Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
Campus Connection: The Hall Comes Calling For Avon
September 21, 2018 09:00 AM | Football, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - For Avon Cobourne, most of the games he once played at West Virginia University are now beginning to run together. Age and time have a way of blurring things.
But he does remember one game very vividly.
"Boston College, my senior year," he said via cellphone earlier this week. "When I broke the (WVU career rushing) record against BC and the people held me up. Every time somebody talks to me about WVU football, that is really the game that sticks out in my mind because of that experience. My teammates threw Gatorade on me."
When you were as good as Cobourne was during his four seasons at West Virginia University from 1999-2002, it's easy to forget all of those good games.
He had so many.
He ran for a career-high 260 yards and scored two touchdowns in a blowout home victory against East Carolina in 2002.
However, most of the fine details are lost to father time.
He tore through Pitt's overmatched defense for 210 yards during his freshman season in 1999, another blowout Mountaineer win.
That performance, too, is now locked up deep in the memory vault.
Same goes for his 181-yard performance against Kent State during his junior year in 2001, or the 175 yards he put on Miami's stacked defense in 2002. If you recall, that Hurricane team lost to Ohio State in the national championship game.
The other 24 times he topped 100 yards during his outstanding career are now becoming a fading memory as well.
The things Cobourne remembers most about his terrific experience at West Virginia University were the lifelong friendships he made, whether it was cracking jokes in the locker room before practice, getting ready for big games or seeing the joy teammates Tory Johnson and Moe Fofana got whenever he scored a touchdown.
His touchdowns were their touchdowns, too, because they were the guys in front of him paving the way for them to happen.
Those memories are impossible for Cobourne to ever forget.
"Cooper Rego was my locker mate," he said. "I was number 22 and he was number 23 and Coop would just say crazy things all the time. He had a bodybuilder in his locker, and I would always say, 'Coop, why do you have a bodybuilder in there?' He'd say, 'Because I'm going to look like that one day.' I'm like Coop, you're crazy dude! Good times."
Cobourne also remembers sitting in the freshman locker room waiting to take his very first physical as a Mountaineer player.
He was having a good time with the rest of the guys, cutting it up, when offensive guard Terry Dixon walked into the room with a dead-serious look on his face.
Dixon was a junior college transfer who had done this before, and he had to do it once more with a bunch of know-nothing freshmen that afternoon. He told them in addition to doing the normal physical exam they were also going to be administered an AIDS test.
"Everybody in there got quiet real quickly," Cobourne chuckled. "He said, 'If y'all don't think you can pass, you might want to leave right now.' We don't know anything because we're all just freshmen, and he was just messing with us."
Cobourne came to WVU from Camden, New Jersey, where he was once considered among the top prep running backs in the country playing for Tom Maderia, a former graduate assistant coach for Don Nehlen.
Then Cobourne blew out his knee during his junior year and nearly all of the schools who were recruiting him quit calling.
Cobourne said that was a big dose of reality.
"You are only good for someone when you are working the right way," he said. "It wasn't an Avon thing but more of a football thing. I had a relationship with a coach from Notre Dame, and he probably called me more than anyone else and when that happened he just stopped calling me."
It was the same deal with Tennessee. Even Rutgers quit calling Cobourne. If ever a school needed good football players it's always been Rutgers, but the Scarlet Knights weren't interested in reading Avon Cobourne's Scarlet Letter.
"How could they not offer me a scholarship when I was one of the best running backs in the country?" he said.
But one man stuck with Cobourne, Nehlen. It wasn't so much clairvoyance on his part as it was a former graduate assistant chirping in his ear to stick with Cobourne because he was well worth it, damaged goods and all.
When you have a program full of good people, sometimes the circle of life has a way of circling back.
It certainly did with Maderia, and that's how Cobourne ended up at West Virginia.
