PERFECT!
August 27, 2008 10:39 PM | General
All of the disappointments leading up to the 1988 season were forgotten – the collapse in 1984 when all WVU needed to do was beat Virginia, Rutgers and Temple to go to the Orange Bowl, the beat-downs absorbed against Maryland, Penn State and Virginia in 1985, and the albatross that was 1986. Most disappointing was how close West Virginia came to having a great season in 1987. Five of the Mountaineers’ six losses that year were by a mere 16 points, including a one-point defeat to Syracuse in the Carrier Dome to finish the regular season and a two-point loss to a loaded Oklahoma State team in the 1987 Sun Bowl. Grantis Bell remembered taking a long look around the locker room after the Oklahoma State game.
“Everybody in there was coming back,” Bell said. “We were only losing a couple of players.”
The team was also getting its coach back. Nehlen interviewed for the Ohio State job and it wasn’t until after the bowl game that he informed the team and the coaching staff that he was staying. The OSU job eventually went to John Cooper.
“Reality started to set in that we could be pretty special when we realized that Coach Nehlen was coming back,” recalled defensive back Dave Lockwood, now a member of Bill Stewart’s WVU coaching staff.
“Coming into our senior year, we felt that we were the best team in the East at that time,” said wide receiver Calvin Phillips. “If we did everything right - if we came and prepared Monday through Thursday, we knew we were better than each team that defeated us in 1987.”
“We almost had an expectation of the way the season was going to go,” remembered offensive guard John Stroia. “Every time we won we were like, great, but that was what we were supposed to do. We would have all been very disappointed if it didn’t turn out that way.”
After early wins against Bowling Green and Cal-Fullerton, West Virginia’s first big test in 1988 came against Maryland.
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Disappointment in the Desert
“I have forgotten that game,” said fullback Crag Taylor, only half jokingly. “I’ve always thought about the losses more than the wins and I wanted to prove to the world that we deserved to be there,” said running back A.B. Brown. “I don’t think I have ever let that game go. How many times do you have an opportunity to play in a game like that?” The years have taken some of the sting off the loss, but those 15,000 West Virginians that made the trip out to Tempe, Ariz., still have great difficulty shaking off the resentment they felt for the way some of the Notre Dame players conducted themselves during the game. The Irish won that national championship fair and square. They outplayed West Virginia in every facet. But what stuck in the craw of West Virginians were the eight personal foul penalties Notre Dame accumulated during the game. They saw Lou Holtz running on the field trying to get control of his out-of-control defense. They saw the taunting; they saw the one Irish player swat the cap off the official’s head. Wrote Sports Illustrated: “It was a classless finish to a classy season.” “Our players were completely in the wrong,” Holtz said afterward. Notre Dame linebacker Wes Pritchard said the talking went both ways, which is probably true. All during the week leading up to the game both teams were courteous, polite and respectful. At one bowl function Notre Dame quarterback Tony Rice and West Virginia quarterback Major Harris publicly exchanged pleasantries. “He seems like a real down-to-earth guy,” Harris said of Rice. That was on the surface. Beneath it was a different story. Some believe the roots to Notre Dame’s discontent were derived from the rap song Harris and defensive back Alvoid Mays were talked into making for a local charity. It was similar to what the Chicago Bears did a few years earlier with the Super Bowl Shuffle. “It was Tony Caridi’s idea,” said Harris. “He approached me about it and we went into the studio. The funny thing was at the time we did it we didn’t think it was that big of a deal.” It turned out to be a big deal when West Virginia coach Don Nehlen found out about it. Nehlen nearly had an aneurysm when he learned what Harris and Mays had done. It went against everything he believed in as a coach. “Hey Tony, do you know what Lou Holtz is doing right now?” Nehlen asked. “He’s playing that damned rap tape to his team!” Of course the rap song had nothing to do with the loss. Tony Rice, Irv Brown, Rocket Ismail, Ricky Watters, Anthony Johnson, Rodney Culver, Chris Zorich, Todd Lyght, Mike Stonebreaker and the rest of the gang took care of that. “They were good,” said Taylor. “If you look at their roster they had a ton of guys in the NFL and they got the ball to their playmakers. They had a good plan against us; they spread us out and they hit the tight end. And they were defending everything that we were doing. I don’t think I even gained a yard in that game. I mean come on, Ricky Watters, Rocket Ismail, Chris Zorich …” Stonebreaker separated Harris’ shoulder on the third play of the game; guards John Stroia and Bob Kovach were out before the end of the first quarter. Undra Johnson, Renaldo Turnbull, Rick Phillips, Bo Orlando and several others joined them on the sidelines. The Mountaineers didn’t leave Arizona - they were evacuated. “We couldn’t afford to play Notre Dame with four starters out of the game,” Nehlen said. “It just made me sick. We could have gotten by had Major not been hurt.” “When Major hurt his shoulder it changed up everything,” Taylor mentioned. “He was done. I heard him in the huddle (talking about his shoulder) and he never did anything like that so we knew he was hurt pretty bad.” “I never had an injury like that so you don’t know how you are going to react,” said Harris. “It wasn’t a play where I got hit hard. It was really a fluke accident. It was a play where I got hit low and as I was falling the guy just jumped on my back. I kind of relaxed and my arm couldn’t withstand the instant weight that he put on me.” There were some players that blamed the loss on the long layoff. Others brought up the old turf versus grass argument (West Virginia was notoriously a bad grass team and Notre Dame played nearly all of its games on grass). Whatever the reason, the game was essentially over after the third play because West Virginia’s entire game plan that afternoon was on Harris’ shoulders - literally. “We decided to put a lot of stuff in for him that Notre Dame had never seen,” Nehlen said. “We had some great stuff we had worked on and low and behold, the third play of the game he comes off the field and he says, ‘Coach I don’t think I can throw.’” “We had a lot of plays for the wide receivers and we felt like we could get behind them and do some things,” said wide receiver Calvin Phillips. Whether or not that would have happened we will never know. Notre Dame rolled up 445 yards of offense and held West Virginia to less than 300. WVU failed to make a first down until midway through the second quarter and fell behind 23-6 at halftime. The Mountaineers were able to tack on a pair of late touchdowns to make the game respectable. “We played to the end and that’s what we were proud about,” said Phillips. “We didn’t just want to be there - we wanted to be national champions but it wasn’t meant for us.” “I still say to this day if nine doesn’t get hurt nine times out of 10 we beat Notre Dame,” said Dave Lockwood. We will never know.
