MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Last week, we came up with a list of some of the most challenging rebuilds in Mountaineer football history, dating back to World War II.
Today, let’s take a look at some of West Virginia football’s best handoffs – coaching transitions where the successor greatly benefited from his predecessor.
Here is one guy’s opinion of the six best talent handoffs since V-J Day, or thereabouts:
6. Bill Kern’s handoff to Dud DeGroot in 1948
I once remember having a discussion with the late Mickey Furfari about Bill Kern, a Jock Sutherland protégé whose Mountaineer football legacy has long since been forgotten. Mickey thought that Kern was an underappreciated coach whose program suffered mightily when the United States entered World War II.
Kern was the national coach of the year after leading Carnegie Tech to the 1939 Sugar Bowl and his early tenure at WVU included noteworthy wins over Kentucky, Kansas, South Carolina and Penn State. After Uncle Sam finally called him into service, Kern coached the Del Monte Pre-Flight team to a 7-1 record and an No. 10 final ranking in the AP poll in 1943, and when he finally returned to WVU after the war in 1946, Kern brought with him some of players who he had met in the service.
One of Kern’s big military service additions was Tom Keane, from national champion Ohio State, who became an All-Pro defensive back for the Baltimore Colts. For whatever reason, Kern and athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley never saw eye-to-eye, which ultimately led to Kern announcing his resignation before the Pitt game at the conclusion of the 1947 season.
Kern’s Mountaineers upset the Panthers 17-2, ending Pitt’s 15-game winning streak over WVU that spanned 19 years. A couple of days after the big victory, 22 Mountaineer players filed a petition demanding that Kern rescind his resignation and asking Hawley to submit his.
Neither happened, but when Hawley hired pro coach Dud DeGroot to replace Kern, DeGroot made out like a kid in a candy store. He switched Jimmy Walthall to quarterback in his Wing-T offense and took advantage of the pass-catching trio of Roy Lester, Vic Bonfili and Clarence “Bud” Cox to win eight regular season games, upsetting South Carolina and Maryland along the way, and defeating UTEP 21-12 in the 1949 Sun Bowl.
Kern had left DeGroot nine players good enough to be drafted by NFL teams over the next three years. However, as more of DeGroot’s recruits began arriving in 1949, West Virginia’s record slipped to 4-6-1 and his tenure ended after just 23 games when he took the New Mexico job for less money than he was making at West Virginia.
5. Bill Stewart’s handoff to Dana Holgorsen in 2011
Say what? The Bill Stewart-to-Dana Holgorsen coaching transition ranking among the best handoffs since World War II?
Am I crazy? Yes, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Of course, the Stewart-Holgorsen transition wasn’t smooth - not because Stew left the cupboard bare, but rather because of the ill-fated idea of having Holgorsen serve one year as the team’s “head coach in waiting” with Stewart hanging around to offer fatherly advice and counsel.
No. 1, Bill Stewart wasn’t too thrilled about the plan considering the role he played in leading West Virginia to one of its greatest victories in school history over Oklahoma in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, not to mention the three straight nine-win campaigns his teams produced in 2008, 2009 and 2010. You can argue that there could have been more wins during those years, but you can also argue that there easily could have been more losses, too.
The fans who wanted Stewart gone had already made up their minds three games into his WVU tenure in 2008 following back-to-back road defeats at East Carolina and Colorado, and nothing short of a national championship was ever going to change it. Speaking as a lifelong West Virginian, stubbornness has always been an integral part of our state’s sports DNA.
And secondly, Dana Holgorsen was not the type of person who was going to take counsel and advice from anyone. His ideas on how he wanted to run a football program were established long before he ever got the West Virginia job.
Therefore, the “coach in waiting” idea was destined for failure, which even director of athletics Oliver Luck sort of foreshadowed when he announced the plan on Dec., 22, 2010.
“I do want to say that I expect from all of our coaches, led by coach Stewart, coach Holgorsen and coach (Jeff) Casteel, a lot of professionalism during the transition,” Luck said. “As I have mentioned, I studied the transition models of Wisconsin and Oregon, and I think those transitions went extraordinarily well and were reflected by great results on the field and great experiences for the student-athletes.”
What Luck didn’t say, and what no media member in the room picked up on that day, was that in both instances Luck cited, the head coaches had direct input in choosing their successors. The one he didn’t mention, Jimbo Fisher succeeding Bobby Bowden at Florida State, didn’t go over well at all because Bobby thought he still had some gas left in the tank.
Not surprisingly, soon after spring football practice, Stewart stepped aside in June and accepted a buyout.
