The Hall Calls
August 11, 2006 09:49 AM | General
August 11, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Oliver Luck’s first impression of Don Nehlen was a lasting one. It was 1979 and Nehlen had just been named West Virginia University’s new football coach and a meeting had been hastily arranged downstairs at the Towers Dormitory for Nehlen to introduce himself to the team.
The players casually filed into the room and sat down. Some were wearing baseball caps; others were slouched down in their chairs. One player near the front of the room had both feet propped up on a table. It had the look of a room full of losers.
Nehlen walked in, and realizing this was the first test in front of his new team, went over to the player with his feet propped up and kicked them right off the table.
“Right then we realized it was going to be a different regime,” Luck said.
The right man for the job
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| Don Nehlen became West Virginia University's 29th head football coach on Dec. 7, 1979.
WVU Sports Communications |
It didn’t take West Virginia Athletic Director Dick Martin long to realize that Don Nehlen was the right man for the job.
Martin fired Frank Cignetti in 1979 after four losing seasons and he was looking for a football coach that could relate to West Virginia and West Virginians, but more importantly relate to the players.
Early on, the WVU AD got a telephone call from old friend Bob Marcum who was the athletic director at South Carolina. The two had known each other from Martin’s days working at the Big Eight Conference. Marcum had found out that Martin was looking for a football coach and he suggested the name Don Nehlen, an assistant coach on Bo Schembechler’s coaching staff at Michigan.
“I just kind of did the research from there,” Martin said.
Martin found out that Nehlen had head coaching experience at Bowling Green, and that he was universally respected in the coaching profession. Martin, secluded in his office and keeping his search private, methodically steered the athletic council in Nehlen’s direction.
“At that time to protect the overall process and to make sure it worked right you had to be a little more secretive,” Martin recalled. “Not that I was trying to hide anything but you can over-blow something and people can get into different camps.”
So while the newspapers were reporting that the finalists for the West Virginia job were former Colorado coach Bill Mallory, ex-West Virginia assistant Richard Bell, Pitt assistant Marv English and Gary Tranquill, a member of Cignetti’s staff, Martin was zeroing in on Nehlen.
Martin called Schembechler.
“He had great things to say about Don,” Martin said. “He said he was a fine coach and would do a heck of a job for us.”
At the same time Schembechler was telling Nehlen a different story.
“When I told Bo I was going to take the West Virginia job he said, ‘Don you’re crazy.’ He looked at our schedule and he saw Oklahoma on there. He saw Penn State and he saw Pitt,” recalled Nehlen earlier this week on Metro News Talkline.
“Bo said, ‘You’ve got about four, five or six losses on here right away. Every coach that’s ever coached there if they win they leave and if they lose they get fired. You’re making good money; we go to the Rose Bowl every year. In two or three years I’ll get you a good job.'”
But Martin had convinced Nehlen that even though West Virginia’s program was experiencing instability at the time, a new stadium was under construction and the Morgantown campus was close enough to several metropolitan areas.
“(The stadium) was one of the reasons I went there,” Martin said. “If you could build a stadium that I saw … the depiction of that stadium in Morgantown, West Virginia, and within a 200-mile radius of some really outstanding football players and an improving road system … all that together made the West Virginia job an interesting one.”
Nehlen said as much to Schembechler.
“I said, ‘Coach, I don’t think it’s a lousy job.’ I took a map out and I drew a circle around Morgantown and I said, ‘Bo there are a ton of football players within 300 miles of Morgantown. 'I got a feeling I can get me 15 of those guys a year,'” Nehlen said.
Nehlen’s first season at West Virginia in 1980 wasn’t a winning one – his team going 6-6 -- but it wasn’t a losing one either like the last four. And the cupboard wasn’t completely bare when Nehlen took over.
“In retrospect the last two years of Frank Cignetti’s time there we weren’t beating a lot of teams but there was some decent talent,” Luck said.
What Nehlen did was get rid of the veer offense West Virginia was running and installed the I-formation, moved Fulton Walker over to defense, put Walter Easley back at fullback, and got the most out of underachieving running back Robert Alexander.
“I think the personnel we had really fit his system,” Luck said.
A year later in 1981, West Virginia went 8-3 and earned an invitation to play Florida in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. No one gave the Mountaineers a chance.
“At the press conference (Florida coach) Charley Pell didn’t know my name. He called me ‘Nellun.’ He said, ‘This new guy Nellun has done a pretty good job with the West Virginia program,'” Nehlen laughed. “My two captains are snorting when we get out of there.
“(Tight end) Mark Raugh comes up to me and he says, ‘Coach I’m going to tell you one thing, that Charley Pell is going to know your name by the end of the game,’” Nehlen said.