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Recalling West Virginia’s 34-21 loss to Notre Dame in the 1989 Sunkist
Fiesta Bowl is like picking the scab off an old wound.
It was sometime during the mid-1980s that somebody came up with the Maryland-is-a-barometer slogan. Simply stated, whenever West Virginia lost to Maryland it was headed for a bad season and when the Mountaineers beat the Terps they were going to a bowl game.
“At that time Maryland was a very good football program,” Nehlen said. “Jerry Claiborne had them for a while and then Bobby Ross was their coach and they were winning ACC championships.”
In 1987, West Virginia was well on its way to beating Maryland in College Park. Eugene Napoleon started the game with a kickoff return for a touchdown and on the very next series Robert Pickett returned an interception for a score. Three quarters later, West Virginia was walking into the locker room 25-20 losers, wondering how in the world they blew a 14-point lead.
The exact opposite happened in 1988. Maryland jumped out to a 14-0 lead on a pair of Michael Beasley touchdown runs. The second Beasley TD was 74-yarder.
“I had an angle to tackle him and I got pushed from behind and I thought I was clipped,” Dave Lockwood said. “Then I looked up and realized it was Darrell Whitmore who got me. He took the wrong angle and he tripped me up.”
“That was the first time we were behind that year,” said Calvin Phillips. “For a minute it was like a shock. Are we as good as we think we are? But we calmed down and started running our offense.”
After Maryland’s second touchdown John Stroia remembered Nehlen walking over to the bench where the offensive line was sitting.
“He came over to us and he said in his unique style, ‘We’re not throwing the ball the rest of the half! I want two tight ends and we’re going to ram it right down their throats!’ We were all like, ‘Yeah!’” Fifty-five points later the barometer was set.
The following week West Virginia had another obstacle to overcome: Pitt. This was a big game for Major Harris; the hometown boy was making his big return. It was also a big game for a couple of Panther turncoats A.B. Brown and Eugene Napoleon.
“They wanted to shut me down badly in that game,” Brown admitted. “I was still pretty friendly with a lot of those guys and they would call me before the game and they let me know what the plan was. They were circling the wagons to shut me down.”
Pitt did a pretty good job keeping Brown under wraps until early in the third quarter when West Virginia caught the Panthers in the right defense. All week West Virginia coaches had prepared the team for a certain look and when they got it they had the perfect answer – a draw play.
“That was one of those plays where we got to the line, they were in the right alignment, and Kevin (Koken) and I knew what calls to make,” John Stroia said. “He blocked the guy over me and I came up the middle and I picked up the linebacker. If you look at the play on film, everybody blocked it exactly like it was drawn on a piece of paper.”
When Brown got the football all he had to do was run straight ahead for 64 yards. He didn’t even have to run that fast.
“A.B. could have run for seven days straight,” Undra Johnson joked. “Nobody was even close to him.”
As Brown ran downfield toward the game-changing touchdown, you could almost hear some of the Golden Panthers murmuring the F-word.
Foge!
He was the guy who let Brown transfer to West Virginia.
“I don’t think they were real happy about that,” Brown laughed.
The Mountaineers had some other unfinished business to take care of that year against Penn State and Syracuse. Of course Penn State was always a problem. West Virginia’s road to football misery always started in Happy Valley. Just once since Eisenhower was in office did West Virginia beat Penn State in football in Morgantown, and Don Nehlen couldn’t even get the satisfaction of shaking Joe Paterno’s hand at the end of the game. Both coaches were too busy running for their lives.
The Mountaineer players would always watch Penn State on film and they would see those white helmets, white uniforms and black shoes and constantly have to remind themselves that the Lions were much bigger than they looked, they were much stronger than they looked, and most importantly, they were much faster than they looked.
