MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – When Don Nehlen got his first good look at the football team he was inheriting after he took the West Virginia University job in 1979, he was appalled.

He thought he was looking at the track team.

“I had linemen who could run five miles but couldn’t bench press 200 pounds,” Nehlen recalled.

There are no photos to be found of West Virginia’s weight room at old Mountaineer Field because no coach in his right mind would ever let anybody see it.

The place was beyond abysmal.

What the team had for a weight room underneath the bowl end of the old stadium was no bigger than a broom closet. It was only big enough to fit a couple of bench presses and a Universal machine.

The players used to tell stories of how offensive guard Joe Taffoni had to get teammates to sit on the crossbar of the leg-press machine because there were not enough weights for him to put on it.

According to former Mountaineer player Charlie Miller, coach Jim Carlen got the University to purchase a couple of Exer-Genies, which was a resistance-type of contraption that was supposed to help the players improve their leg strength and flexibility. 

That was about it for weight training in the late 1960s and 1970s.

When Nehlen eventually saw where the team worked out he wondered out loud how West Virginia managed to win any football games at all.

WVU’s solution to its lack of size was to play a style that didn’t require big, physical players to knock people off the football. That’s why coaches Carlen, Bobby Bowden and Frank Cignetti chose to run the Veer offense, which relied on wide splits, angles and blocking at people’s feet.

The Veer worked well for many of the teams on the Mountaineers’ schedule, but when it came time to play Penn State, Pitt, Maryland and some of the bigger, more physical opponents, West Virginia simply couldn’t hold up.

“The hardest thing for us to recruit at West Virginia was the imposing linemen – the big, tough kid who could knock you off the ball,” Bowden recalled in 2014. “Penn State would get them and Pitt would get them. Now we were never as big and as strong as they were because their backyard was full of ‘em, and we didn’t have as many.”

Cignetti was the first coach to hire a strength coach when he put graduate assistant coach Dave Van Halanger in charge of it in 1978, but there was only so much Van Halanger could do with severely limited resources.

When Nehlen arrived he kept Van Halanger, and he also made it a point to carve out some more space in the new stadium for Van Halanger to work out the Mountaineer players.

Nehlen, who spent three years coaching the quarterbacks for Bo Schembechler at Michigan, wanted to make West Virginia a Michigan clone.

“I found out at Michigan that football was strictly a mind game,” Nehlen once recalled in 2006. “When you have a bunch of kids who believe in themselves and believe in the program, you have a chance to win.”

However, Nehlen was smart enough to understand that it’s hard to get players to believe in themselves when they are physically weak and are regularly getting manhandled by the more physical teams they play.

He also knew he couldn’t play Michigan football at West Virginia without getting Michigan-caliber players, which simply wasn’t going to happen at a place with a limited football tradition located between Columbus, Ohio, and State College, Pennsylvania.

His solution was to make Michigan players through a disciplined and structured weight program.

“We are playing Pitt and Penn State each year so I told (Van Halanger), ‘I don’t give a damn if my guys can run from here to the refrigerator, we’ve got to get these guys much stronger or else we’re going to get killed.”

For about the first year and a half, Nehlen’s teams did get killed by those big, physical teams – particularly Pitt. The Panthers mauled the Mountaineers at Pitt Stadium during Nehlen’s first season in 1980, and the same thing happened a couple weeks later when West Virginia played at Virginia Tech.

Nehlen somehow got his team through that first season with a 6-6 record, relying on a little bit of psychology to get the sixth win at Rutgers near the end of the season. Nehlen knew his guys were wearing down and were going to likely take the Scarlet Knights lightly, so he asked Jack Fleming, the “Voice of the Mountaineers,” for some help putting together a fictitious broadcast that he could play to them.

“Rutgers had a coach named Frank Burns – a good coach – but his teams were so predictable,” Nehlen recalled. “His first play was a run up the middle, his second was a run to the outside and the third was a pass down the middle of the field.

“So I had Jack put a cassette tape together of a broadcast to play to the team and on that third play I told him to describe Steve Newberry intercepting a pass and us taking the ball down the field to score,” he continued. “Well, lo and behold that’s exactly what happened and we were able to hold on and beat Rutgers in a very difficult game.”

Following that season, the coach continued to play mind games with his guys in an effort to boost their confidence and self-esteem. He instructed Van Halanger to measure each players’ body parts and to keep track of the gains they were making in the weight room.

If a player struggled to lift a certain amount, Nehlen wasn’t against Van Halanger nudging the bar to help them get it up, or sticking his toe on the scale to show them gaining weight.

Nehlen wanted his guys believing they were getting bigger and stronger, even if they actually weren’t. Having them think they were bigger and stronger than they really were was just as important as actually being bigger and stronger.

More mind games that he learned at Michigan.

