PERFECT!
August 27, 2008 10:36 PM | General
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| The scoreboard said it all after West Virginia's 31-9 win over Syracuse.
WVU Sports Communications Photo |
The epiphany for Major Harris came the morning of the Rutgers game on Nov. 14, 1987. Harris’ rollercoaster season of ups and downs was to finally even out later that afternoon. Major had beaten out Browning Nagle for West Virginia’s starting quarterback job the previous spring, but his ‘87 debut was less than auspicious.
West Virginia defeated Ohio University, 23-3 - not because of but in spite of Harris, who had completed only 3 of 9 passes for 52 yards. Backup Mike Timko had to come in relief to keep the offense moving. The next week at Ohio State was even worse. Harris completed only four passes and two of them were to Ohio State players in 24-3 loss. Those Harris turnovers led to 17 first-quarter Buckeye points in a game that was really much closer than the final score indicated.
Harris’ problems continued against Maryland and Pitt. West Virginia jumped out to a 14-0 lead on the Terps only to lose, 25-20, and a 6-3 loss to Pitt in Morgantown was accentuated by Pitt’s winning drive, which actually went backwards after another Harris turnover.
When it came to replacing Major Harris, West Virginia coach Don Nehlen was getting a quicker hook than Sparky Anderson.
“If you start out with an easy schedule you’re building confidence,” Harris explained. “Well we came out with Ohio U. and then we played Ohio State and already you’re behind the eight ball. Then it was Maryland and Pitt. Back then Pitt was a pretty good team. After that the schedule started to ease up a little bit.”
And that’s when Harris began to blossom. He played well in wins against East Carolina, Cincinnati and Boston College. At State College, Harris almost beat Penn State by himself, his long third-quarter pass to Craig Taylor after scrambling from sideline to sideline would have iced the game if not for offensive guard John Stroia getting caught beyond the line of scrimmage.
“They nabbed me,” Stroia said. “What I should have done was fall down but what I did was I turned around and started running back toward the line.”
A touchdown at that point would have put West Virginia up by 11 points and sealed the deal. Instead, the Nittany Lions won the game, 25-21. It was the team’s third loss that season by five points or less.
It was against Penn State that Harris began to show signs of becoming the quarterback everyone involved with the West Virginia program knew he could be. He passed for two touchdowns and ran for another against a defense that had shut down Miami in the national championship game a year earlier. More importantly, Harris played the entire game. Not once did Nehlen bring out the hook. It was a performance he could build on.
And then Major and roommate Benny Reed slept through their wakeup call at the team hotel the morning of the Rutgers game while their teammates were eating breakfast. Hollywood actor and Lamisil pitchman Benny Reed is a great guy – really funny and the original Uncle Rico - but he was probably not the right person to help groom the team’s star young quarterback.
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1988
The working press liked Bobby Bowden’s Florida State team, having won seven in a row and coming off a 31-28 victory over Nebraska in the 1988 Fiesta Bowl. That is until Miami whacked the Seminoles over the head in the Orange Bowl in the ‘88 opener. Miami jumped into the top spot in the polls and remained there until an early October date in South Bend. Notre Dame, under third-year coach Lou Holtz, was chasing some little-known history. Third-year Irish coaches had a habit of winning national titles. Knute Rockne did it in 1920. Frank Leahy did it in 1943. Ara Parseghian did it in 1966 and Dan Devine got Notre Dame to the mountaintop in 1977. Now it was Lou Holtz’s turn. Notre Dame started the season ranked 13th and made a steady climb in the polls following wins over Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, Stanford and Pitt. Notre Dame’s big victory came against No. 1 Miami in South Bend, 31-30 in a game dubbed “The Catholics Versus The Convicts” (the guess here is that the name didn’t come from the Miami Herald). Two weeks later, Notre Dame moved into the top spot in the rankings when No. 1 UCLA lost to Washington State. Beano Cook’s adopted team, West Virginia, first cracked the AP Top 10 after a 31-10 victory at No. 16 Pitt and then got to No. 4 when the entire nation saw the Mountaineers dismember Penn State, 51-30, on CBS. The Mountaineers remained fourth after beating No. 14 Syracuse, 31-9, to wrap up their first undefeated, untied regular season in school history. Notre Dame eliminated USC from the national championship picture with a 27-10 victory over the Trojans in South Bend, and Miami took care of undefeated Arkansas, 18-16. West Virginia jumped ahead of USC in the rankings to No. 3 to set up just the 13th match up between undefeated, untied teams in a bowl game history. Sandwiched between Notre Dame and West Virginia was No. 2 Miami, which was forced to face Nebraska in the Orange Bowl instead of having a rematch with Notre Dame. Miami coach Jimmy Johnson openly politicked for the Hurricanes, hoping after Miami took care of Nebraska in the Orange Bowl that West Virginia could