Pat White is one of the greatest college football players of all time.
The only bummer of his football career is that he wasn’t at the same level in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins.
A lot of time has passed since his Miami tenure, though, which makes it much more fun simply to look back and remember White’s greatness at West Virginia.
The Mountaineers are doing just that on Saturday when they retire White’s number. He wore No. 5 for WVU and made so many plays that just made jaws drop around the college football world.
Pat White’s West Virginia Career
There are so many ways to sum up White’s greatness at West Virginia.
One is that at the end of each of his four seasons, he won a bowl game.
Another is that he went 35-8 as a starting quarterback.
And then how about those stats? He threw for 6,049 yards and ran for another 4,480 yards.
Sacks in college football are negative rushing yardage for the quarterback, and yet White still averaged 6.5 yards per carry at West Virginia.
Combined, he had 103 touchdowns between his passes and his runs in his time with the Mountaineers.
“He was the guy that you thought you had a good game plan for,” NFL analyst Devin McCourty told Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio. “On paper, everything was covered and you knew how they were going to attack you. Then the moment came to make the play on him, and it never happened. He made you miss or he made the great throw against good coverage. He was unstoppable.”
Pat White’s Dolphins Career
The Dolphins made White a second-round pick in the 2009 NFL Draft, No. 44 overall.
The NFL was starting to be more intrigued by running quarterbacks, and so the idea of the scrambling White, and his prodigious college career, got him chosen that highly.
He appeared in 13 games as a rookie for the Dolphins, not as a starting quarterback but just to get little snippets of action.
He had a nasty head injury at the end of his rookie season that knocked him unconscious on the field, and he wouldn’t play in an NFL regular season game again.
White played in the UFL and the CFL after that, and Washington also gave him a brief NFL contract that didn’t amount to anything more.
He’s a perfect example of why it’s not always necessary to remember a player for what he did in the NFL.
For four years in Morgantown, White was a superhero. He did things that pretty much every other player in college football history could only have dreamed of. White was a generational college football talent, and West Virginia is recognizing that on Saturday with his number retirement.
Ex-Dolphins QB Has Number Retired For Legendary College Football Career