Hype Video Showdown: Backyard Brawl Edition

We've done this feature before on an occasional basis, but with the '22 season set to begin I figure it's time to make Hype Video Showdown a weekly thing.

Each week -- typically Friday, but we'll go Thursday this week because the game is tonight -- we'll spotlight one game by putting each team's creative departments head-to-head against each other. Does the creative department that digs deep to find the right tone, the right clips, the right music foreshadow a team that will lay it all out on the football field? Or does none of that matter at all and I'm just dressing it up in the name of #content?

No. 2 Notre Dame at No. 5 Ohio State is officially the biggest game of the week. There's no denying that. It's Notre Dame's third visit to the Horseshoe, ever. GameDay and ABC's Saturday Night Football will be there. If you're an unattached fan looking to watch one game and one game only, it's this one.

But the game with the most emotional stakes for the participants is undoubtedly the Backyard Brawl. 

West Virginia and Pitt -- or is it Pitt and West Virginia? -- first met in 1895 and played on an annual basis from 1900 through 2011, then quit cold turkey when WVU left the Big East for the Big 12. After a decade of jawing back and forth, they finally meet on Thursday night (7 p.m. ET, ESPN). Heinz Field -- I know they sold the naming rights to some insurance company; I don't care -- will be full... but it could be more full of blue-and-yellow Mountaineer colors, as opposed to Pitt's blue-and-yellow.

Pitt holds a 61-40-3 all-time advantage, but West Virginia won the last three, and five of the last seven, and seven of the last 10, and 14 of the last 20. Among that 20, though, was perhaps the most shocking, most devastating, most consequential upset in modern college football history: Dec. 1, 2007, when a 4-7 Pitt team stunned No. 2 WVU, 13-9 in Morgantown. 

Eleven years apart has not toned down the animosity on the 75-mile stretch of I-79 that separates Pittsburgh and Morgantown. 

And with that, we give you Hype Video Showdown.

Pittsburgh: "Sometimes, you have to BRAWL"

vs.

West Virginia: "Who will this moment belong to?"

Though WVU wins points for bringing in Pacman Jones for the narration, I have to give the edge to Pitt. What say you?