knock off Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. Johnson believed he could convince enough voters to go with Miami to at least give his team a shot at a split championship. Following Notre Dame’s win over West Virginia, the final AP poll had the Irish No. 1, followed by Miami, Florida State, Michigan and West Virginia. Florida State recovered from the Miami loss to run the table and beat Auburn in the Sugar Bowl, and Michigan won the Big Ten title and knocked off USC in the Rose Bowl to finish the year with a 9-2-1 record. Oklahoma State running back Barry Sanders won the Heisman Trophy by a landslide, tabulating 559 first place votes and 1,878 overall points. The next closest vote getter was USC quarterback Rodney Peete, who had 70 first-place votes and 912 overall points. UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman finished third while Miami quarterback Steve Walsh placed fourth. West Virginia’s Major Harris earned 27 first-place votes and 280 overall points to finish fifth in the Heisman balloting. Sanders won the Maxwell and Walter Camp Awards, Auburn defensive tackle Tracy Rocker won the Outland and Lombardi, Aikman captured the Davey O’Brien Award, Alabama linebacker Derrick Thomas won the Butkus Award, Florida State cornerback Deion Sanders won the Thorpe Award and USC quarterback Rodney Peete won the Unitas Award. |
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The smart money was on Florida State to win the national championship in 1988. At least that was the
opinion of those Associated Press voters not swayed by the logic of
ESPN commentator/agitator Beano Cook, who pulled his best suit out of the
closet and made the short trip from Pittsburgh down to Morgantown to tape a
segment for SportsCenter making West Virginia his preseason pick to win it
all. Cook’s logic: West Virginia had the best schedule.
One of the first things Reed did when arriving in Morgantown from Bixby, Okla., was to show some of his new teammates his old junior college film. He kept running one particular play over and over.
“You ever see anyone roll out and throw like that?” Reed asked several of his teammates.
“You ever heard of a guy named Jeff Hostetler?” one of them finally answered. That was the end of the Benny Reed highlight show.
It was nearly impossible to set Quarterbacks Coach Dwight Wallace off but Harris had managed to light his fuse. When Wallace discovered his starting and back-up quarterbacks snoring away through breakfast he lost it. He stormed into the room and jumped on Harris, who was completely under the covers.
“He comes into the room mad at me because I’m a young quarterback, struggling and stuff like that and I missed the team breakfast,” Harris laughed. “I’m lying under the covers and he jumped on top of me and I couldn’t even move. He really got on me. It was like a Bobby Knight thing.”
Wallace had had enough. It was time for Major Harris to grow up. “I think that kind of lit the fire under me,” Harris admitted. “That helped me – it really did.”
West Virginia won the Rutgers game easily, 37-13, and Harris was brilliant. He threw for 196 yards and a touchdown, completing 14-of-21 passes, and he also ran for 108 yards including a beautiful 24-yard touchdown run when he leapt over a Rutgers defender. One Pittsburgh sportswriter in the press box remarked after that run, “We have just seen West Virginia’s first legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate.”
For four years since the departure of Jeff Hostetler, Don Nehlen was searching for a quarterback to build his team around. The 1984 season was a success with senior Kevin White under center, but the revolving door of quarterbacks soon began in 1985. First it was John Talley, and then, Tony Reda before finally ending with Mike Timko. In 1986 – a year when nothing went right as teammates turned against each other – it was Timko and Reed sharing time at quarterback. The running joke in Morgantown then was that there were only two people in the country who could get a stadium of 60,000 people up on their feet to praise the Lord: Billy Graham and the next quarterback Don Nehlen put into the game. The Mountaineers finished the year with a 4-7 record – the first losing season of Nehlen’s West Virginia tenure.
Standing on the sidelines observing it all were freshmen Major Harris and Browning Nagle. Harris was a fabulous all-city quarterback at Pittsburgh’s Brashaer High who made The Sporting News Top-100 list for high school players. The only problem with Harris was that nobody was really interested in him as a quarterback. Pitt wouldn’t even talk to him unless he was willing to play another position. Nehlen, desperate for a playmaker, was more than happy to put Harris under center. For insurance in case Harris didn’t pan out, Nehlen also recruited Browning Nagle out of Pinellas Park High in Largo, Fla. Nagle owned a cannon for an arm and was perfectly suited for the drop-back passing game that Miami had used so successfully with Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde in the early 1980s.
“Of the kids we had recruited, we felt the type of football Major played would fit the rest of our team better than Browning Nagle,” Nehlen explained. “We had running backs and we had fullbacks – those were the type of kids we recruited – and we wanted to throw the ball off the option. Major was able to run the option.
