Good Luck!
June 21, 2004 10:00 AM | General
June 21, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – There has never been a football player in West Virginia University history that has combined athletics and academics quite like quarterback Oliver Luck.
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| QB Oliver Luck combined athletics and academics like no other athlete in WVU history. (WVU Sports Communications) |
The Cleveland native not only finished his career in 1981 as one of the school’s most prolific passers, he was also a two-time academic All-American in 1980 and 1981, was picked by the National Football Foundation as one its 10 scholar-athletes making the keynote speech at its banquet, and was selected as one of Today’s Top Five, an award presented for scholastics by the NCAA.
He was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship after earning a 3.96 overall grade point average; his only ‘B’ coming in calculus during the fall semester of his freshman year.
Luck’s academic prowess earned mention in some of America’s most prominent newspapers including a page-one spread in the New York Times prior to WVU’s meeting against No. 4-ranked Pitt in 1981. Times writer Gordon S. White Jr. compared Luck to former NBA all-star Bill Bradley and Los Angeles Rams quarterback Pat Haden: the two intellectual jocks of the day.
Yet it was Luck’s football abilities that most Mountaineer fans remember. And he was the quarterback responsible for turning around West Virginia’s woeful football fortunes.
The 6-foot-2, 195-pound signal caller was the Cleveland Touchdown Club high school player of the year in 1977 playing at St. Ignatius, but he was overshadowed in Ohio prep circles by Miami Trace and Ohio State signee Art Schilichter.
Neither Ohio State nor nearby Michigan recruited Luck, whose college choices came down to Harvard, Yale and West Virginia.
“I was different than a lot of guys because my decision came down to some of the Ivy League schools,” Luck said recently. “It was more of do I want to play Division I football? For an 18-year-old, that was an attractive pitch because you’re more interested in football than going to school.”
Luck became part of the so-called ‘Cleveland Connection’ recruited by assistant coach Gary Stevens. In addition to Luck, there were linebackers Delbert Fowler and Darryl Talley, running backs Curlin Beck and Eldridge Dixon, and linemen Frank Kinczel and Pat Conochan to name a few.
“At one point we had seven or eight starters from Cleveland,” he said.
Luck says Stevens, later offensive coordinator for the Miami Dolphins, was a very persuasive recruiter. “Half of recruiting is getting the high school coach to buy into the concept because the kid would get advice from his parents and then the coach. (Stevens) was a long-time Cleveland guy and he knew the coaches very well.”
Yet Luck admits Stevens and WVU head coach Frank Cignetti had to overcome several obstacles to land him. For one, the Mountaineers were coming off back-to-back losing seasons in 1976 and 1977. And perhaps most detrimental was West Virginia’s horrible facilities.
“I’m not even sure they took us to old Mountaineer Field on our recruiting trip,” he said. “They spent more time driving around the old golf course saying ‘just envision the new Mountaineer Stadium out there. Look, here are some drawings.’”
“'Well where do you play in the meantime?'” Luck asked them.
“We’ll show you that later.”
Luck says the reason that WVU was able to attract some quality prospects, including running back Robert Alexander (the nation’s No. 1 recruit in 1977), was the fact that the coaches were able to promise playing time early.
“For the bulk of the guys they were saying, ‘Come on down and play early. You don’t need to ride the bench for two or three years at Ohio State or Michigan or maybe not play at all.’ I’d rather start on a 6-5 team then be a backup on an 11-1 team,” he admitted.
For Luck, it wasn’t too long before he cracked West Virginia’s lineup. As a true freshman in 1978, he came out of fall camp as the team’s No. 2 quarterback behind Maryland transfer Mark “Dutch” Hoffman.
Hoffman and West Virginia struggled to a 1-2 start and Luck got his first big break in the California game after the Mountaineers fell behind 28-13 in the third quarter. Luck came into the game and marched West Virginia right down the field 57 yards for a touchdown. He also ran the football into the end zone for the two-point conversion to close Cal’s lead to 28-21. The Bears won the game, but Oliver Luck won the respect of the WVU coaching staff and his teammates.
He also saw action against Syracuse and Virginia Tech before a broken collarbone against Penn State ended his season. His performance was enough for Cignetti to award him the starting job as a sophomore in 1979 running West Virginia’s unorthodox veer offense.
“Nobody ran the veer unless you were living in Texas or something,” said Luck. “Up here it was a bizarre offense.
“There was the veer and then there was the veer,” Luck continued. “Frank did some odd things with it but they did throw the football. Dan Kendra had great numbers relative to that era because the passing game has really made a lot of progress since the 1970s and 1980s. It was actually kind of fun looking back on it.”
But things weren’t fun for Cignetti, who in addition to having three straight losing seasons, was also suffering from a rare form of cancer. Luck said Cignetti’s poor health became more apparent during the 1979 season.
“You could physically see it his second year. He would just get physically exhausted out there,” said Luck. “The poor guy was suffering from cancer and we admired the guy tremendously for being out there and just getting up in the morning and coming to practice. He was struggling and that had an affect on the team.
