1,000-Yard Barrier
July 13, 2006 12:46 AM | General
July 13, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- This year marks the 40th anniversary of running back Garrett Ford’s 1,000-yard season in 1966 when he became the first West Virginia University player to eclipse the barrier. Only nine other Mountaineers have managed to do it since.
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| Garrett Ford became the school's first 1,000-yard rusher with 1,068 yards in 1966.
WVU Sports Communiations photo |
“Back then I didn’t even know they kept records,” Ford admitted recently. “I looked in the paper one time and I saw the Southern Conference leaders and I was at the top. But I didn’t even think about that stuff.”
Ford finished the 1966 campaign ranked sixth in the country in rushing with 1,068 yards playing a 10-game schedule. There were only nine runners who reached 1,000 yards that year.
Just seven years prior to that in 1959, not a single college back gained 1,000 yards. To demonstrate how rare 1,000-yard rushing performances were back then, before Ford’s junior campaign in 1966, there were only 58 known instances of runners topping 1,000 yards in a season.
At the time, the major college rushing record was 1,570 yards produced by Texas El-Paso’s Fred Wendt in 1948.
Ollie Matson of San Francisco came close to that with 1,566 yards in 1951, and USC’s Mike Garrett got to within 130 yards of Wendt with a 1,440-yard season in 1965. Trojan coach John McKay popularized the ‘feature back’ running the I-formation with Mike Garrett and later O.J. Simpson, who broke Wendt’s NCAA record with 1,709 yards in 1968.
“I just liked carrying the ball, but I didn’t know anything about being a featured back,” Ford said. “They just kept giving me the ball that year.”
Ford ran a school-record 236 times in 1966 (a mark that stood for 31 years until Amos Zereoue got 281 carries in 1997) logging 100-yard games against William & Mary (182), Citadel (157), Pitt (153), Maryland (138) and Kentucky (120).
At 6 feet 2 and weighing 210 pounds, Ford was the prototypical runner of the 1960s and early 1970s – guys like Jim Nance, Larry Csonka, Ernie Davis and Jim Brown of Syracuse, O.J. Simpson of USC, and Franco Harris of Penn State who all stood taller than 6 feet and weighed more than 200 pounds. With the exception of Brown, Davis and Simpson, they weren’t particularly fast. Ford says he had 4.8 forty speed.
“Back then schools preferred big running backs,” Ford said.
The Washington, D.C. native ran for 894 yards as a sophomore in 1965 for Coach Gene Corum, and continued his outstanding running a year later for new 32-year-old coach Jim Carlen.
“I never really thought of myself as a good player because I was always afraid that Coach Carlen was going to send me back home,” Ford laughed.
Ford says Carlen was much more assertive than the laid-back Corum.
“We had 11 o’clock curfew and I remember running back from Beverly Manor to get back in time once,” Ford said.
Carlen preferred a strong running game and he had several 1,000-yard ball carriers after Ford, including Bob Gresham at WVU in 1969 and Heisman Trophy winner George Rogers at South Carolina in 1980.
During Carlen’s first season at WVU in 1966, he overhauled the roster and chose to ride Ford’s broad shoulders on offense.
“We had a two-back set with a fullback and a tailback,” Ford remembered. “The fullback was the lead blocker and we ran an open-daylight thing Coach (Bobby) Bowden installed. One (play) was 47-slant and I could run anywhere along the line that I wanted.
“I had to start at point A but I could cut back or go this way or that way. We practiced that all the time.”
Ford had the school career rushing record after only two seasons and he was prepared to add to that with every additional step he took as a senior in 1967. But he encountered misfortune during the preseason.
“Going into my senior year during practice I tore a ligament or pulled something in my ankle,” he said. “It was so bad that I only got in about three games that year. I wanted to be a pro football player and I thought I would never get drafted.”
But Denver coach Lou Saban remembered a game against Ford while he was at Maryland in 1966 – one in which Ford ran for 138 yards and made a great touchdown run breaking several tackles – and Saban selected him in the third round of the 1968 AFL draft.
Ford played one season with the Broncos as a fullback blocking for all-pro runner Floyd Little before being released.
“I had an immature attitude,” Ford admitted. “I was used to playing and when I didn’t I pouted. I didn’t go all-out in practice and they don’t have time for that. I felt I was better than the fullback they had there at the time and I didn’t get to play.”
A year later, Ford’s plan was to play semipro football in 1969 in Quincy, Mass., in hopes of catching on with another pro organization. As part of his deal he was set up with a job at Waltham Bank.
“I had no banking background at all,” he said. “They were going to teach me to be a banker. I had nine weeks of orientation and just about the time I was going to be promoted to bank manager, Coach Bowden got the job at West Virginia.”
A simple congratulatory note to Bowden led to Ford getting a job offer at his alma mater.
“He called me back and asked me if I was interested in becoming an assistant coach,” Ford said. “I came here in February of 1970 for $9,600. We packed up the car and it was like the Clampetts going to Beverly Hills.”
Ford has been at WVU ever since. Today he serves as the school’s associate athletic director in charge of student services. It was a position he convinced the school to create back in the late 1970s.
“We’ve graduated some kids here,” he says proudly. “Penn State didn’t want them and they couldn’t get into Pitt so they came to Morgantown. And we’ve made a good living off those kids.”
In addition to being the school’s first 1,000-yard rusher, Ford also became the first African-American assistant coach as well as the school’s first African-American administrator.
Ford admits he sometimes sits back and reflects on his 36 years at West Virginia University.
“Yeah, I think about it sometimes,” he says of being the pioneer who paved a path for many others. “We’ve come a long way since then.”