At any rate, the roster of top-tier talent Bill Stewart passed on to Dana Holgorsen ranks among the best of any succeeding coach - two NFL first-round draft picks, Bruce Irvin in 2012 and Tavon Austin in 2013, a second-rounder in quarterback Geno Smith, and two third-rounders in Stedman Bailey and Will Clarke.
Plus, don’t forget rookie free agent signees Quinton Spain, Donny Barclay and Terence Garvin were also handed off to Holgorsen as well. Spain, by the way, was a starting offensive guard in last year’s Super Bowl for the Cincinnati Bengals, while Barclay and Garvin played in the NFL for multiple seasons.
One other point to consider, the less-than-ideal transition didn’t seem to deter Holgorsen from winning 10 football games and putting 70 points on the scoreboard in West Virginia’s Orange Bowl victory over 14th-ranked Clemson.
4. Don Nehlen’s handoff to Rich Rodriguez in 2001
Considering Rich Rodriguez’s 3-8 first-year record after taking over for Don Nehlen in 2001, it doesn’t seem like much of a successful handoff at all. But that had more to do with Rodriguez’s philosophical differences than him inheriting bad football players from Nehlen.
Rich Rod wanted to continue using the same offensive system that was wildly successful at Tulane and Clemson, which required leaner, more athletic offensive lineman and fleet running backs and wide receivers to operate his no-huddle, spread attack. Defensively, he wanted to play an aggressive, attacking style so he hired LSU defensive coordinator Phil Elmassian, who was on his 14th different job.
Job No. 15 for Elmassian came one year later when he was hired as Marshall’s linebackers coach.
Elmassian’s West Virginia pass defense ranked No. 1 in the country in 2001, mainly because nobody was dumb enough to throw the ball against a porous West Virginia run defense that gave up a staggering 213.2 rushing yards per game. Elmassian’s 4-2-5 Virginia Tech scheme was quickly shelved in favor of the 3-3-5 stack, which defensive coaches Jeff Casteel, Todd Graham and Tony Gibson were required to learn after visiting Wake Forest. Rodriguez struggled to move the football against the stack when he was at Clemson, and he thought it would better suit the type of defensive players he could recruit to West Virginia.
Switching defenses and going to a triple-threat, power running game with Rasheed Marshall, Avon Cobourne and Quincy Wilson in the backfield made a six-win difference in 2002, and set the table for Rodriguez’s great success in the mid-2000s when Pat White, Steve Slaton, Owen Schmitt and Noel Devine came on board.
Incidentally, Nehlen left Rodriguez nine players good enough to either play for or get drafted by NFL teams.
3. Jim Carlen’s handoff to Bobby Bowden in 1970
Jim Carlen’s three years of program building and developing good football players resulted in West Virginia’s outstanding 10-1 record and a 14-3 victory over ACC champion South Carolina in the 1969 Peach Bowl.
Carlen was a CEO-type of coach who let his assistants handle their areas while he concentrated on such big-picture things as getting a full-time football trainer and an ice machine in the training room, demanding that the females be allowed to remove their gloves during games so the players could better hear their applause, and imploring West Virginia University to take a more aggressive approach to enrolling Black students so he could quit losing good Black football recruits to Penn State, Syracuse, Maryland and Pitt. On the field, he let Bobby Bowden run his offense and he let Richard Bell handle the defense.
“The one thing I could out-do anyone else was hire good coaches,” Carlen once recalled in 2009. “If you look at the staff that went with me, I brought in good people, and they did 99% of the work and I take credit for about 1%. They recruited, and they coached well.”
In the meantime, Carlen took care of team discipline and selling Mountaineer football to anyone who would listen. He was the first WVU football coach who really concentrated on branding the program, decades before that was even a thing.
He talked to any civic group that would have him and he created a football television show that was produced in Wheeling and distributed to different stations throughout the state. Carlen’s idea for it came about while watching the Bear Bryant Show as a youngster growing up in Cookeville, Tennessee.
“I knew it was a terrible drive to Wheeling, so I got some of my student managers and I put them in state cars (to deliver the game film to be edited),” Carlen said. “We went to four different stations. I think Bluefield was one. Charleston was one; Wheeling, of course, and the other was Parkersburg. We never had one on the other side of the state toward (Washington) D.C., and we should have and that was a mistake on my part.”
When Carlen left for Texas Tech following the Peach Bowl victory, he handed Bowden a football team that was ranked in the preseason polls for the first time since the mid-1950s.
However, Bowden fumbled the exchange when his team suffered an early season home loss to Duke, blew a 35-8 halftime lead at Pitt and fell 36-35, and endured a blown out defeat at Penn State. Mountaineer fans hoping for another 10-win season and a major bowl appearance took out their ire on Bowden, whom they believed was a significant downgrade from Carlen.