“He really did an unbelievable job. He had tremendous intestinal fortitude to go out there and do what he did. He is a good man and I really respect him,” said Luck of Cignetti, who managed to beat the disease and become a highly successful Division II coach at Indiana, Pa.
The quarterback passed for 213 yards and a touchdown in the ’79 season opener against Temple and had 228 yards of total offense against Tulane, but West Virginia once again couldn’t get over the hump and finished the year with its fourth straight losing record. Luck believes the combination of Cignetti’s illness and the veer offense was probably his undoing.
“Clearly the veer wasn’t the right offense,” said Luck. “For Robert Alexander, the top running back in the history of the state … there was some talent there. Frank wasn’t running the right system but he had some very good coaches there. Nick Saban was there. Gary Tranquill was there. Joe Daniels went on to coach all over the place in the NFL as did Gary. There was also Rick Trickett.
“Why don’t coaches work out? Why didn’t Bobby Bowden do better at WVU? Who knows? There are a lot of things that happen,” said Luck.
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West Virginia didn’t renew Cignetti’s contract after the 1979 season and hired Michigan recruiting coordinator Don Nehlen, who had head coaching experience at Bowling Green.
“Nehlen was full of piss and vinegar when he was young,” Luck chuckled. “He came in and it was a my-way-or-the-highway kind of deal. As the years went on he mellowed as all coaches do. He was a lot tougher than Frank; Frank was a lot more laidback.”
Nehlen didn’t inherit a great deal of talent, but Luck maintains there were some good football players at WVU when he took over the program, “He had some decent players … he didn’t have great talent. Keep in mind the year I got drafted (1982) I was the only guy who got drafted from WVU. Penn State had like 12 guys and Pitt had seven or eight. So clearly against those two schools we were overmatched.”
But Luck and Alexander thrived in Nehlen’s pro offense that utilized the ‘I’ formation.
“Believe me we were all happy when the ‘I’ came back when Nehlen came in,” said Luck. “Everyone was familiar with it and it was really more suited to having a big, bruising fullback and a good tailback. In the veer you needed wishbone personnel, which is tough to get; it’s tough to get that much speed.”
In 1980, Alexander ran for more than 1,000 yards and Luck passed for nearly 2,000 and 19 touchdowns in leading West Virginia to a 6-6 record – the school’s first non-losing season in five years. “We ended up 6-6 and we probably could have gone 8-4 with one or two breaks,” said Luck.
Nehlen’s second season in 1981 put West Virginia football on the map. With Alexander gone to graduation, Nehlen put the offense solely on Luck’s shoulders with a controlled, short passing game. The senior responded with nearly 2,500 yards through the air and 16 touchdowns. His best game came in the ’81 regular season finale against Syracuse when he completed 34 of 48 pass attempts for 360 yards and two touchdowns in an upset loss. Despite the loss to Syracuse, West Virginia was invited to play Florida in the Peach Bowl and pulled off one of the greatest upset victories in school history, stunning the heavily favored Gators 26-6.
“That was kind of the benchmark game for the program … it really was,” Luck said.
Luck finished his career passing for 5,765 yards and 43 touchdowns. He also ran for 517 yards and scored 11 more TDs. Yet he is most pleased that he left the program as a senior in 1981 in far better shape than it was in when he came in 1978.
“We went from 2-9 to 9-3,” Luck said. “I’m proud that we were able to put Mountaineer football on a platform that they’ve been able to keep it at, quite honestly.”
Luck was the 44th overall player taken in the 1982 draft (second round) by the Houston Oilers and spent five seasons in the NFL (1982-86). His most extended action came in 1983 when he made six starts and finished the year completing 124 of 217 passes for 1,375 yards and eight touchdowns. He fired a 66-yard touchdown pass against Miami and engineered a 27-17 win over Detroit that snapped Houston’s club-record 17-game losing streak. But Luck saw the writing on the wall when the Oilers signed Warren Moon from the Canadian Football League and he didn’t want spend his career as a backup.
So he retired after the 1986 season to go to law school where he graduated from the University of Texas in 1987.
Three years later he became the general manager of the Frankfurt Galaxy of the newly created World League of American Football and in 1996 Luck was named president of the league. Most recently he became chief executive officer of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority in 2001, overseeing the development of Minute Maid Park (home of the Houston Astros), Reliant Stadium (home of the Houston Texas) and the new Toyota Center (home of the Houston Rockets).
Today Luck and his wife Kathy stay busy with their four children: Andrew (14), Mary Ellen (12), Emily (10 and Addison (6). He mostly keeps in touch with former WVU teammates Jay Krohe, Dave Sarkus, John Garcia and Pat Conochan. Luck says he has also run into Curlin Beck every now and then living in Houston.
His kids keep him from religiously watching West Virginia games but Luck does his best to keep up with the Mountaineers.
“The Internet has made it easier,” he said. “I’d be lying to you if I told you I’ve seen a whole bunch of games on TV. It’s hard; I’ve got four kids who are all doing stuff on Saturdays. It’s hard to sit around and watch a college game and not have my wife all over my case.”
But a strong case can be made that Oliver Luck is the most complete student-athlete in West Virginia University sports history. And as each year goes by he only enhances that argument.
