Nehlen recalls Pitt-WVU, OSU-Michigan rivalries
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Experiencing one of college football’s greatest rivalries as a coach or player should be enough to last one a lifetime, but West Virginia’s Hall of Fame coach Don Nehlen has had the unusual opportunity to be part of two of the game’s most heated rivalries — West Virginia’s Backyard Brawl with Pitt and Michigan’s annual Big Ten battle with Ohio State.
As this year’s 106th renewal of the Backyard Brawl at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday night in Mountaineer Field approaches, Nehlen took some time out to talk about both.
“The fans make them intense,” Nehlen said. “The one here has been out of view for a while, but when I came here (in 1980) the Pitt-West Virginia rivalry was nastier than Michigan-Ohio State. The sayings on the shirts, some of the stuff they did and said I didn’t like.”
There’s a difference between being nasty and vile, between good-natured, clever combatants trying to get under each other’s skin and those who want to cut open the other’s skin.
“I got rid of them, to be honest,” Nehlen said. “That wasn’t my ball of wax. Some of the stuff was too nasty or too personal or whatever you want to call it.”
If the rhetoric cooled while he was at WVU, the rivalry didn’t.
Nehlen points out that the roots in both rivalries are deep, going back a long time, and though Michigan was one state and Ohio another, they played for bragging rights. Ohioans didn’t like those from Michigan. Ohio State’s legendary coach Woody Hayes coined the phrase “That team up north” so he didn’t have to say the word Michigan while Wolverines’ head coach Bo Schembechler, when Nehlen was the quarterback coach there, always called Ohio State “those sumbitches down south” instead of using the school’s name.
The strange thing was, according to Nehlen, “they were very good friends.”
“I was sitting in my office in West Virginia one day and a guy came by who had a picture for me,” Nehlen said.
He had him shown in.
“He’s got this framed picture and he says ‘Coach, I was in a bar in Ironton, Ohio, and I saw this picture and said to the bartender, ‘I know that guy is Woody Hayes and that guy is Bo Schembechler, but who is that other guy?'”
The bartender told him that was Doyt Perry, who happened to be Nehlen’s mentor at Bowling Green as a quarterback and who Nehlen replaced as coach there. The guy said he had to have that picture and the bartender gave it to him.
The picture now hangs in Don Nehlen’s office all these years later, three Hall of Fame coaches who had a big influence on his career.
Nehlen found when he came to West Virginia, there was a similar attitude between West Virginia and Pitt.
“You know, we didn’t like those guys and they didn’t like us,” Nehlen said.
And that’s what makes the rivalries of college football so special, even as they are becoming less and less contested.
“One of the big things that made it different here when I was coaching was that the players knew each other so well,” Nehlen said.
There was a lot of locker room cross-breeding between players from the area of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania at both schools who had faced each other in high school or in all-star games and built a familiarity even in the pre-Internet era.
Nehlen noted they would “kibitz” with each other, a word you don’t often hear much these days.
It took Neal Brown a while to really catch on to the intensity of the rivalry. Being from Kentucky he knew about it and had seen it on television, but the temperature was hotter than he could have imagined. That came to him last year when the rivalry was revived after a decade of not playing each other.
Before WVU let the game slip away, 38-31, at Acrisure Stadium, Brown was asked to make a congratulatory video to Chuck Smith, the coach at Boyle County High, where he had played. Smith was entering the Hall of Fame the next day.
As it often is, the problem was location, location, location for they picked the one wrong spot to shoot it in the stadium … in front of the Panther student section as they were revving up for the game.
“I’m out there shooting a video and I had no idea the students were already there,” Brown said of his first real live lesson in the rivalry. “Here I come out of the tunnel with my son, Dax, and he learned some new words. He wants to know why they were giving us the No. 1 signal with the middle finger.
“From that point on I had a good understanding of what this is all about.”
The decade away made it no less intense for the fans.
“It’s fun. Rivalries make college football. A lot of rivalries have gone by the wayside, which is disappointing,” Brown said. “I’m in favor of playing this game and this makes a lot of sense to be our non-conference Power 5 opponent each and every year. It’s a game that our fans and their fans like to see. This is heated and we understand that and our players look forward to getting back into that.”
Nehlen is in total agreement.
“When you think about it, we ought to play them every year,” Nehlen said. “They are 75 miles up the road. We don’t need to go all over the world to find somebody to play. Our fans are interested; their fans are interested. It’s a natural game.”
As rabid as the Pitt fans can be, and as nasty as they got back in Nehlen’s 20 Backyard Brawls, he said the fans from Pittsburgh never really bothered him.
“I don’t know how they treated the players but no fans — well, a few of them yelled at me — but I never had any bad experience with Pitt’s fans,” he said.
And those games in Pittsburgh, Nehlen noted, were played in Pitt’s stadium on campus, not in the more sterile pro football stadium in which they now play.
“I think that’s hurt their program personally,” Nehlen said, who, of course, coached the first game in WVU’s new Mountaineer Field, a boon to college football in a college town. “Pitt’s old stadium was a nice stadium.”
Nehlen said he once was in a meeting with one of Pitt’s greatest defensive players, he thought it was probably Hugh Green, who told him that when they tore down the old stadium, they lost a lot of support because that’s where the tradition was built and where Pitt’s national championships were won.
While at Michigan, Nehlen coached in three battles with Ohio State, winning the first two of them. The second was probably closest to his heart, that being in 1978 when Michigan won, 14-6, behind its Heisman Trophy-candidate quarterback Ricky Leach.
The wire service story of that game noted that “Leach, operating on one leg for three quarters after pulling his left hamstring early in the second period, fired two touchdown passes.”
“It hurt,” Leach admitted after the game. “I was in a lot of pain, but this was our last shot and I wanted to go as long as I could.”
“Ricky was a dream kid to coach, so much fun to coach,” Nehlen said Monday, thinking back. “He wasn’t really fast and he wasn’t a great passer. He just had IT. He was one of those guys when he went in the huddle the other 10 grew up. They just believed in Ricky Leach so much.”
The next to last paragraph of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s story on that game was this:
“Leach credited Don Nehlen with his passing success. ‘Nehlen brought in new ideas in passing and we really worked on them,’ said Leach. “We’ve come along and we can run and throw effectively now.”
Nehlen, of course, would coach some pretty good quarterbacks in his days at West Virginia, including Major Harris and Marc Bulger, and he was on the sideline for a good bit of the rivalry’s history, none more memorable than the 1994 game.
“Oh, geez,” Nehlen said with a giggle when that game was brought up. “That was the craziest Pitt game I can ever remember. How in the world we scored on that last play, unbelievable.”
That was the now famous pass from a scrambling quarterback Chad Johnston to wide receiver Zach Abraham. The touchdown pass covered 63 yards with just 15 seconds remaining in a 47-41 come-from-behind victory.
“The amazing thing was Chad threw it on the dead run. He was running for his life,” Nehlen said. “Not only that, he threw the ball about 45 or 50 yards and he didn’t put any loft on it. He threw a line drive and the Abraham kid caught that thing … you make a play like that one-in-a-million, I think.”
As the play unfolded and Nehlen watched from the sidelines, there was no crowd noise, not anything other than Johnston scrambling and Abraham running free behind defenders.
“You become so focused you don’t know what’s going on,” Nehlen said.
Pitt was at home, was 3-1 and WVU 1-3 and the game was so crazy that WVU had blown a 33-12 lead, then had to score twice in the last 1:32 to win, once on an 80-yard pass from Johnston to Raashan Vanterpool and then the pass to Abraham around a Pitt touchdown.
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