No. 10: Cincinnati, 1980
June 22, 2010 11:54 AM | General
July 21, 2010
Nationally known recording artist John Denver was invited to Morgantown to help christen new Mountaineer Field by performing “Country Roads” before West Virginia’s 1980 season opener against Cincinnati.
Just as Denver was about to strum the first chord on his guitar the power went off in the stadium. Ed Pastilong, in charge of athletic facilities at the time, felt his heart go into his throat. He was standing in the north end of the stadium underneath the scoreboard next to his assistant George Nedeff when everything went dead. Athletic officials everywhere grabbed their radios trying to figure out what went wrong.
Pastilong calmly looked over at the large electrical breaker box sitting underneath the scoreboard and noticed that the door was wide open. In an effort to get all of the finishing work done before the game, nobody thought to check and make sure the electrical box was locked.
“I said to George, ‘Do you realize there is no lock on that box?’” Pastilong recalled. “Why don’t you go over there and see if somebody went in there and pulled down the arm?”
Sure enough, someone had turned the power off in the stadium.
“Everybody thought some big miracle went on (when the power was restored),” Pastilong chuckled.
Also, the ticket office, usually accustomed to handling ticket requests for 35,000-seat old Mountaineer Field, was overwhelmed by the 50,150 that showed up for the ’80 opener. The lines outside the ticket gate stretched well into the parking lot as ticket takers tried to accommodate the much bigger-than-usual crowd.
There were other nervous people at the stadium that afternoon. First-year coach Don Nehlen wasn’t big on making speeches before games but he felt he had to make an exception for this one.
“It was a carnival-like atmosphere,” Nehlen recalled. “It was the first time in my coaching career I ever had to do something like that before a football game. I had to go out and cut a ribbon, or something, and I had to talk to the fans and student body. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt it was important.”
Also troubling Nehlen was the fact that he didn’t know what type of team he was putting on the field in the new stadium.
“I knew I didn’t have a real good football team. In fact, I didn’t know what kind of team I had,” he said.
"We were in the locker room for about 45 minutes after we came in from warm-ups and Coach Nehlen was pacing back and forth, giving us his opening game speech," recalled quarterback Oliver Luck. "Governor Rockefeller had a speech. Senator Byrd had a speech. I remember we started to joke about it in the locker room because it seemed like we were in there for hours."
Right off the bat Cincinnati scored the game’s first points on a 45-yard field goal.
“I didn’t think we were going to be very good, but I thought we’d certainly be better than this,” Nehlen said.
But once the West Virginia players got over their opening jitters they rolled to a 41-27 victory. Tailback Robert Alexander, running in Nehlen’s brand new I-formation, rushed for a career-high 187 yards and two touchdowns.
Luck completed 10 of 15 passes for 138 yards and two scores, one of them going to Cedric Thomas. And fullback Walter Easley rushed for 89 yards and scored twice.
“When the game was over I felt like a 100-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders,” Nehlen recalled. “Now, I didn’t think we played particularly well. I knew Cincinnati was just an average team, yet it scored 27 points on our defense. That wasn’t a good sign. But I was just happy we scored more than Cincinnati did.”