West Virginia surprised the Gators 26-6 in one of the most stunning upset victories in school history. Nehlen’s coaching performance gave the Mountaineer program instant credibility and it also got the attention of other schools that were looking for coaches. One of those schools just happened to be South Carolina, where Jim Carlen stepped down after the 1981 season.
The face of West Virginia football changes
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| Don Nehlen was very close to taking the South Carolina job after the 1981 season.
AP photo |
“We just got back from the Peach Bowl and Bob Marcum wants to hire Coach,” Mike Kerin, then WVU’s equipment manager, said. “Guys were out recruiting and Coach Nehlen basically locked himself in his office for two days and he hardly ever came out.”
“I was really going to go but a lot of things happened,” Nehlen admitted. “Gov. (Jay) Rockefeller said something to me that really stuck. He said, ‘Don every single time we have a winning season our coach leaves and when we don’t do well he gets fired. If you leave West Virginia now I don’t think we’ll ever be able to build a program.’”
Rockefeller's call combined with the South Carolina president’s hard selling eventually swayed Nehlen to remain at WVU.
“(The South Carolina president) wanted me to come immediately and I told him, ‘I am not going to leave West Virginia without getting in front of my team and telling them exactly why I’m leaving because these kids have been beaten up and they are not going to read in the newspaper that I ran for a couple of bucks,’” Nehlen said. “He got all bent out of shape and he kept calling me and calling me. Bob Marcum then called me and I said, ‘Bob, I’m not coming.’”
“When Coach Nehlen came out of his office and told everyone that he was staying … to me that is when the face of West Virginia football changed,” said Kerin. “Prior to that every coach that won a couple of years got out. If he would have left who knows what would have happened here?”
Most certainly not victories over Oklahoma to begin the 1982 season, a memorable win over Pitt in 1983 or a pair of triumphs over top 20 teams Boston College and Penn State in 1984. The Penn State win snapped a losing streak to the Nittany Lions that lasted 25 years.
“That was naturally one of the great, great victories because we hadn’t beaten them for such a long time,” Nehlen said.
Penn State coach Joe Paterno’s congratulatory handshake with Nehlen after the game was a brief one.
“He said, ‘Don I just want to congratulate you. I knew when this game was over it was going to be pure pandemonium. I want to shake you hand and I’m getting out of here.’ He shook my hand and took off running in one direction and I ran in the other,” Nehlen said.
The impressive list of victories Nehlen’s program was piling up had made an impression on a high school quarterback living in Pittsburgh named Major Harris.
“Growing up in Pittsburgh, I heard things about West Virginia,” Harris said. “I knew that (Jeff) Hostetler had transferred there. We get a lot of the Penn State news in Pittsburgh and I remember West Virginia was in the process of building a program to where they could compete with Penn State, Pitt and stuff like that. He did it.”
As it turned out, two years later in 1986 Harris signed with West Virginia. The Nehlen-Harris marriage took West Virginia to the very top of college football.
“I had Browning Nagle who was a drop back passer and I had Major Harris,” Nehlen said. “As a head football coach I was much more knowledgeable of the option game and the option passing game than I was the straight drop back, professional passing game. So we decided to go with Major. He had a kind of belly-be-damned attitude about the game and it rubbed off on our team.”
“As you get older you see things differently,” Harris said. “He was real good friends with the coach from Syracuse and they were pretty successful with Don MacPherson. Looking at things like that makes a defense play honest and it was a pretty good move.
“He could have gone with a drop back quarterback like he did later on in his career … either way,” Harris said.
Reaching the pinnacle
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| Quarterback Major Harris helped lead West Virginia to the national championship game against Notre Dame in the 1989 Fiesta Bowl.
WVU Sports Communications |
After seven years of hard work, Nehlen had most of the pieces in place. When Major Harris arrived the puzzle was complete. Harris was such a remarkable talent.
“Our offensive linemen kept saying, ‘Hey coach, when we call a pass play this guy takes off and we don’t know where to go.’ I said, ‘Just stay where you are because he’ll probably come back,’” Nehlen laughed.
Nehlen and Harris took unbeaten West Virginia to college football’s summit in 1989 facing Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl for the national championship. It is the one game in his coaching career that Nehlen would like to do over.
“Notre Dame had been there a lot of times and the media was just overwhelming with me: I couldn’t move that week and they drove me crazy,” Nehlen said. “I was not smart enough to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a team to prepare.’”
Injuries to offensive linemen Bob Kovach and John Stroia and to safety Darrell Whitmore were inhibiting, but not quite as damaging as Harris getting hurt on the game’s third play.
“That was just a routine play,” Harris said. “I was falling down and the guy jumped on my back. He was real aggressive and he was just doing his job. I wasn’t down so he was going to try and put me down.”
