'82 Gator Bowl Recap
December 13, 2003 07:06 PM | General
December 13, 2003
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – West Virginia goes to a bowl game in 1969 and the very next day Coach Jim Carlen packs his bags for Texas Tech.
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| Bobby Bowden faced West Virginia for the only time in the 1982 Gator Bowl -- West Virginia's first Gator Bowl appearance. (WVU Sports Communications) |
Six years later in 1975, Bobby Bowden takes the Mountaineers to the Peach Bowl where they defeat North Carolina State, 13-10. Less than a month later, Bowden is in an airplane on his way to Tallahassee, Fla., to take over the Florida State program.
So when Don Nehlen led West Virginia to a surprising upset victory over Florida in the 1981 Peach Bowl, naturally West Virginians were worried about losing another coach.
Based on what Nehlen’s predecessors did, and that fact that his close friend Bob Marcum -- then athletic director at South Carolina -- was turning on the charm, West Virginians had every reason in the world to be concerned about seeing another coach head down the pike.
Nehlen went as far as to schedule a trip to South Carolina to visit the campus when Governor Jay Rockefeller stepped in. There would be more money for Nehlen and greater job security; for years West Virginia coaches were only issued one-year contracts because of state law. After enduring a miserable 4-7 season in 1974, the one-year contract was one of the big reasons Bowden decided to take the Florida State job after the 1975 season.
Nehlen ultimately decided to stay at West Virginia. Director of Athletics Fred Schaus listed three reasons why:
More money and the fact that Nehlen’s wife Merry Ann was becoming comfortable in Morgantown were two very compelling reasons to remain, but the fact that he also had a pretty good football team returning for 1982 proved too tough to walk away from.
Nehlen’s defense that completely shut down a good Florida team was virtually intact, including terrific linebackers Darryl Talley and Dennis Fowlkes. And while he was losing a very good quarterback in Oliver Luck, his replacement had an even higher ceiling in Jeff Hostetler, a Penn State transfer.
In just two short years Nehlen had turned one of college football’s 10 worst programs into a Top 20 contender. When West Virginia fired Frank Cignetti after the ’79 season the safe money was on former Colorado coach Bill Mallory landing the job. Mallory was once secretly approached by WVU athletic director Dick Martin in the summer of 1979 to see if he was interested in coaching the team if Cignetti was not well enough to do it; Cignetti, suffering from cancer, was eventually able to beat the disease.
Nehlen only came on the radar screen when Martin was persuaded by an athletic administrator from another school to take a hard look at the Michigan recruiting coordinator. The man selling Nehlen to Martin was Bob Marcum.
“When I got this job people said, ‘Who the hell is Don Nehlen?’ I had no name,” Nehlen told Pittsburgh reporter Ron Cook back in 1982. “I was a nobody. I’d pick up hitchhikers on campus and they’d ask me if I was going to the game on Saturday. I’d tell them, ‘I think so, but I may not go if it rains.’
“That happened several times my first two years here,” he added.
It didn’t happen in 1982.
Just nine months after engineering the Florida win, Nehlen pulled off an even bigger shocker when his team went into Norman, Okla., and defeated No. 9-rated Oklahoma in the ‘82 opener.
Those two victories completely erased the stinging memories of the late 1970s, when West Virginia was regularly losing by 30 points or more to rivals Pitt and Penn State while at the same time dropping games to Villanova, Temple and Boston College.
Nehlen’s first season saw the Mountaineers turn in a solid 6-6 effort. In 1981, West Virginia went 9-3 and ‘How ‘Bout Them ‘Eers’ became the catch phrase in the Mountain State.
Meanwhile, a resurrection was also taking place in Tallahassee, Florida. Bowden’s first year saw Florida State turn a 3-8 finish in 1975 into a more positive 5-6 mark in 1976.
In 1977, Bowden led FSU to a 10-2 record, a big victory over arch rival Florida, and a Tangerine Bowl win over Texas Tech to finish No. 14 in the country.
Bowden led FSU to back-to-back Orange Bowl berths in 1979 and 1980 on the way to a 21-3 two-year mark. After a down year in 1981 Bowden’s second wave of recruits began blossoming in 1982. Florida State had one of the country’s most explosive offenses led by running backs Ricky Williams and Greg Allen, and a quartet of game breaking receivers in Tony Johnson, Jessie Hester, Dennis McKinnon and Hassan Jones. Bowden also had a terrific tight end to work the middle in Zeke Mowatt.