“To be honest, I wouldn’t say that we didn’t know the drop-back passing game, but we didn’t know it near as well as we knew the power offense, the option and the option passing game like we did at Michigan,” Nehlen said.
Nehlen called Nagle into his office and explained the situation.
“I said, ‘Hey, Browning this is a tough thing for me because you are a great quarterback in your own right and you ought to go someplace where they drop back and throw it.’ He said, ‘Coach, Louisville does that with Howard Schnellenberger.’ I said, ‘Hey, let’s help you get there.’ And that’s how he got there.”
Major Harris was just one of the pieces to the puzzle, albeit a big one. West Virginia managed to nab a couple of transfers from Pitt following the 1985 season when A.B. Brown and Eugene Napoleon begged Pitt coach Foge Fazio to release them.
“It took a lot to finally get him to release me,” Brown recalled. “He was not going to let both of us go. I was really good friends with offensive line coach (Joe) Moore and I said, ‘Listen, this is just not a good situation for any of us. I’m miserable here. You guys built this situation. At least try to do something.’ Coach Moore spoke to Coach Fazio and I guess a couple of other guys spoke to him and they finally ended up letting us go.
“It was after a fight, trust me.”
Nehlen was able to locate another important piece to the puzzle in the winter of 1987 when assistant coach Doc Holliday managed to land junior college All-American wide receiver Reggie Rembert from Independence, Kan. Rembert had great size and speed and was the big-time playmaker on the outside that West Virginia was searching for to complement Harris. While those guys made up the final parts, the foundation of the 1988 team was formed by Nehlen’s 1984 recruiting class. That ‘84 group included Willie Edwards, Bryan Hendricks, Dale Jackson, Undra Johnson, Kevin Koken, Bob Kovach, Eric Lester, Pat Marlatt, Bo Orlando, Chris Parker, Calvin Phillips, Rick Phillips, Robert Pickett, Brian Smider, John Stroia and Craig Taylor. All 16 players played prominent roles as fifth-year seniors on the 1988 team.
It was to be the blueprint for the success that Don Nehlen used during the entire 21 seasons he coached at WVU.
“When I came here Pitt and Penn State were two of the best teams in America and they were right in our backyard,” Nehlen recalled. “And of course Ohio State was always there and we couldn’t beat those guys for any players. So I decided that we were going to take good kids, we were going to keep them for five years, and maybe they won’t play their fourth and fifth year but we can keep the program moving and they will be plenty good enough for us to win with.
“That 1984 recruiting class wasn’t very highly rated,” Nehlen said. In fact, the two best players in the class didn’t even make it to their senior years: Morgantown High running back Tony Johnson and Florida wide receiver Robert White.
“Tony Johnson is one of my best friends in the world and I love him to death,” said defensive back Willie Edwards. “That kid had more potential in his pinky than a lot of people have in their whole body.”
“We had all heard stories about how Robert White was the fastest guy in Florida,” recalled running back Undra Johnson. “But he didn’t make it.”
Nineteen eighty four was also the first year West Virginia was able to cash in on Florida recruiting. According to longtime Orlando Sentinel sportswriter Bill Buchalter, some of the bigger-named schools in the country had enjoyed reasonable success with Florida high school football players in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Oklahoma benefited from playing every year in the Orange Bowl and former Sooner star Billy Vessels living in South Florida.
Ohio State and Michigan also did well with Florida players, especially in the Okeechobee-Belle Glade-Pahokee area. Michigan had a staunch supporter working in the Palm Beach County school system who was able to steer players like Riviera Beach wide receiver Anthony Carter to Ann Arbor. Don Nehlen was at Michigan at the time and he got a first-hand look at what Florida State’s Bobby Bowden, Florida’s Charley Pell and Miami’s Howard Schnellenberger had access to.
“Anthony was recruited by Bill McCartney, but I was his position coach and when he came on his visit to Ann Arbor I showed him around because I was going to be the guy who coached him,” Nehlen recalled.
It wasn’t long after Nehlen took the West Virginia job in 1980 that he was approached about recruiting Florida.
“We had a real good alum down there named Rick Perry and he was the head football coach at Stranahan High in Ft. Lauderdale,” Nehlen said. “I went down there and spoke at a coaches’ clinic and he kind of cornered me. He told me, ‘Don I’m telling you there are so many kids down here and Miami, Florida State and Florida can’t take them all. You could come down here and get a ton of kids that could be really good football players.’ He sold me on the idea.”
Nehlen didn’t have the manpower or the resources to recruit the entire state of Florida. So he decided to take his youngest assistant coach with the most energy, which happened to be Doc Holliday, and he gave him a specific area to concentrate on.