But in 1988 the film didn’t lie. There was no way in the world Penn State was going to come down to Morgantown and beat the Mountaineers that year.
“No matter what, that game they didn’t have a chance,” said fullback Craig Taylor.
“All those years coming up were like experience to us,” said Calvin Phillips. “The ‘88 season we went into the game knowing that we could beat them. All those years, we were hoping something would happen and we would get this break. Man-for-man, we felt we were better than them.”
It also didn’t hurt when Harris went the wrong way to score the game’s first touchdown. The way Harris remembered it he called an option play to the left in the huddle. The 25-second clock was winding down and he was trying to quickly get the team lined up.
“I didn’t want to call a timeout and I was getting everybody ready and I forgot which way the play was going,” he said. “I knew it was an option. I just didn’t know which side we were running it to. To be honest it was like a bootleg where the guys go one way and the quarterback goes the other.”
What Major forgot to mention were the seven Penn State players he managed to avoid. If that touchdown run was made by someone from Notre Dame it would have instantly been turned into a movie or prominently displayed at the College Football Hall of Fame. The run was only 26 yards but it was the prettiest 26-yard touchdown run in the history of college football.
“To this day it was one of the greatest runs I have ever seen in college football history,” said Mountaineer secondary coach Dave Lockwood. “I still tell people that Major was the best athlete I have ever been around from all of the places I have been. The only guy who would be in that category would be (New England Patriots running back) Laurence Maroney.”
“When stuff like that happens, you don’t have a chance,” said Craig Taylor.
Near the end of the half, Nehlen, surprised with his team’s huge lead and not wanting to push his luck, was content to run out the clock and go into the locker room with a 34-8 lead. So he called a draw play for Undra Johnson. It wound up being a 55-yard touchdown. Those black shoes just couldn’t keep up with Johnson.
“That was crazy because we were just trying to run out the clock,” Harris laughed. “For a half you couldn’t write a better script.”
Linebacker coach Steve Dunlap was purposely holding the elevator for the Penn State coaches at halftime so they could all ride down together.
“I was patting (Penn State defensive coordinator) Jerry Sandusky on the rear end going down the elevator saying, ‘Hang in there Jerry, you’ll be all right,’” Dunlap laughed. “That was fun.”
The final score: West Virginia 51, Penn State 30. It was one of the worst beatings of Joe Paterno’s coaching career. Once again Nehlen didn’t get the satisfaction of shaking Paterno’s hand at midfield. Paterno, then 62, was still able to outrun the West Virginia students chasing him into the locker room.
A.B. Brown, having started his college career at Pitt, saw the Penn State game from two different angles. “I thought the Penn State game was a really big game because that was when we really found out how good we were,” he said.
Following road wins at Cincinnati and Rutgers, all that stood between West Virginia and an undefeated regular season was a home game against nationally rated Syracuse. The year before in the Carrier Dome Syracuse was in a similar situation facing West Virginia for the opportunity to go undefeated. The Orange pulled it out on the last play of the game when they successfully converted a two-point conversion.
The game in 1988 wasn’t nearly as close. Willie Edwards broke it open in the third quarter when he stepped in front of a Todd Philcox pass out in the flat, tipped the ball to himself, and returned it 49 yards for a touchdown.
“I wish I had a quarter for every time someone asked me about that play,” Edwards said.
A David Greene field goal and a late Rob Moore touchdown catch were all that stood in the way of a West Virginia shutout. The scoreboard read West Virginia 31, Syracuse 9. Above it was the word Perfect!
As the teams walked off the field, not a single person had left the stadium. Eventually, someone came up with the idea of having the team return to the field and take a victory lap.
“I kid you not, that was the best experience of my life,” said Craig Taylor. “I have never experienced anything like that since.”
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| Willie Edwards, a Morgantown resident and starting cornerback on the 1988 team.
WVU Sports Communications Photo |
West Virginia had done it. Eleven wins and zero losses. No other team in school history had ever finished a regular season without either a loss or a tie. No one outside of West Virginia thought it was even possible. And many within the Mountaineer program were shocked as well.
“It makes you feel very good about yourself and what you accomplished as a team,” said A.B. Brown. “There were a lot of good things that happened at West Virginia at that time.”
“It was a great experience for the players; it was a great experience for the state and the whole nine yards,” said Dave Lockwood. “A lot of people say it was one of the best - if not the best team - to ever come through here. I tend to agree.”
“I appreciate it more because I don’t live there,” Major Harris said. “If I was down there constantly I would always be reminded of that. But being that I’m in Pittsburgh and when I go down there it’s almost like a family reunion.”
“It’s kind of funny how people remember that season like it was last year,” mentioned Willie Edwards. “Often people will come up to me and make comments about certain things that happened during that season like it just happened. It has been 20 years now.”
Yes, it is hard to believe that it has now been 20 years since West Virginia first achieved perfection. That magical season will always be the one Mountaineer fans point to when comparing future teams. The vast majority of players on that 1988 team weren’t superstars. They liked each other, they played hard, and they bought into what Don Nehlen was preaching.
They also had one very special quarterback who discovered himself after sleeping through a team breakfast. It turned out to be the greatest epiphany in school history.
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