Motor City Bowl: West Virginia 49, Mississippi 38

<br>NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ Forty-two years of coaching experience and an emotional high converged in a burst of West Virginia football that Mississippi could only admire, if painfully. <br><br>For the

Friday, December 29th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ Forty-two years of coaching experience and an emotional high converged in a burst of West Virginia football that Mississippi could only admire, if painfully.

For the first 35 minutes of the Music City Bowl on Thursday, retiring coach Don Nehlen's Mountaineers were about as sharp as a team can get.

``They played extremely well,'' Mississippi coach David Cutcliffe said after the 49-38 loss. ``They executed as well as any team I've played against on offense in any bowl game I've ever been involved with.''

It seemed as if every time Mississippi was in a man-to-man defense Brad Lewis found someone wide open, and five times his receiver wound up in the end zone.

``Lewis just kept hitting them in stride,'' Cutcliffe said.

It was 40 yards to fullback Wes Ours, 11 to Khori Ivy, 35 to Antonio Brown and then 60 to Brown. And that was just in the first half, when Lewis was 7-of-7 for 216 yards and four TDs.

``This game was something,'' said Nehlen, who finished his 42-year coaching career _ 21 at West Virginia _ with 202 wins. ``I don't think we've ever had a quarterback with a better half. I've never seen our offense execute that way.''

It was 35-9 at the half and Ole Miss could only hope to make the second half their own. That hope lasted all of 18 seconds as Shawn Terry took the second-half kickoff 99 yards to make it 42-9. Five minutes later Lewis threw his fifth TD pass to make it 49-9, and Mississippi was just trying to avoid complete humiliation.

They did so thanks to the first three touchdown passes in the career of Eli Manning, who replaced senior Romaro Miller for the fourth quarter.

Manning, son of Archie Manning and brother of current NFL star Peyton Manning, threw touchdown passes of 23 yards to Jamie Armstrong, 18 yards to Omar Rayford and 16 yards to Toward Sanford.

``I wasn't really expecting a comeback,'' Manning said. ``I was just trying to score a couple of points.''

The victory not only sent Nehlen out a winner, it ended one of the most exasperating streaks of his highly successful career. The Mountaineers had lost eight consecutive bowl games.

``We're pleased as the devil to have won. We've had a long dry spell,'' Nehlen said. ``If nothing else, the jokes will disappear in Morgantown for a while. Like I say, we've never played poorly in a bowl, we've just never won any of the doggone things.''

Lewis battled a series of injuries this season and managed only eight touchdown passes all year. On Thursday, in a sort of audition for incoming coach Rich Rodriguez, who was in the stands, the junior was right on the money.

``We knew coming in that Ole Miss played a lot of man-to-man and we knew that with Khori Ivy, Antonio Brown and our tight ends that they couldn't match up with our speed,'' Lewis said. ``All that talk about next year and playing a new kind of offense, that's not in my head right now. I was giving all I had to this team, to these seniors, and especially to coach Nehlen because this is the team I'm on now.''

Nehlen has tried for a month to deflect attention from his impending retirement, but failed even with his players.

``Coach told us all week don't win for him, win for ourselves,'' said Brown, whose touchdown catches capped drives that took a cumulative five plays and 52 seconds. ``But deep down in our hearts we knew we were going to win this for the coach.''

West Virginia's victory kept the Big East Conference's record perfect against the Southeastern Conference in the three years of the bowl game.