MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The word being used is "immortalize" to describe what West Virginia University is planning to do on Saturday afternoon when it recognizes former coach, Don Nehlen, as the Mountaineers take on the Cincinnati Bearcats at Milan Puskar Stadium.
 
The University is immortalizing Nehlen by placing his name on the Diversified Energy Terrace next to all-time greats Ira Errett Rodgers, Sam Huff, Bruce Bosley, Darryl Talley, Major Harris and Chuck Howley.
 
It's Mountaineer football's Mt. Rushmore, if you will, and Nehlen's name certainly deserves to be on there. I'm willing to argue that Don Nehlen's name could even be placed a little bit more prominently than the others, based on what he did during his 21 seasons at WVU.
 
Of course, a little perspective is in order.
 
In December of 1979, when athletic director Dick Martin went rogue to hire Michigan's quarterback coach, hardly anybody from Weirton to Welch knew who the hell Don Nehlen was. One local commentator consistently referred to him as Donald and pronounced his last name Nay-lun, and Nehlen's somewhat pedestrian head coaching credentials at Bowling Green seemed to be in line with what West Virginia University could afford to pay its football coach at the time.
 
The Mountaineers were coming off four consecutive losing seasons, prompting one magazine to list the West Virginia program among the worst in Division I football. In fact, it was so bad that Nehlen's Michigan boss, Bo Schembechler, thought he was nuts for even considering it.
 
"Don, are you crazy?" he said. "I'm looking at that West Virginia schedule and I see Pitt on there. I see Penn State. I see Oklahoma coming up. There's Maryland, Virginia Tech and Boston College. You've got four, five or six losses on here right away.
 
"Every coach that's ever coached there if they win, they leave, and if they lose, they get fired," Schembechler lectured him. "This is just a huge mistake on your part. You're making good money here, we go to the Rose Bowl every other year, and in two or three more years I'll get you a good job."
 
Everything associated with West Virginia was considered a losing proposition back then. The collapse of the coal industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the state's population literally fall off a cliff, going from 1.9 million people when Nehlen took the WVU job in 1980 to around 1.79 million in 1990 before finally stabilizing for a bit.
 
West Virginia's unemployment rate was a staggering 17.3% in 1983 – nearly Great Depression levels – and remained above 10% for most of the decade.
 
West Virginia University, too, was experiencing declining enrollments and annual budgetary difficulties that would often require the University to look to athletics to help fund some of its ailing academic programs.
 
In 1993, for instance, a significant portion of the Mountaineers' Sugar Bowl payout went to the University to help support some of its most underfunded programs on campus. In this regard, the athletic department was never in a position to fully reap the rewards of Nehlen's successes in the 1980s and early 1990s the way other peer programs such as Virginia Tech did under Frank Beamer.
 
Therefore, West Virginia University, in the late 1970s, was not really an ideal place for an ambitious, middle-aged man to try and revive his football coaching career.
 
But Nehlen saw something different here than what Schembechler had described to him. He saw great potential. A new 50,000-seat football stadium was under construction and was scheduled to open in 1980, demonstrating the residents' intense desire to field good, competitive football teams despite its overwhelming financial hardships.
 
Nehlen could sense immediately their great passion when he began meeting some of them.
 
He also realized Morgantown, West Virginia, was situated in a place where there were, and still are, a lot of really good football players. He took out a map and drew a concentric circle around Morgantown and showed it to Schembechler. Within that circle were Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., southern New Jersey, western New York, Virginia, Delaware and Kentucky.
 
"Bo, there are a ton of football players within 300 miles of Morgantown, and I feel like I can get 15 or 20 of them a year," Nehlen predicted.
 
A few years later, Nehlen met a man named Rick Perry who convinced him to go down to Florida to recruit Dade and Broward counties. And he did that, too.
 
Nehlen always suspected that he was a pretty good football coach when he was at Canton McKinley High and Bowling Green, but after spending a couple of years with Schembechler at Michigan, he knew it.
 
"I found out at Michigan that it was strictly a mind game," Nehlen once recalled. "When you have a bunch of kids who believe in themselves and believe in your program, you have a chance to win. Well, when I was at Michigan, I thought to myself, 'If I ever get a chance to be a head coach again, I'll be good because what I was doing at Bowling Green was good.' I just wasn't real sure I believed in it because I didn't have anything to compare it with.
 
"Then, going to Michigan and seeing that, wow, what I was doing was pretty good."
 
Nehlen's first objective at West Virginia was to get a bunch of losing football players, some who were pretty talented, to start believing in themselves. During the first team meeting Nehlen held in a room at the Towers complex, he walked over to one of the players slouched down in his chair with a ballcap pulled over his eyes and feet propped up on a tabletop and kicked them off.
 