This is really what separated Don Nehlen from most of his contemporaries and where his true greatness was as a football coach. He was able to convince his guys that they were better than they actually were and could motivate them to do things that were sometimes seemingly beyond their capabilities.

It happened when West Virginia stunned Florida in the 1981 Peach Bowl, and it happened again nine months later when the Mountaineers upset Oklahoma 41-27 in Norman to begin the 1982 season.

“We had no business beating Oklahoma, whatsoever,” Parkersburg’s Allan Johnson, Nehlen’s strength coach after Van Halanger, recalled recently.

But they did. 

Those two big victories in back-to-back fashion were a turning point for Mountaineer football. It gave West Virginia some cache it lacked in the football world and also gave Nehlen job security no coach before him at WVU ever had.

In turn, Nehlen’s newfound security afforded him the time he needed to build a true developmental program. 

He could now make those Michigan football players he was seeking through his weight program.

Bill Legg, Kurt Kehl, Mike Fox, Kevin Koken, John Stroia and many, many more just like them … by the time they were seniors they were good enough to play for any program in the country.

“He knew if he could give us at least two years with kids – if the program could afford that without injuries or a lack of depth at a certain position – the kids would get to where they needed to be with respect to body weight and strength for their position,” Johnson explained. “He wanted to line up in the I (formation) with a fullback in front of the tailback, and he wanted that fullback to knock that middle linebacker right out of his shoes!”

By 1983, Nehlen’s teams were at a point where they could do that against the biggest, most physical teams on their schedule.

The victory over Pitt in Morgantown that ended the Panthers’ seven-year winning streak in the Backyard Brawl was essentially a product of Nehlen’s strength program. The winning drive in the fourth quarter covered 90 yards and spanned six minutes.

There were no gimmicks and almost no passes – just one for 12 yards. The other 13 plays were on the ground between the tackles. His guys were able to take seven year's worth of frustration out on the Panther defense that afternoon.

One year after that, Nehlen ended Penn State’s 29-year winning streak over West Virginia in similar fashion.

Boston College Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie was 0 for 4 against West Virginia. 

Why? 

Because Nehlen’s teams pounded him. Maryland’s Boomer Esiason was also winless against West Virginia for the very same reason.

A decade later, fourth-ranked Miami and 11th-ranked Boston College endured similar fates on back-to-back weekends in late November in 1993. That continued a five-year pattern of unbeaten regular seasons that first began in 1988 as a result of Nehlen redshirting players and developing them in the weight program.

Possibly Nehlen’s most talented team in 1998 never reached its full potential because it lost the season opener to No. 1-ranked Ohio State and then dropped back-to-back midseason games to Miami and Virginia Tech before getting upset by Missouri in the Insight.com Bowl.

Even when some of Nehlen’s teams in the late 1990s began to decline, they were still known for being among the toughest and most physical in college football.

“I would run into strength coaches from Maryland, Virginia Tech and Pitt at our national strength conferences and those guys would all tell me it didn’t matter if West Virginia was worth a damn or not, they knew the Mountaineers were going to beat them up,” Johnson said. 

“They said the next week after they played West Virginia they always struggled because the game with West Virginia was so physical that it took another week to recover before the players felt good again,” Johnson continued. “Those guys would tell me their kids would say, ‘Dang, West Virginia is so physical. Their guys come off the ball, they strike you and regardless of the outcome of the game, they beat us up.”

That was the essence of Don Nehlen football at West Virginia University.

“Don did an amazing job,” Bobby Bowden said. “No. 1, he had that Michigan background. He used to coach at Michigan, and he was used to being big-time all the way so when he comes to West Virginia he just assumes he’s going to do the same thing there. He changed the uniforms to even look like Michigan.

“Don is one of the best coaches ever, in my opinion,” Bowden added.

That’s telling because Bowden knew how difficult it was to win at West Virginia during that period of time.

Nehlen’s innovation at WVU wasn’t something tactical that came about on the grease board. He ran the same plays over and over and over and over again. 

His innovation was molding a losing program into his image and then getting them to believe in themselves. And he did it by emphasizing a strength and conditioning program. 

“No. 1, team building starts early and the most important thing in team building is the head of the organization – whether it’s coaching a football team, running an insurance company or running an athletic program. You’ve got to make the people believe in your plan and then make sure they can execute it,” Nehlen once said. “If the leader has great passion for what they’re doing it will rub off on the people below them. Most football teams are the reflection of the personality of the guy who is coaching them.”

For Don Nehlen, it was about being enthusiastic and positive and getting his players and coaches to share that same enthusiasm and positivity.

“Of all the coaches I ever worked for, coach Nehlen was the best,” Johnson said. “He was totally in. You didn’t have to sell him on the importance of what we were doing. 

“He understood.”

Next Sunday is the fourth and final installment of our Mountaineer football innovator series.