Ray Glier

By Halloween, West Virginia should be the most dismissed unbeaten college football team since BYU in 1984.

(OK, you might even have to include TCU and Boise State, who also play embarrassingly lame schedules).

The contempt for the Mountaineers will be coast-to-coast. The authority figures voting in the college football poll — the reporters, not the coaches — will have their fingers crossed behind their backs.

“Please lose. We don’t want to vote for you. Your schedule has the toughness of a pink ribbon.”

Marshall, Eastern Washington, Maryland, East Carolina, Mississippi State, Syracuse, UConn. Only Eastern Washington (7-5) had a winning record last season and that was in the Big Sky Conference.

When WVU gets to 7-0 — if it gets to 7-0 — there won’t be much noise.

Meanwhile, Texas plays Ohio State and the noise is cheering in the press box for teams willing to stick their jaw out. There is cheering on the sideline, too. Ohio State and Texas are ranked Nos. 1 and No. 2 in the preseason coach’s poll because of talent ... and guts.

The AP poll of reporters comes out Aug. 19. Once the ruffians, cheaters and boozers among the players stupid enough to get caught have been thrown off their teams, we will have a better idea of who’s good and who isn’t. The Mountaineers could be No. 7, maybe No. 6, in the AP poll.

One win, two wins, three wins. 48-7, 55-0, 45-17. It shouldn’t matter how impressive the Mountaineers win on their way to 7-0. It will be as if they were poured into cement. There should be no charity, thus no forward movement in the poll.

Reporters come out of the womb skeptical of mushy schedules. The voters do not eat granola and wish you well. They chew rocks and want you to prove yourself. If WVU starts No. 7, I bet they stay No. 7, even at 7-0.

There ought to be a law against schedules like this, but because there isn’t we’ll leave it to the voters to administer justice.

West Virginia will go nowhere in the polls and the same should go for TCU and Boise State if they stay spotless. Their only hope is if parity in college football creates confusion among voters because so many of the best teams have one loss.

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Remember Auburn in 2004? Skewered because of the schedule. The Tigers went unbeaten, but did not show any guts outside the SEC and were left as No. 2. They are still being scoffed at two falls later.

The voters who run the polls are going to look up at 7-0 and yawn. “How did we let these guys get so high in our poll in the first place?”

And then there will be West Virginia’s game at Louisville on Nov. 2.

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