Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia

13. A Major Leads His Army: West Virginia University Football, 1960 through the Don Nehlen Years

317 A Major Leads His Army: West Virginia University Football, 1960 through the Don Nehlen Years IN THE 1960s and 1970s, the WVU athletic program was in a state of flux. That was not unusual for an era when protests over the war in Vietnam , civil rights, women’s rights, and student rights were sweeping the nation . Although such social unrest surfaced in Morgantown to a degree, the turbulence in the athletic program was caused by a college athletic program seeking an identity. The Mountaineers had been a member of the Southern Conference and had been identified as a southern university since the 1950s, but WVU had been steadily adding eastern colleges to its football schedule. The question of regional identity was to perplex the university for two decades. Beyond this question of identity, WVU faced a lack of stability in the leadership of the football program. In the twenty-year period from 1960 to 1980, WVU had four head football coaches, two who could be ranked among the best Mountaineer coaches and two that could be ranked among the worst. The first of the worst was Gene Corum, who replaced Art Lewis in 1960. Things started badly when Corum’s first team failed to win a single C H A P T E R 1 3 Chapter 13 318 game, with a 0-8-2 record. Even worse was the debacle of the opening game of the 1963 season. To highlight the state of West Virginia’s centennial celebration , WVU brought the powerful Navy team, with future Heisman trophy winner Roger Staubach, to Morgantown. Navy crushed the Mountaineers by the humiliating score of 51-7. Although Corum did produce three winning teams in six years, his overall record was 29-30-2. He was fired because WVU fans expected winners, particularly when the schedule included easy wins over Southern Conference pushovers. Among the best of the four coaches was Jim Carlen, who lasted four seasons, from 1966 through 1969. In his second year, Carlen convinced the WVU administration to leave the Southern Conference and become an independent . WVU continued to schedule strong Eastern colleges like Penn State, Boston College, Syracuse, and archrival Pitt, and the team slowly added games with other flagship state universities like Kentucky, Maryland , and Indiana. Leaving the Southern Conference made travel easier because WVU teams no longer had to travel the length of West Virginia on bad roads to get to Southern Conference foes. However, the switch severely hurt the basketball team: it lost ten to twelve guaranteed wins each season against Southern Conference teams, as well as an almost automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament from winning the soft Southern Conference tournament. Carlen’s best season was his fourth, in 1969, when he led the Mountaineers to a 10-1 record. During the regular season, WVU beat Pitt, 49-18, and Syracuse, 13-10. They also won the Peach Bowl over South Carolina, 14-3. Following this success, Carlen immediately jumped to Texas Tech for a huge salary increase and a rumored offer of an oil well in his name. Carlen ’s four-year record at WVU was a respectable 25-13-3. As history would later prove, the best football coach that ever spent time at West Virginia University was Carlen’s replacement, Bobby Bowden. He followed Carlen’s 1969 Peach Bowl season with a good 8-3 record in 1970 and continued to produce five straight winning seasons. In Bowden’s A Major Leads His Army 319 sixth year, the Mountaineers defeated North Carolina, 13-10, in the Peach Bowl. Bowden had been hanged in effigy following a couple of sour defeats, but his record was 42-26. He left for Florida State, the former women’s college in Tallahassee, and the rest is history: he holds the record for the most wins of any Division I football coach. The next WVU coach was Frank Cignetti. The program hit rock-bottom when Cignetti’s 1979 team was ranked number ten in the country. Ordinarily , that rank would immortalize a coach, but it was bad news because the rating was in Penthouse. Between the pictures of topless women and tasteless cartoons was a story titled “Penthouse’s 20 Worst College Football Teams.” In the September 1979 article, WVU was ranked as the tenth worst team in the country, sandwiched between perennial losers Oregon State (number nine) and Rice (number eleven), but...