmore

If you can have a Mount Rushmore, why not a Mount Crushmore to honor West Virginia’s hardest hitters.

We’re not talking big hits. We’re talking bone crushing hits, the kind that come in a game where the Mountaineers score five touchdowns and fans leave talking about the hits not the touchdowns.

In this area, one stands alone and that is Karl Joseph, who impaled his No. 8 into the chest of too many ball carriers or receivers to recall.

Numbers tell part of the story, 208 solo tackles, 16.5 for losses from safety with 16.5 for a loss. He tossed in there nine interceptions, which speaks loudly, but not as loudly as eight forced fumbles.

It started as quickly as he did as a freshman, when in an early game one broadcaster said he was “a man among boys.” Truth was, he was “a boy among men turning them into boys.”

He didn’t tackle people. Didn’t stop people. He knocked them backwards in their tracks, another television broadcaster noting after he sent a tight end with the ball ricocheting backwards “that’s a 286-pound man”.

His inflection was that of amazement.

He didn’t just save this for game day. It was every day in practice.

“It happens every day,” his coach, Joe DeForrest, said. “A lot of times you will see (quarterback) Skyler (Howard) throw the ball to a receiver and Karl closes in and you are like, ‘Whoa, that guy might be going to Ruby (Hospital).’ The plays when you don’t have pads on you wonder what it might be like if he hit him in a live situation.”

While he really was alone in the viciousness of his contact, the eyes told you that safety Jahmile Addae wasn’t far behind him and that when Grant Wiley made tackles out of his middle linebacker spot, they echoed throughout the stadium.

But there was one offensive player who you had to put in there among the biggest hitter and it made him a fan favorite whose fame still stands in Morgantown, that being the player dubbed “The Runaway Beer Truck”, Owen Schmitt, who hit hard that he famously broke his own facemask.

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Mount (Pass) Rushmore

If you can have a Mount Rushmore and a Mount Crushmore, why not honor the great pass rushers in the program’s history with a Mount (Pass) Rushmore?

We start this with a story from far more years ago than anyone would want it to be. Shelly Poe was football’s sports information director then and one of her favorite players was defensive end Canute Curtis.

We would joke and talk about him a lot, a wonderful kid out of Long Island who really was a terror, good enough that we were referring to him as “Canute The Great”.

Well, one day with my nose in The Daily Racing Form I came across a horse named — yep, you got it — Canute The Great”. I tore the page out, gave it to Shelly Poe and she hung it in her house.

Unfortunately, the horse was far less of a rush on the track that the Canute named Curtis was as rushed against quarterbacks.

If sacks of quarterbacks produced calories when the QB was ingested, Curtis would have weighed 600 pounds. He got that many of them. The record book says with 34.5 Curtis had seven more than any other Mountaineer.

Second on the list is another fan favorite with a tale of coming from nothing, surviving on the streets in Georgia, finding a way to junior college and then into Morgantown where he simply was known as “Bruce”, which was the fans chanted as Bruce Irvin ran down quarterbacks on the way becoming a first-round draft pick and WVU Hall of Famer.

The third head up there is one whose effect on WVU football has lasted a long time. Gary Stills is third on the all-time sack list with 26 and he is also father of the player who became fourth on the list with 23.5 in Dante Stills, while Dante’s brother, Darius, became an All-American nose guard in what well may be the first family of WVU football.

But you probably have to carve Julian Miller onto the rocks as he finished second to Curtis in sacks with 27.5 and, while not as spectacular as the others, was equally effective.

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Mount Thrillmore

Certainly a mountain range filled with carvings of great players would be thrilling, so why not have one of the peaks reserved for the greatest thrills you could get from a player.

And they don’t put 60,000 people into the seats at Mountaineer Field without players who provide those thrills.

Clearly, just from the number of views his highlight reels get on social media, the most thrilling player is Tavon Austin. Don’t believe you will get much argument there.

Be it catching the football, returning punts, returning kickoffs or, even, running out of the backfield when the ball was in his hands everyone was on the edge of his seat wondering what he had up his sleeve that they hadn’t seen.

It would take a mountain to chronicle just the thrills he gave out. Here’s a few of them:

–Four kickoffs returned for touchdowns, one of 100 yards

–A 76-yard punt return for a touchdown

–An 80-yard run

–Third in career receiving TDs with 29

–A game with 215 receiving yards against Baylor, another with 187 yards against LSU and 179 yards against Maryland

–And surprisingly moved to running back from receiver against Oklahoma, he set the school’s all-time record with 344 rushing yards.

Also, up there with him goes Pat White, who turned broken play into broken hearts for the defense as he ran and scrambled his way into inventing a new way to play quarterback.

Before him, laying the groundwork for such quarterback antics, was Major Harris, who turned running the wrong way on a play into the right way as he ran through the entire Penn State team for a touchdown, then apologized to Coach Nehlen for his mistake.

And it’s hard to separate the tandem of Geno Smith and Stedman Bailey in their passing game that included a game against Baylor in which Smith three for school record 656 yards with 8 TDs, 5 of them to Bailey, who was on the receiving end of 303 of those yards in a thrill-a-second introduction to Big 12 play for the Mountaineers.

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Boot Hill

As long as we’re taking liberties with Mount Rushmore, let’s put a smaller monument as boot hill to our favorite kickers.

Right there front and center, of course, is the celebrity kicker of all-time, Pat McAfee, whose personality is going even further than some of his punts and field goals.

He’s become as much of a force backing WVU as an alumnus who hosts a classic show on ESPN while injecting finances and influence into the program.

Let us not forget, however, that he once hit a 75-yard punt, which was fifth all-time for the school, made three field goals of 50 or more yards and the third most field goals in the school’s history, while breaking more team rules than kicking records.

If his celebrity helps get him up there, Todd Sauerbrun’s punting feats (should that be “feets”?) remain still amazing, including a record 90-yard punt against Nebraska that set an NCAA record and 177 career punts he averaged 46.2 yards.

And you belong somewhere on our Boot Hill if you can beat Pitt by scoring all the points in a game as Ken Juskowich did in 1967’s 15-0 victory in the Backyard Brawl.

Finally, our Boot Hill proved to be a cemetery only for Pitt in 1975 when walk on kicker Bill McKenzie carved his face onto the canyon wall and set off one of the longest celebrations football ever saw with a closing seconds field goal to give WVU a 17-14 over a Pitt team with Tony Dorsett which would go on to win the national championship the next season.

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Mount Catchmore

You have to go through a mountain pass to get to Mount Catchmore, where the great receivers are immortalized.

It is difficult not to have the aforementioned Stedman Bailey and Tavon Austin when picking receivers to remember on the side of a mountain, and make no doubt that quarterback Geno Smith’s favorite targets are up at the top there.

But who goes after that? The list is long and deep but we’re going to grab off someone who you can’t overlook, for his heroic moment came against Pitt in 1994. He already had a 40-yard TD pass in his pocket but as the final seconds ticked off the clock in Pitt Stadium, the Panthers led, 41-40.

That set the stage for Zach Abraham to find a way to work himself free deep as Chad Johnston bought himself some time and found him for a 60-yard Backyard Brawl winning scoring heave. It was Johnston’s fourth TD pass of more than 40 yards of the game and gave him two in the final period, the 60-yarder and an 81-yard connection with Rahsaan Vanterpool.

As for the fourth face, there’s so many to choose from with Shawn Foreman and David Saunders, Kevin White and Darius Reynaud, David Sills and Gary Jennings, but somehow the pure, raw talent that Chris Henry brought to the table in the Rich Rodriguez years of the 2000s screams out for recognition.