Making Bowden’s offense work was the two-headed quarterback duo of Kelly Lowrey and Blair Williams. FSU owned a 24-7 victory over Miami and it appeared the Seminoles were headed to the Orange bowl for the third time in four years before losing badly to LSU 55-21 in the regular season finale. LSU went to the Orange Bowl and Florida State had to settle for the Gator Bowl to play West Virginia.
And while Florida State may have taken a while to warm up to the idea of spending the holidays in Jacksonville, Fla., West Virginia was ecstatic to be there.
After beating Oklahoma, Maryland and Richmond to begin the season, West Virginia nearly pulled off the biggest upset in school history when it had No. 1-ranked Pitt on the ropes heading into the fourth quarter. But the Panthers, behind All-American quarterback Dan Marino, was able to erase a 13-9 deficit and defeat the Mountaineers 16-13.
West Virginia’s only other loss in 1982 came in Morgantown to Penn State – the eventual national champion. The Mountaineers finished the season winning its last four games to crack the Top 10 for the first time since 1975. Five of West Virginia’s opponents that year went to bowl games. Nehlen was taking a team to back-to-back bowl games for the first time in WVU history. Not even Bowden had done that.
Florida State fell out of the rankings following the loss to LSU.
Leading up to the Gator Bowl, the obvious story line was Bowden’s rematch against his old school. Bobby played down rematch in the press, but privately he wanted to beat West Virginia very badly.
How could he not?
Still fresh in his memory was the telephone call he received eight years earlier late at night after his team lost to Pitt 31-14 in 1974. “Coach Bowden, I’m going to kill you.”
When Bowden asked who was on the other line, the caller hung up. “It was probably somebody at a party who was drunk and lost some money and said, ‘I’ll get that guy,” the coach recalled five years later.
There were also “For Sale” signs placed in his yard and a couple of misguided students hung Bowden in effigy in front of Woodburn Hall on the main campus. Bowden made up his mind then that he was going to win big in 1975 and get the hell out of town.
However, not all of Bowden’s memories at West Virginia were bad. He spent a total of 10 years in Morgantown as both an assistant and head coach, and raised all six of his children there. Two sons (Tommy and Terry) played at WVU, Tommy married a WVU cheerleader from Morgantown, and daughter Robyn married Morgantown native Jack Hines, a WVU player.
“It’s a great place to live except for the snow and to coach,” Bowden once said.
By 1982 with West Virginia winning football games once again, Mountaineer fans were no longer going after their own. Fortunately, Don Nehlen was able to channel some of that anger outward.
Heading into the Florida State game, Nehlen’s big concern was getting his team properly prepared for the school’s biggest football game since facing Georgia Tech in the 1954 Sugar Bowl.
Nehlen remembered how well prepared North Carolina was against Michigan in the ‘79 Gator Bowl when he was still an assistant for the Wolverines, and he decided to give Tar Heels coach Dick Crum a telephone call for some advice.
Crum told Nehlen that he took his team down to Daytona Beach early for the game and practiced at a local high school field. He let his team go to the beaches and get all of the fun out of the way before they got down to business in Jacksonville.
Instead of practicing the normal seven days in Florida, Nehlen took his team down three days earlier. That proved to be a big mistake. Nehlen’s team peaked too early. He realized that Tuesday night two days before the Gator Bowl.
“After the practice, I told my coaches, ‘I’ve never seen the team sharper. We’re ready to play the game tonight. Now what in the heck are we going to do with them for the next 48 hours?’” Nehlen later recalled in his book I’m Nobody Special.
Bobby Bowden’s brain was working overtime, too. Instead of starting Lowrey, who finished the regular season completing 113 of 217 passes for 1,671 yards and 11 touchdowns, Bowden was going to go with senior Blair Williams as a surprise starter. Williams was no slouch, completing 73 of 121 passes for 1,084 yards and nine touchdowns.
Bowden was also going to give the bulk of the carries to sophomore running back Greg Allen; the team’s leading rusher that year was Ricky Williams who ran 134 times for 857 yards and three touchdowns. Allen, however, led the Seminoles with 20 rushing touchdowns.
When the monsoons hit Jacksonville right before the game, Bowden’s decision to start Williams was a stroke of genius. As Bowden explained after the game, Williams had bigger hands than Lowrey and that enabled him to throw the football better in the rain.
West Virginia’s Jeff Hostetler had a terrible time dealing with the poor weather conditions and finished the game completing just 10 of 28 passes for 118 yards. He was intercepted twice and was sacked three times.
There were other bad signs for West Virginia.
The Mountaineers took the game’s opening kickoff and marched 77 yards to the FSU 19. The drive stalled and WVU was forced to try a 35-yard field goal. No problem. WVU had the nation’s most accurate kicker in Paul Woodside, whose 28 field goals set an NCAA record for the most in one season. Not only was he money in the bank, but even Woodside’s misses were spectacular. A 52-yarder that would have tied the Pitt game with no time left on the clock nicked the bottom of the cross bar.