"He's a special man in my heart because he gave me an opportunity to come to WVU," Cobourne said of Nehlen. "My talent was good, but that all faded when I tore my ACL. When I spoke to Coach Nehlen recently he admitted, 'I wasn't going to offer you because there are a lot of fish in the sea but Tommy said you were special. And you turned out to be pretty special for us.' For him to take a chance like that was phenomenal to me."
Cobourne repaid Nehlen many times over, and then his successor Rich Rodriguez when he took over the Mountaineer program in 2001 and force-fed Cobourne the football 602 times during his remaining 24 games, which amounted to about 50 percent more carries than what he got during his first two years.
Cobourne's 5,164 career rushing yards are still tied with Northern Illinois' Garrett Wolfe for the 15th-most in NCAA history entering the 2018 season.
Avon wasn't a burner and he wasn't going to rip off a bunch of long touchdown runs like Steve Slaton did later for the Mountaineers, but he had such a great feel between the tackles and possessed an uncanny knack for making defenders miss whenever he got into the open field.
He was also far more powerful than his 5-foot-8-inch, 190-pound frame suggested.
Linebacker Ben Collins, a teammate of Cobourne's, once reminded Avon how his bread got buttered before the Mountaineers' road game at Cincinnati early into their senior season in 2002.
Once again, Cobourne recalls very little about his amazing 193-yard rushing performance against the Bearcats or the exact details of how the Mountaineers pulled out a tough road victory, their first road win under Rodriguez.
But what he does remember is Collins before the game telling him to start running the football like a man again.
"It's my senior year, and I'm doing pretty well, and Ben pulls me aside before that game," Cobourne said. "He's from Fairmont or someplace close to there, and he says in his Fairmont accent, 'Hey Coal-burn, you ain't runnin' how you used to run. I was sitting with my dad watching film, and he said you are tip-toeing in there. I don't care 'bout nuthin'. I just want to win, so that's why I'm tellin' you, Coal-burn. So run the way you used to and let's go win this damned game!'"
Cobourne never tip-toed in a football game again, which included a professional career that lasted a season and a half with the Detroit Lions and eight more years in the Canadian Football League, ending in 2013.
He played on a couple of Grey Cup teams in Montreal and was named the game's MVP in 2009.
Cobourne also coached a few seasons in the CFL before ending that part of his life for good in 2016.
"My choice," he said. "I wanted to do something different."
So, he packed up his bags and brought his growing family back to the United States, first to Orlando and then to Charleston last year where his wife Rebecca's family lives.
They have two young boys, Avon III who they call Trey, Quion, and an infant daughter Nova, which is Avon spelled backwards.
Cobourne is in charge of business development for Charleston's YMCA, and he also has a financial planning business on the side. His wife is a beautician, which means the mother-in-law has their children during the day.
Our conversation was briefly interrupted by a text message from his mother-in-law after Avon sent a text to her checking in on the kids.
He said his crew would have made more Mountaineer football games last year if not for the birth of their daughter.
"My wife wanted to go, but she was pregnant and I'm like, 'I'm not getting caught anywhere with a pregnant woman in the middle of nowhere (driving up Interstate 79 from Charleston)," he laughed. "We're going to go up to a lot more games this year and have my boys experience Mountaineer Field and what it's like to be a young Mountaineer.
"I'm preparing them early," he added.
The Cobourne boys' prep work will take on added meaning this Saturday afternoon when their daddy walks into the Caperton Indoor Practice Facility to be officially inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame.
He's one of 11 going in this year in a star-studded class that includes quarterback Pat White, Slaton, basketball standout Mike Gansey, Michigan gymnastics coach Bev Fry Plocki, women's basketball standout Kate Bulger, All-Americans Web Wright and Jon Capon, football old-timers Tom Keane and Larry Krutko and pioneering women's administrator Eleanor Lamb.
Cobourne said he was floored when he got the call from WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons last summer.
"It's going to be pretty exciting for me, I'm not going to lie," he said.