"Get your damned feet off the table!" Nehlen, who rarely used curse words, barked.
 
"Right then, we realized it was going to be a different regime," quarterback Oliver Luck remembered.
 
"He started telling everybody, 'Regardless of how you guys got here, now all of you are MY GUYS. No matter what anybody says, you're ALL MINE,'" linebacker Darryl Talley recalled of that first team meeting. At the time, Talley marched to his own beat and often did what he wanted, including sleeping on the sidelines in uniform during the games in which he wasn't playing. "I said to myself, 'Here's a guy who doesn't know ace from apple butter going to tell me I'm his guy? Well, we're going to see about that!'"
 
Talley watched, observed and paid attention to everything Nehlen said and did. Soon, he realized that he could trust him. Talley became a consensus All-American player at West Virginia, an All-Pro for the Buffalo Bills and now shares a place on that façade with his coach.
 
When Nehlen took over, he changed everything, including the uniforms. If you talk to him today, one of his proudest accomplishments was transforming West Virginia's look from something unrecognizable to something highly recognizable from the top down, starting with that navy blue helmet and simple bright-gold Flying WV logo that got made for $250.
 
To the people living in West Virginia at the time - down on their luck, suffering from low self-esteem and enduring great personal hardships - what that navy blue helmet and Flying WV represents is impossible for outsiders to ever comprehend, even today. In our eyes, altering it in any way makes us extremely uncomfortable. 
 
Then, once Nehlen began winning, that Flying WV became such an important symbol around here that the University adopted it as its official logo. An envious Virginia Tech even copied it. How often does that happen?
 
That alone speaks volumes to what Don Nehlen has meant to the people of West Virginia. He didn't lift up a football program or a university - he lifted up an entire state when it was down and out.
 
I mean, really down and out!

I know. My dad lost his job around this time and we basically lived off soup beans and cornbread until he could get back on his feet.
 
Beating Florida, Oklahoma, Boston College and then Pitt and Penn State during a time when it seemed unimaginable was, yes, unimaginable. Leading his team to the brink of a national championship in 1988 seemed impossible then, and today, a fond, distant memory.
 
Nearly repeating it five years later only strengthens the legend of Don Nehlen.
 

"Don did an amazing job," the late Bobby Bowden told me in 2014. "No. 1, he had that Michigan background. He used to coach at Michigan when he was an assistant coach and he was just 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 here. He even changed the uniforms to look like Michigan.
 
"Don is one of the best coaches ever, in my opinion," Bowden added.
 
No, Don Nehlen wasn't perfect. His later Mountaineer teams weren't quite as good as his earlier ones, but time has a way of blurring some of those memories.
 
I can vividly remember, as a seventh grader, getting rid of my Ohio State gear and proudly buying my first West Virginia football t-shirt with the phrase "How 'Bout Them Eers?" on the front.
 
Don Nehlen made it cool for kids around here to put on West Virginia football stuff and wear it proudly among those obnoxious Pitt, Penn State, Ohio State and Notre Dame rooters who always used to make fun of us poor, old hillbillies - or Hoopies, as Dan Marino used to call us.

Nehlen gave us what we needed most - hope.
 
That's a little bit of perspective of what this guy has meant to the people of West Virginia.
 
I could type 10,000 words or more of what outsiders think of Nehlen, too, from peers to university presidents to conference commissioners.
 
I remember Chuck Neinas telling me a story about the time Nehlen once stripped the bark off during a meeting of university presidents. He basically told them they were all full of (crap). They were so impressed with what he had to say that every single one of them offered him a job during his tenure at WVU.
 
That alone significantly boosted the profile of Mountaineer athletics, and later helped pave the way for West Virginia University get into the Big 12 Conference.
 
So, if you've got nothing else better to do, come on out to Milan Puskar Stadium this Saturday afternoon and help us show our appreciation for our old ball coach, a College Football Hall of Famer, who is now 87 and getting up in years.
 
The sports marketing staff has a clever promotion – two tickets for $88 or two tickets for $93, depending upon seat location. Visit WVUGAME.com for more details.
 
It's only fitting that we are celebrating Don Nehlen's Mountaineer football legacy against the Cincinnati Bearcats.
 
That was the place where he took his first college coaching job in 1963. It was his first-ever opponent at West Virginia in 1980, and Nov. 18 was the date of his final game at Mountaineer Field against East Carolina in 2000.
 
It was a beginning and an ending to a fabulous, one-of-a-kind coaching career.