Woodside lined up to attempt the kick, the ball was snapped, he kicked it and the ball traveled upward all of about 10 feet before it was blocked by a Florida State defender. That was the first time Woodside had ever had a field goal attempt blocked.
Minutes later, another West Virginia drive stalled and the Mountaineers were forced to punt from their own 28. Dependable Steve Superick went back to punt and it was blocked.
Meanwhile, Florida State’s Billy Allen returned a kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown – the first time West Virginia’s special teams allowed an opponent to take a kickoff the distance in more than two years.
Just before the half, Florida State was able to score a late touchdown when Dennis McKinnon somehow managed to haul in a 27-yard pass from Williams in double coverage. That score turned a close 10-3 Florida State lead into substantial 14-point halftime advantage.
“The touchdown pass right at the end of the first half really hurt us,” Nehlen admitted.
Bad things continued for West Virginia in the third quarter.
West Virginia’s exciting kick returner Willie Drewery was easily the fastest player on the field. When he caught a Florida State punt at his own 11, maneuvered free of the Florida State defense and broke into the clear up the far sideline there was no doubt West Virginia was going to score a touchdown.
But Drewery came up lame at the FSU seven, the victim of a pulled hamstring.
West Virginia tried three cracks at the end zone and had to settle for a Paul Woodside 32-yard field goal try to cut Florida State’s lead to 13 points. True to form, Woodside missed the field goal and any gas left in West Virginia’s tank was gone.
“The punt return early in the third quarter was typical of the entire game,” said Nehlen. “Willie pulls a muscle on the play or he scores. Then we don’t get any points out of it. I don’t know if it would have changed the game but it sure would have been a great help.”
Allen scored two third-quarter touchdowns to turn the game into a Florida State rout.
It wasn’t until backup Kevin White found Darrell Miller in the end zone for a 26-yard TD pass with just 51 seconds left in the game that West Virginia finally hit pay dirt.
Florida State ran out the clock, and Bobby Bowden was carried off the field having beaten his former employer 31-12.
“I get no thrill whatsoever in the fact that we beat West Virginia,” Bowden said after the game. “I am happy because we won the Gator Bowl. I spent 10 years up there and those are good people.
Added Bowden: “It was our environment tonight,” alluding to the rain.
And while the wet weather was certainly a factor, Nehlen narrowed his team’s troubles down to two specific areas: special teams and Florida State’s defense.
“Our special teams did not play good at all and we did not execute on offense. Boy their backs are good, too,” he said.
Allen finished as the game’s MVP, rushing 15 times for 138 yards and two touchdowns. Williams handled the rain just fine, completing 16 of 30 passes for 202 yards and a touchdown.
It was Bowden’s only game against West Virginia, and it came in the Mountaineers’ first-ever Gator Bowl appearance. Nehlen, WVU’s all-time winningest coach, took two more teams to the Gator Bowl in 1989 and 1997. Rich Rodriguez, who played in the 1982 Gator Bowl, brings WVU back for a fourth time next month.
Scoring Summary
FS – Hall 20 FG
WV – Woodside 48 FG
FS – Allen 95 kickoff return (Hall kick)
WV – Woodside 34 FG
FS – McKinnon 27 pass from Williams (Hall kick)
FS – Allen 29 run (Hall kick)
FS – Allen 1 run (Hall kick)
WV – Miller 26 pass from White (Conversion failed)
Individual Statistics
Rushing: WV – Mullen 2-42, Wolfley 7-32, Walczak 7-30, Gray 10-27, Hostetler 9-24, Beck 4-7, Total 41-155; FS – G. Allen 15-138, McKinnon 1-65, Williams 10-25, B. Allen 3-21, Williams 2-7, Jones 1-1, Burnett 1-1, Total 34-259.
Passing: WV – Hostetler 10-28-2-118-0, White 4-6-0-90-1, Total 14-34-2-208-1; FS – Williams 16-30-1-202-1, Lowrey 0-1-0-0-0, Jones 0-1-0-0-0, Total 16-32-1-202-1.
Receiving: WV – Miller 5-100, Raugh 4-60, Brown 1-18, Hollins 1-13, Gray 2-12, Total 14-208; FS – Thompson 2-41, McKinnon 2-36, Mobley 4-34, Jones 3-29, Williams 2-26, Allen 1-15, Burnett 1-13, Bowden 1-8, Total 16-202.
Attendance: 80,913
