Right to honor Nehlen's legacy

Much as today’s coach Neal Brown came into Morgantown to inherit the ruins of a downsliding program from Dana Holgorsen, so, too, did Nehlen come into a situation that had produced four losing seasons in five years under an ill Frank Cignetti.

Why would someone who was the quarterback coach at Michigan, himself a one-time head coach in another difficult state while winning at Bowling Green, move into such a challenging situation?

He worked for Bo Schembechler, a Hall of Fame coach at Michigan, and as an advisor Schembechler very strongly questioned his sanity of returning to head coaching in this spot.

“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.”

A strong recruiter, Schembechler could not convince Nehlen that his future was not at Michigan and was at WVU.

What’s more, as WVU historian John Antonik noted recently, the coal industry was collapsing, people were leaving the state, the university was facing financial difficulties and ... well, you get the idea. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But to Nehlen, this was almost heaven. He was ready to branch out on his own again and now, 43 years later, as Neal Brown fights the same battles he fought then, Nehlen completes his Hall of Fame career with this honor.

Nehlen offered an answer to Schembechler’s vision with the vision of his own.

“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 argued.

He got a lot more than anyone imagined ... Major Harris, Marc Bulger, Amos Zereoue, Brian Jozwiak, Canute Curtis, Gary Stills, Avon Cobourne, John Thornton, Jeff Hostetler. Mike Logan, Aaron Beasley.

You get the picture. There are so many more names that could be added to that list.

He was battling year in and year out for players and respect and he did it the right way. He didn’t buy players. He didn’t steal signs. He didn’t re-invent the game, although playing Major Harris at quarterback when everyone else saw him elsewhere changed the way the position was played.

Twice (perhaps that should be capitalized as TWICE) did he go through unbeaten regular seasons. Once he played for the national championship at a school that had never won one and had Harris not been injured still to this day believes he would have won that 1988 Fiesta Bowl against Notre Dame.

None of the players on that team argue.

He first gained national prominence by winning at Oklahoma, a team that four years earlier had beaten WVU so badly — you might say sort of like this year — that they say when he and the WVU players looked across the field in the second half the starters were sitting there with their shoulder pads off and laughing.

And, shades of today’s game, he did it was Penn State recruit named Jeff Hostetler who triggered the change in WVU football.

Within five years Nehlen had built a team capable of beating Penn State, 17-14, perhaps the most significant victory in the school’s history as that win was the Mountaineers first against the Nittany Lions since 1955.

That was 28 years with the best result being one tie.

It was big enough that when the rivalry was renewed this season after not having played since 1992 the Altoona Mirror saw fit to profile Nehlen to talk about that rivalry.

“Joe was a great friend,” Nehlen said of the Hall of Fame Penn State coach Joe Paterno. “He was a great guy and a great coach. He was so far ahead of everybody and they were light years ahead of everybody in the East. Anything we had, they had five of.”

Paterno was 25-2 against WVU, but Nehlen earned both those victories over him.

“The first one was big,” Nehlen said. “I had only been at West Virginia for four years at that point. Any time you could bet Penn State was a big, big win.”

Nehlen was a hard-nosed, old-fashioned coach who believed in defense and running the ball, but he was also a child of the new game where he could win with throwing quarterbacks like Hostetler, Oliver Luck and Marc Bulger.

There’s a story that says a lot about Nehlen in his willingness to recruit Bulger.

“We were recruiting Marc, but my coaching staff was not real excited because he weighed only 150 pounds and wasn’t extremely fast,” Nehlen recalled.

“But I looked at this kid on film and I said to myself, ‘I’ve never seen a guy throw the ball any better than Marc did in high school. But when other people aren’t recruiting him, you get a little cold feet and you start to say to yourself, ‘What’s wrong with me.”

Nehlen called a coach he respected, Gary Tranquill, who had coached with him at both Bowling Green and WVU, and was then at Virginia Tech.

He asked Tranquill’s opinion and he said he really liked Bulger, but like Nehlen, couldn’t find anyone who agreed with him.

“So, to make a long story short, we offered Marc Bulger a scholarship, he accepted it, and the rest is history,” Nehlen said.

Bulger is included on this year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame ballot.

Nehlen has remained tied to the WVU program and an asset as Neal Brown has tried to rebuild the program he inherited.

“He’s been great to me,” Brown said on Monday. “He’s been very supportive and that’s really all I can ask. I have great respect for him as a coach and a man. He did it for a long time here. He did it the right way.

“I really feel like the longer he’s been away the more appreciation our fan base has for him, as well they should.”