HofF Profile: Jeff Merrow
May 17, 2009 09:32 AM | General
May 17, 2009
 |
||
| Jeff Merrow |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - The way Jeff Merrow remembers it, he had his sights set on going to Ohio State until a smallish man with a pronounced Southern accent drove up to the family house in Akron, Ohio, and began turning on the charm.
That man’s name, of course, is Bobby Bowden and back in 1970 he was trying to build West Virginia University into a big-time football power.
“When I met Coach Bowden I was just really excited about his attitude toward what was going to happen at West Virginia and his vision,” Merrow said. “(Bowden’s visit) kind of turned things around for me and I was really excited about going there and playing in that big, beautiful stadium that he assured me would be done before I left.”
Bowden may have exaggerated a little about the new stadium, but it didn’t hurt to throw that out there in an effort to land one of Ohio’s best defensive linemen.
“Coach Bowden is a real dynamic guy and my grandmother was from West Virginia (Waverly). From the time I was two years old I just thought West Virginia was God’s country,” said Merrow in his modified Georgia accent. “It was a great time and a great opportunity, and at the same time, the guys I went in with as a freshman were really an outstanding group of players.”
That West Virginia freshman class Merrow was a part of in 1971 included John “Tree” Adams, Danny Buggs, Bubba Coker, Chuck Fiornate, Bruce Huffman, Charlie Miller, John Spraggins and Doug Stevens.
“Prior to my era, West Virginia had played more of the traditional Southern style of football with small linemen and all of the sudden I’m going there with guys like Tree Adams, Doug Stevens and a bunch of full-blown models,” Merrow said. “It was a pretty neat time. Most people don’t understand it, but if you talked to Bobby Bowden and you talked to Woody Hayes, it was a no-brainer.”
It was also a no-brainer that Merrow was going to be a star for the Mountaineers. He had an unbeatable combination of size, quickness, strength, athletic ability and a mean streak that made him nearly impossible to block. In one game against Illinois in 1973, No. 90 produced 18 tackles (13 unassisted) to help the Mountaineers to a 17-10 victory. His junior season also saw him lead a stout defensive line that produced goal line stands in games against Maryland, Virginia Tech and Miami. He made a ridiculous 141 tackles that year.
Merrow lined up at nose guard in West Virginia’s 5-2 defensive alignment and his coach was former Mountaineer standout George “Duke” Henshaw.
“The only thing that made Duke mad with me was that I weighed 235 pounds and I didn’t weigh 220 pounds,” Merrow laughed. “I’m like, ‘Duke, I really don’t need to be playing nose guard.’ He’s like, ‘You’re going to play nose guard.’
“I’m playing nose guard and I’ve got all these great big guys around me like Rich Lukowski, who was a horse and a really good ballplayer. We had Luke and Tree and both of those guys dwarfed me and I’m thinking, ‘Why isn’t one of those guys playing nose guard?’ Duke was old-school even back then, so we had some 235-pound nose guard with malnutrition.”
Merrow said that college football in the mid 1970s was a much dirtier game then played lower to the ground.
“Every week the off-side guard would try to spear me in the knee on every play,” he said. “They were trying to hurt you – maybe they got a free pair of shoes or something for doing it. That’s just the way it was.”
Merrow finally got caught in a 17-14 loss at Tulane three games into his senior season. He was engaged with the center when one of the guards came crashing down on his knee.
“When you were playing nose guard you were really vulnerable and a guy caught me one night when we were playing down at Tulane,” he said. “Basically I hurt my knee pretty bad so I played the whole year on one leg.”
Despite having a knee injury that probably should have sidelined him for the remainder of the season, Merrow wound up only missing the Pitt game. Unfortunately, he didn’t miss the abuse the team took for having such a disappointing year in 1974.
“Coach took such a thrashing my senior year,” Merrow said. “He was hanging from trees. When I saw him once years later when I was doing business down in Florida I said, ‘Well Coach, it’s really nice to see that you weren’t hanging from any trees.’ He said, ‘You notice we don’t have any trees down here for them to hang me in.’
“There was definitely a lot of negativity at the time but what was so disheartening that year was that we weren’t winning games,” Merrow said.
West Virginia had arguably one of Bowden’s most talented teams in 1974 with a group of players that included Merrow, Buggs, fullbacks Ron Lee and Heywood Smith, running backs Dwayne Woods and Artie Owens, linebackers Ken Culbertson, Ray Marshall, Steve Dunlap and Bruce Huffman, defensive backs Jack Eastwood, Marcus Mauney, Charlie Miller and Rory Fields, wide receivers Marshall Mills and Bernie Kirchner, and offensive linemen Dave Van Halanger, Al Gluchoski and Rick Pennypacker.