It didn’t help matters when some of Carlen’s comments to a Houston reporter bragging about all of the great football players he had left Bowden - a non-inclusive list which included Jim Braxton, Dale Farley, Bob Gresham, Eddie Williams, Leon Jenkins and freshman Kerry Marbury - made their way back to the Mountain State.
Although Bobby recovered and eventually experienced successful campaigns in 1971, 1972 and 1975, many stubborn Mountaineer fans never forgave him for the mistakes he made during his first season in 1970.
2. Frank Cignetti’s handoff to Don Nehlen in 1980
When Don Nehlen was hired to replace Frank Cignetti following the 1979 season, he made it a point to tell anybody who would listen how bad things were when he took over, adroitly in hindsight, because it gave him an insurance policy in case things went south for him. The Mountaineer team he was inheriting was coming off four straight losing seasons playing in a dilapidated football stadium that had as many rats inside its walls as it did fans sitting outside on the bleachers.
Someone gave Nehlen a copy of a college football magazine article that had listed West Virginia among the worst football programs in the country and he cited that article frequently during the months leading up to his first game in 1980.
“When I told Bo (Schembechler) I was going to take the West Virginia job he said, ‘Don, you’re crazy.’ He looked at our schedule and he saw Oklahoma on there. He saw Penn State and he saw Pitt,” Nehlen once recalled. “He said, ‘Don, you’ve got about four, five or six losses on here right away. Every coach that’s ever coached there either won and left or lost and got fired. I just think this is a big mistake.
“You’re making good money, and we go to the Rose Bowl every other year. In two or three years, I’ll get you a good job,’” he said.
But Nehlen saw the potential in West Virginia that Schembechler didn’t see living in Michigan.
“I said, ‘Coach, I don’t think it’s that lousy.’ I took a map out and I drew a circle around Morgantown, West Virginia, showed it to him and I said, ‘Bo, there are a ton of good football players within 300 miles of Morgantown. I’ve got a feeling I can get me at least 15 of those guys every year,’” Nehlen recalled.
What Nehlen failed to mention was that Frank Cignetti had also left the cupboard pretty well-stocked with good, young football players.
Just because Cignetti didn’t win football games with them didn’t mean these guys couldn’t; they just needed to be shown how to win. That’s where Nehlen’s Michigan can-do attitude and self-confidence came into play. What he did was change the team’s culture, another term more commonly used today.
The first team meeting Nehlen assembled in Towers, he sized up the room, saw one of the players with his feet propped up on a desk and walked right over and kicked them off. Some of the guys sitting in the room that afternoon watching this included Darryl Talley, Oliver Luck, Walter Easley, Fulton Walker, Robert Alexander, Delbert Fowler, Dennis Fowlkes, Calvin Turner, Andre Gist and Mark Raugh. Even the most casual Mountaineer football fan today can recognize many of those names.
“We inherited a lot more football players than people think,” Nehlen admitted in 2011. “We didn’t have 400 or 500, but we had some good football players, and in my opinion (Frank Cignetti) has never been given the due he deserves at West Virginia.
“We had success pretty early and one of the reasons is because we had some pretty good football players,” Nehlen added. “I asked Frank a hundred times how in the hell he could win any games with the facilities he had to work with here? It was just a different ballgame.”
1. Rich Rodriguez’s handoff to Bill Stewart in 2008
It’s hard to argue with the talent Rich Rodriguez left his successor Bill Stewart in 2008, including Pat White – the only QB in college football history to win all four bowl games he played. This impressive array of talent was on full display in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl when West Virginia ran fourth-ranked Oklahoma right out of University of Phoenix Stadium.
It remains the most impressive bowl game performance in school history, when considering the fact that Stewart was leading the team as an interim coach after Rodriguez had abruptly left for Michigan soon after West Virginia’s upset loss to Pitt.
“Some people were saying Oklahoma was the best team in college football that year,” defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel once recalled. “I remember meeting with the TV people before the game and Pat Haden said, ‘I’ve watched these guys, and I think they are the most talented team in the country. Some say USC, Ohio State or LSU, but these guys are better.’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why did you have to tell me that!’ It’s like two days before the game!”
In addition to White, Rodriguez passed on to Stewart running back Noel Devine, as well as professional-caliber talent such as Ellis Lankster, Pat McAfee, Selvish Capers, J.T. Thomas, Chris Neild, Will Johnson, Keith Tandy and Najee Goode - the latter two eventually wrapping up their collegiate careers under Dana Holgorsen.
Rodriguez’s 32-5 record from 2005-07 comes close to Clarence Spears’ 25-2-1 mark from 1922-24 as the two most successful periods in school history.
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