Unlike many of those WVU football games Avon once played, this is one Mountaineer experience he will never forget.
After all, he's got two small boys and now a little girl around to always remind him.
But he does remember one game very vividly.
"Boston College, my senior year," he said via cellphone earlier this week. "When I broke the (WVU career rushing) record against BC and the people held me up. Every time somebody talks to me about WVU football, that is really the game that sticks out in my mind because of that experience. My teammates threw Gatorade on me."
When you were as good as Cobourne was during his four seasons at West Virginia University from 1999-2002, it's easy to forget all of those good games.
He had so many.
He ran for a career-high 260 yards and scored two touchdowns in a blowout home victory against East Carolina in 2002.
However, most of the fine details are lost to father time.
He tore through Pitt's overmatched defense for 210 yards during his freshman season in 1999, another blowout Mountaineer win.
That performance, too, is now locked up deep in the memory vault.
Same goes for his 181-yard performance against Kent State during his junior year in 2001, or the 175 yards he put on Miami's stacked defense in 2002. If you recall, that Hurricane team lost to Ohio State in the national championship game.
The other 24 times he topped 100 yards during his outstanding career are now becoming a fading memory as well.
The things Cobourne remembers most about his terrific experience at West Virginia University were the lifelong friendships he made, whether it was cracking jokes in the locker room before practice, getting ready for big games or seeing the joy teammates Tory Johnson and Moe Fofana got whenever he scored a touchdown.
His touchdowns were their touchdowns, too, because they were the guys in front of him paving the way for them to happen.
Those memories are impossible for Cobourne to ever forget.
"Cooper Rego was my locker mate," he said. "I was number 22 and he was number 23 and Coop would just say crazy things all the time. He had a bodybuilder in his locker, and I would always say, 'Coop, why do you have a bodybuilder in there?' He'd say, 'Because I'm going to look like that one day.' I'm like Coop, you're crazy dude! Good times."
Cobourne also remembers sitting in the freshman locker room waiting to take his very first physical as a Mountaineer player.
He was having a good time with the rest of the guys, cutting it up, when offensive guard Terry Dixon walked into the room with a dead-serious look on his face.
Dixon was a junior college transfer who had done this before, and he had to do it once more with a bunch of know-nothing freshmen that afternoon. He told them in addition to doing the normal physical exam they were also going to be administered an AIDS test.
"Everybody in there got quiet real quickly," Cobourne chuckled. "He said, 'If y'all don't think you can pass, you might want to leave right now.' We don't know anything because we're all just freshmen, and he was just messing with us."
Cobourne came to WVU from Camden, New Jersey, where he was once considered among the top prep running backs in the country playing for Tom Maderia, a former graduate assistant coach for Don Nehlen.
Then Cobourne blew out his knee during his junior year and nearly all of the schools who were recruiting him quit calling.
Cobourne said that was a big dose of reality.
"You are only good for someone when you are working the right way," he said. "It wasn't an Avon thing but more of a football thing. I had a relationship with a coach from Notre Dame, and he probably called me more than anyone else and when that happened he just stopped calling me."
It was the same deal with Tennessee. Even Rutgers quit calling Cobourne. If ever a school needed good football players it's always been Rutgers, but the Scarlet Knights weren't interested in reading Avon Cobourne's Scarlet Letter.
"How could they not offer me a scholarship when I was one of the best running backs in the country?" he said.
But one man stuck with Cobourne, Nehlen. It wasn't so much clairvoyance on his part as it was a former graduate assistant chirping in his ear to stick with Cobourne because he was well worth it, damaged goods and all.
When you have a program full of good people, sometimes the circle of life has a way of circling back.
It certainly did with Maderia, and that's how Cobourne ended up at West Virginia.
"He's a special man in my heart because he gave me an opportunity to come to WVU," Cobourne said of Nehlen. "My talent was good, but that all faded when I tore my ACL. When I spoke to Coach Nehlen recently he admitted, 'I wasn't going to offer you because there are a lot of fish in the sea but Tommy said you were special. And you turned out to be pretty special for us.' For him to take a chance like that was phenomenal to me."