“We started with 50 schools in Dade and Broward County and Doc became a household name in those schools because those were the only schools we recruited,” Nehlen said. “We didn’t go to Tampa or Gainesville, Jacksonville or the West Coast. We just stayed right there and Doc was there in the spring and in the fall. Slowly but surely we started to get players.”
“Money was certainly a consideration because we didn’t have a whole lot of money at that time,” Holliday remembered. “(Nehlen) would send me down there for a month at a time and wouldn’t let me come home. He wouldn’t pay my flights back and forth.”
Holliday's first stab at Florida recruiting in 1983 didn’t go well. Every player he brought to campus that year signed with other schools. But his luck changed in 1984. Holliday was able to sign one of Rick Perry’s Stranahan players, running back Undra Johnson, and he also landed wide receiver Calvin Phillips from Boynton Beach, defensive back Andrew Jones from Ft. Lauderdale, linebacker Robert Pickett from Miami, and wide receiver Robert White from Ft. Pierce. Grantis Bell was also part of that class as an invited walk-on and he earned a scholarship during fall camp when wide receiver Keith Witt quit the team.
“Doc Holliday was certainly one of the pioneers of recruiting down here,” said Buchalter. “And Holliday was smart because he seldom challenged Florida State, Florida and Miami for the top-rated kids. He learned early the Bobby Bowden theory of recruiting – if the guy on this street isn’t interested in you, I’ll go around the corner to the next guy and he usually turned out to be just as good.”
“We tried to go after kids that we felt could help us. They may have had some schools after them but it wasn’t the competition in recruiting that you have down there now,” Holliday explained, mentioning that the only two Northern schools he remembered recruiting Florida at the time were Michigan and Iowa State.”
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| Don Nehlen found the right guy to run his offense when Major Harris signed with West Virginia in 1986.
WVU Sports Communications Photo |
“Nobody else was really down there,” Nehlen added.
Holliday knew once he got the Florida players up to Morgantown that he was going to have to provide a support system for them. They knew very little about West Virginia and what they did hear were usually the negative stereotypes other coaches had told them. Their reasons for coming to West Virginia varied from early playing time to simply wanting a place to get a free education.
“They kind of hung together,” Holliday said. “Of course you can imagine bringing a kid from Florida and they had never seen snow or anything.”
“There was one ethnic group when I came here and I think everyone did a great job of adapting,” Undra Johnson said. “When I lived in Florida there was such a broad mix of people.”
The Florida players relied on themselves for haircuts with Andrew Jones becoming the team barber. There were no black radio stations in Morgantown which made it difficult for the players to keep up with the latest music (MTV helped but this was well before the advent of satellite radio). Willie Edwards said he would often have the Florida players over to his house during the holidays.
“They came over for dinners and cook outs,” Edwards said. “I invited them to my church.”
All six of them came up to Morgantown together on the same flight.
“We were flying up to Morgantown from Palm Beach. I saw Robert Pickett with his big glasses on and I’m thinking, ‘This guy must be unbelievable,’” Undra Johnson said.
“We were all talking about how much we were going to miss home instead of what was going to happen when we got up there,” laughed Grantis Bell.
Twelve Florida players would eventually play key roles on West Virginia’s first undefeated team in 1988, including four of the first six Holliday brought to West Virginia (Andrew Jones was the only player not to redshirt his freshman season in 1984 and ran out of eligibility before the ’88 season).
Of course there were other good players in the program. Bo Orlando was a converted quarterback on the Berwick (Pa.) High team that claimed a mythical national championship in 1983. He became the defensive team captain and was the team leader in the secondary at strong safety. Bob Simmons was able to pry New Jersey fullback Craig Taylor away from Maryland. WVU assistant basketball coach Bob Smith heard about Renaldo Turnbull playing eight-man football while recruiting in the Virgin Islands and sent word to the football coaches that he was worth pursuing. Linebacker Chris Haering came from Pueblo, Colo., and Mike Fox was part of the Northeast Ohio pipeline West Virginia first developed when Gary Stevens was working for Frank Cignetti.
“When I left North High School in Akron, I weighed 214 pounds,” Fox remembered. “I played defensive end/tight end and I was tall and skinny.
“They thought I had potential and they thought they could mold me,” Fox added. “I came in there and I gave all the effort I could give and tried to grow, get bigger, stronger and all that stuff.”
Teammates hated going against Fox because he was as hard on them Monday through Friday as he was against opponents on Saturdays.
“Pads or no pads it was always full-tilt with him – always,” laughed A.B. Brown.
“I practiced to win,” Fox said.
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