What West Virginia didn’t have was a healthy quarterback. By the end of the year true freshman Dan Kendra wound up playing the final three games against Syracuse, Temple and Virginia Tech.
“When you run a system like the one (Bowden) does you better have your quarterback running on all eight cylinders,” Merrow said. “Going into my junior year we had Chuck Fiorante and this kid could throw a football. Chuck was the stuff, but he separated his shoulder and he was never really the same after that. It was sad. You watched him in practice and you saw how he played before he got hurt and then afterward, he could probably throw it a little better than me – he just didn’t have it anymore.”
The following year in 1975 - without many of those great players from Merrow’s senior class - West Virginia produced a 9-3 record, beat Pitt at Mountaineer Field and won the Peach Bowl.
“I think Coach Bowden did a lot better coaching job that next year,” Merrow admitted. “When you go through a year like (1974) obviously there is a lot of reevaluating going on. When Bobby brought in the Mole-Man (Greg Williams) - he changed things. He injected some good schemes.
 |
||
| Jeff Merrow once recorded 18 tackles in a game against Illinois in 1973.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
“Charlie Miller was a hell of a ballplayer. Marcus Mauney was a good college football player. But really, when you look at it from a performance level, we were very average on defense,” Merrow said. “I played on teams that were very well coached and I played on teams that were not-so-well coached. Coach Bowden made a lot of changes the whole time I was there on defense.”
Despite playing injured most of his senior season, Merrow was invited to the East-West Shrine Game and afterward, he was able to rehabilitate his knee in time for the 1975 NFL Draft. He wound up going in the 11th round (263rd pick) to the Atlanta Falcons.
“I got to eat,” he said. “The easiest thing I ever did in my life was during my rookie year go into camp weighing 255 pounds and in great shape. I had a real good camp and the one thing about playing for Duke - you’re going to be fundamentally sound. You’re not going to get knocked off the ball because if you did you would have been gone a long time ago. I had very good fundamentals and physically, I had gone from a boy to a man.”
Merrow had two sacks against the Jets during one preseason game and he broke into the starting lineup as a rookie when all-pro Claude Humphrey injured his knee. Merrow played so well in 1975 that the Falcons traded its other all-pro defensive end John Zook to the Rams in 1976.
“I kind of worked my way to where I was playing with those guys,” Merrow noted. “My new coach was taking me from nose guard to defensive end and I was going to kill for that man because I was never going to play nose guard again. It really worked out well for me.”
Merrow led a record-setting Falcon defense with 10 sacks in 1977 and was a member of the 1980 team that won the NFC West with a 12-4 record. He played nine seasons with Atlanta until the cumulative effect of several injuries forced him to retire after the 1983 season.
“Unless I was hurt I started and it was pretty much my job for the next nine years,” Merrow said.
Similar to when he played in college, Merrow said the pro game was much nastier than it is today.
“If you didn’t have the demeanor for it you struggled with it,” Merrow said. “I can remember my second or third year with the Falcons they took out the head slap rule. I had an old-school coach (Eddie Khayat) and he said, ‘Gino Marchetti invented it. Willie Davis perfected it and Deacon Jones beautified it.’ All you wanted to do was to get that big guy to blink.”
Merrow said cut blocking should also have been outlawed when the league eliminated the head slap.
“We had our big rules meeting and the officials told us there was no more head slapping of offensive linemen. My coach got up and said, ‘You never hurt one of these big guys by hitting them in the head. How come you don’t stop the cut rule?’
“You would go up field and they ran a screen and the back would sneak outside and the tackle would turn you loose and man, that back would just crack you from behind,” Merrow said. “It really took out some guys’ careers. It was just a nasty shot. John Cappelletti was the worst. It took them five years to change that rule.”
Today, Merrow operates a successful equipment business with his brother in Buford, Ga. He and his wife Lisa have three boys including son, Thor, who spent three years on the Mountaineer football team.
Merrow is anxious to return to Morgantown to see old friends when he is officially inducted into the WVU Sports Hall of Fame Sept. 12 before the East Carolina football game.
“It is very thought provoking, especially after all these years,” he said. “It’s very humbling and I’m not the most humble guy in the world. You think about a lot of people and you think about a lot of good times.
“The one thing that has always held true is that we’ve got the wildest football fans in the country,” Merrow said. “That’s what’s so great about it. I knew when I was playing at West Virginia that I played for the wildest bunch of folks out there. I loved playing in front of those crowds because they were so amped up when the game started. You go there today and it’s the same way.
“A lot of people are dead serious about their football games up there,” Merrow added. “A lot of people haven’t been to Morgantown and they don’t realize what they’re getting into. Teams have got themselves a plate full when they walk into that place.”
