MSN Flashback: 1958
December 17, 2007 02:26 PM | General
December 17, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Bolstered by a 7-6 upset victory over Texas in 1956, West Virginia’s football schedule in the late 1950s began to take on a national flavor with teams like Wisconsin, USC, Indiana, Illinois, Oregon, Oregon State, Vanderbilt and Navy being added to the grid slate.
But the biggest name on West Virginia’s football schedule was Bud Wilkinson’s great Oklahoma team in 1958.
Many years later, WVU Athletic Director Red Brown cited his three-point approach to scheduling in an interview he gave to Charleston reporter Shorty Hardman.
“I tried to give West Virginia people the kind of games they will support,” said Brown adding, “I have to be fair to my coaches.
“You have to be fair to the guy who pays the freight – give him something he wants to see – and I have to be fair with myself, scheduling games that I think can be sustained by the athletic department.”
Red Brown had a football coach in the early 1950s in Art Lewis that was willing to play anybody anywhere.
“He would say things like, ‘I’ll play anybody.’ Red Brown was a good schedule maker,” recalled Eddie Barrett, West Virginia’s sports information director at the time. “(Brown) had a national viewpoint and he was a good salesman.”
Of course the biggest name in college football at that time – even bigger than Notre Dame – was Oklahoma. By the mid-1950s Bud Wilkinson had constructed a college football dynasty, winning an NCAA-record 47 straight games that spanned four years from 1953 to 1957.
Wilkinson’s image was carefully protected and cultivated by one of the great PR men in all of college sports: Harold Keith.
“He was one of my role models,” Barrett admitted. “As Jim Tarman helped make Joe Paterno famous at Penn State Harold Keith helped make Bud Wilkinson famous at Oklahoma. (Wilkinson’s) detractors called him ‘The Great God Bud’ and that was because Keith was such a wonderful publicist. He had Wilkinson walking on water.”
Longtime West Virginia reporter Mickey Furfari remembered once getting the Wilkinson treatment at a college football all-star game.
“Art Lewis introduced me to Wilkinson at a college all-star game and I asked him if it was OK if I could ask him a few questions,” Furfari recalled. “Wilkinson declined, telling me to call him at his hotel room later that evening. I called and he never answered the phone.”
Barrett said Wilkinson had a longstanding policy of not talking about Oklahoma’s opponents.
“I remember at a press luncheon Wilkinson telling the reporters, ‘Don’t ask me anything about the other team,’” Barrett said.
Barrett also remembers advancing the Oklahoma game to sportswriters as was the practice of the day.
“At the Quarterback Club meeting or whatever it was on Monday, I said that we had a wide-open offense with a lot of split ends and flankers. Art Lewis, who knew what was coming and knew that we were going to get beat, blew his stack and said, ‘Eddie wouldn’t know a flanker from a wooden Indian!’” Barrett chuckled.
“The way we played you couldn’t tell us from a wooden Indian,” Barrett added.
After a scoreless first quarter, Oklahoma used 27 unanswered points to build an insurmountable second-half lead. The Sooners easily won the game, 47-14.
Nearly 50 years later, Barrett distinctly recalls two things from that game in Norman.
“On Friday afternoon our guys came out to warm up and the Oklahoma players were incredulous at our team’s pudginess,” Barrett said. “They were nudging each other when they saw us, pointing and saying, ‘Look at that.’
“The other thing they did was pull a no-huddle deal. John McKay was Oregon’s backfield coach and he was scouting that game. We didn’t know where they were going to line up or where they were going to go,” Barrett explained. “All Oregon did the following week was wait and line up when Oklahoma lined up and that negated what Oklahoma was trying to do.”
By the late 1950s, West Virginia was an entirely different football program without Bobby Moss, Sam Huff, Bruce Bosley, Joe Marconi and Fred Wyant that made up Lewis’s great recruiting class of 1952. What looked like an aggressive attempt to improve West Virginia’s football schedule turned into a burden too heavy for Lewis to carry.
“After 1955 when those five all-time greats left we had average material,” Barrett explained. “Chuck Howley was a great player and that was all.”
Waynesburg was soon replaced with Wisconsin. Instead of Fordham and Marquette, it was USC and Oregon State (all on the road) and West Virginia paid the price, as did Pappy Lewis whose last two teams finished with records of 4-5-1 and 3-7 before he resigned under pressure in the spring of 1960.
“Red said fine, we’ll schedule those types of games and he did. Unfortunately the material ran out for West Virginia,” Barrett said.
By 1964, following a pair of blowout losses to Navy and Oregon, West Virginia’s practice of scheduling national football opponents was abandoned until the mid 1970s.
On a side note, Brown once related a humorous story about his trials as a schedule maker.
“I scheduled Navy as our opening game in 1963,” Brown recalled in 1972. “They beat us (52-7) and we were supposed to have a good team that year. Roger Staubach, their quarterback, killed us.
“I was coming out of the stadium and these two ladies didn’t know I was walking behind them and one of them said, ‘How stupid could that athletic director be to schedule a team with Roger Staubach?’
“Well,” Brown added, “when I scheduled Navy Roger was just a freshman in high school.”