Cobourne repaid Nehlen many times over, and then his successor Rich Rodriguez when he took over the Mountaineer program in 2001 and force-fed Cobourne the football 602 times during his remaining 24 games, which amounted to about 50 percent more carries than what he got during his first two years.
Cobourne's 5,164 career rushing yards are still tied with Northern Illinois' Garrett Wolfe for the 15th-most in NCAA history entering the 2018 season.
Avon wasn't a burner and he wasn't going to rip off a bunch of long touchdown runs like Steve Slaton did later for the Mountaineers, but he had such a great feel between the tackles and possessed an uncanny knack for making defenders miss whenever he got into the open field.
He was also far more powerful than his 5-foot-8-inch, 190-pound frame suggested.
Linebacker Ben Collins, a teammate of Cobourne's, once reminded Avon how his bread got buttered before the Mountaineers' road game at Cincinnati early into their senior season in 2002.Once again, Cobourne recalls very little about his amazing 193-yard rushing performance against the Bearcats or the exact details of how the Mountaineers pulled out a tough road victory, their first road win under Rodriguez.
But what he does remember is Collins before the game telling him to start running the football like a man again.
"It's my senior year, and I'm doing pretty well, and Ben pulls me aside before that game," Cobourne said. "He's from Fairmont or someplace close to there, and he says in his Fairmont accent, 'Hey Coal-burn, you ain't runnin' how you used to run. I was sitting with my dad watching film, and he said you are tip-toeing in there. I don't care 'bout nuthin'. I just want to win, so that's why I'm tellin' you, Coal-burn. So run the way you used to and let's go win this damned game!'"
Cobourne never tip-toed in a football game again, which included a professional career that lasted a season and a half with the Detroit Lions and eight more years in the Canadian Football League, ending in 2013.
He played on a couple of Grey Cup teams in Montreal and was named the game's MVP in 2009.
Cobourne also coached a few seasons in the CFL before ending that part of his life for good in 2016.
"My choice," he said. "I wanted to do something different."
So, he packed up his bags and brought his growing family back to the United States, first to Orlando and then to Charleston last year where his wife Rebecca's family lives.
They have two young boys, Avon III who they call Trey, Quion, and an infant daughter Nova, which is Avon spelled backwards.
Cobourne is in charge of business development for Charleston's YMCA, and he also has a financial planning business on the side. His wife is a beautician, which means the mother-in-law has their children during the day.
Our conversation was briefly interrupted by a text message from his mother-in-law after Avon sent a text to her checking in on the kids.
He said his crew would have made more Mountaineer football games last year if not for the birth of their daughter.
"My wife wanted to go, but she was pregnant and I'm like, 'I'm not getting caught anywhere with a pregnant woman in the middle of nowhere (driving up Interstate 79 from Charleston)," he laughed. "We're going to go up to a lot more games this year and have my boys experience Mountaineer Field and what it's like to be a young Mountaineer.
"I'm preparing them early," he added.
The Cobourne boys' prep work will take on added meaning this Saturday afternoon when their daddy walks into the Caperton Indoor Practice Facility to be officially inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame.
He's one of 11 going in this year in a star-studded class that includes quarterback Pat White, Slaton, basketball standout Mike Gansey, Michigan gymnastics coach Bev Fry Plocki, women's basketball standout Kate Bulger, All-Americans Web Wright and Jon Capon, football old-timers Tom Keane and Larry Krutko and pioneering women's administrator Eleanor Lamb.
Cobourne said he was floored when he got the call from WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons last summer.
"It's going to be pretty exciting for me, I'm not going to lie," he said.
Unlike many of those WVU football games Avon once played, this is one Mountaineer experience he will never forget.
After all, he's got two small boys and now a little girl around to always remind him.
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