“I think we could have gotten by had Major not gotten hurt,” Nehlen said. “But Major was so durable; he never got a bump all season and we decided to put a lot of stuff in for him that Notre Dame had never seen. We had some great stuff and low and behold, he comes off the field and he says, ‘Coach I don’t think I can throw.’ I’m thinking oh brother what did I do to deserve this?”
West Virginia came up 13 points short of winning its first national championship in football.
Nehlen’s 1993 team also went through the regular season unbeaten and finished near the top of the national rankings before losing to Florida in the Sugar Bowl. The coach believes the following year in 1994 was one of his best coaching jobs when he took a team that started the season 1-4 to a bowl game.
“We opened with Nebraska and what we needed was some Dairy Queen to play in the opener, not Nebraska,” he said. “Mike Logan gets a broken arm and another kid blows his knee out in the tunnel before we even take the field. I say to myself, ‘Boy we’re off to a great start.’
“That cost us and our kids were down in the dumps but somehow we got them back together,” Nehlen said.
Nehlen believes his best West Virginia team was actually the 1998 squad. It was a roster filled with NFL-caliber players like quarterback Marc Bulger, running back Amos Zereoue, tight end Anthony Becht, linebackers Gary Stills and Barrett Green and defensive tackle John Thornton. Jerry Porter spent that year playing on defense.
“Had we opened with anybody but Ohio State we run the table,” Nehlen said. “That’s the best team I ever had. But we played the best team in America. We were a great team and I thought we could win it all. But our team was never the same after that game. If we open the year and win 35-0 … look out.”
Time to move on
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| Nehlen gets a ride from his players after beating East Carolina in his final home game at Mountaineer Field in 2000.
WVU Sports Communications |
Two years after the 1998 season and following a tough loss to Syracuse at home, Nehlen announced that the 2000 campaign would be his last as a college coach.
“I was driving home on a Sunday night and we had already played about seven or eight football games. It was about 11 o’clock at night and I was thinking, I’ve been doing this for about 43 years and it’s time to let somebody else go home at 11 o’clock and let me sit at home and watch games on television,” he said.
Nehlen’s last college game was against Mississippi in the Music City Bowl. After winning three of his first four bowl games, Nehlen’s bowl record at West Virginia was less than stellar. It was one last chance at redemption.
“Every bowl game we ever played I’d tell my wife, hey, this is going to happen or that’s going to happen,” Nehlen said. “I told her before the Mississippi game to hang on to her hat because we could get beat by 40 points.”
Nehlen’s coaching staff was informed that they were not going to be retained and most of them were beginning to look for other jobs. The practices leading up to the game were horrible.
“The only thing nice was the locker room,” Nehlen said.
But fullback Wes Ours caught a long screen pass for a touchdown to start the game and West Virginia played a near flawless game.
“When (Wes) came off the field and our kids were so jacked up I knew Mississippi was going to have a problem,” Nehlen said. “You can feel stuff on the sidelines.
“That game was great because not only did we go out winning but it was in a bowl game because bowl games had been an albatross hanging around our necks,” Nehlen said.
On Saturday, Don Nehlen will officially join the game’s greats as a member of the National Football Foundation’s College Hall of Fame. Saturday’s enshrinement and dinner will be televised by ESPN at 6 pm. It will be a special day for this 70-year-old guy who likes to refer to himself as nobody special.
“How in the world did I ever do this is beyond me?” Nehlen said.
“It is the ultimate individual honor you can have as a coach,” said WVU coach Rich Rodriguez, who played for Nehlen in the early 1980s. “It’s a great honor and I’m tickled to death for him and his family. Speaking as a former player we’re all grateful for what Coach Nehlen and his entire staff did here.”
Dick Martin, the man who brought Don Nehlen to West Virginia 27 years ago, had no doubt whatsoever that the coach was going to be successful at WVU.
“Don had what it took to get the job done,” Martin said. “I felt from the beginning that he could build a program that was longstanding.”
“It was a marriage made in heaven between Don and West Virginia,” Oliver Luck added.
Major Harris, who – like many others -- didn’t always agree with Nehlen’s play calling, proudly remembers his four years playing for Nehlen.
“The job Coach Nehlen did at West Virginia … you look around and only a few coaches can say they did a similar type of job,” Harris said. “I’m up here in Pittsburgh and you’ve got guys talking about wanting to go to West Virginia instead of Pitt. When I was growing up Pitt was the school. That started to change when Coach Nehlen got there.”
Mike Kerin says getting 200 victories in college football is the equivalent of reaching 3,000 hits in baseball. Nehlen finished his career with 202.
“There are only 17 coaches in the history of college football to have won 200 games,” Kerin said. “How many guys have coached? And he won his games at Bowling Green and West Virginia – not exactly recruiting hotbeds.
“He earned his wins; he coached.”
The truly extraordinary man, it has been written, is the truly ordinary man. No description is more fitting for Don Nehlen, National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame Class of 2005.
Congratulations Coach.
