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| Bobby Bowden |
“If our quarterbacking comes through this fall, we could be a pretty good country football team,” he said. “We’ve got the potential and experience, but like a bomb, we can’t explode without an igniter.”
What ignited was Bowden’s football team. He went through three starting quarterbacks before finishing the season with true freshman Dan Kendra. “He wasn’t even close to being ready,” said Bowden. “But history loses all that.”
What history recorded were blowout losses to Pitt, Boston College and Temple, and more competitive losses to Penn State, Miami and Tulane.
However, the most puzzling defeat came in the 1974 opener against Richmond. The Spiders were the only sure thing on the schedule that year.
Steve Dunlap, a junior linebacker on that ‘74 team, remembers playing a brand new cover-two alignment in the secondary that was implemented on the insistence of defensive backfield coach Alex Gibbs, later a long-time NFL offensive line coach with the Denver Broncos and now a member of Jim Mora’s Atlanta Falcons coaching staff.
“We didn’t play it very well in our opening game against Richmond and we lost,” Dunlap recalled. “Donnie Young had a party at his house after the game and Gibbs never showed up for it. He broke out into hives.”
Gibbs wasn’t the only one. The wolves were circling everyone by the end of the year. Bowden was hung in effigy several times on campus and there were committee meetings going on all over town. Bowden may have been holed up in his fortified, concrete bunker of an office underneath the stadium bowl but he had a pretty good idea what was going on outside.
“There was a boy’s dorm right across the street from my office and some kid hung a big sheet out there that said ‘Bye-bye Bobby.’ I couldn’t ever forget that,” he said. “I saw it many times. By that time I had gotten used to it. I thought it was part of the scenery.”
The players were also paying attention to what was going on.
“We knew there was a lot of pressure on him and there was a lot of talk that he might not be around the next year,” said linebacker Ray Marshall, today a lawyer living in Winston-Salem, N.C. “I wasn’t sure he’d be there.”
“I saw some of the bonfires,” said defensive back Tommy Pridemore, now living in Georgia. “It was ‘11 or More in ‘74’ and that kind of stuff. I was a freshman and I didn’t really have a good grasp on what to think about it. That was my first experience in Morgantown.”
The older players like Dunlap and 6-6, 260-pound offensive tackle Dave Van Halanger did have a good grasp of the situation and decided to take matters into their own hands. “We had a really bad article written in the student newspaper by one of the guys living in a fraternity there,” remembered Van Halanger. “Some of the guys on our team went over there and made him retract it. That kind of gave us the unity on our team that we needed.”
Leland Byrd, West Virginia’s athletic director at the time, says Bowden was never in danger of being fired. Byrd maintains that Bowden had always had the full confidence of the WVU administration and he believes most of the discord was emanating from the students.
“He had the support of the administration from the president on down,” recalled Byrd. “I don’t know why (some students disliked Bowden). And of course you always have a few disgruntled alumni but you have that even now.”
Van Halanger was voted one of the team’s captains for 1975, along with seniors Artie Owens and Jack Eastwood. There were 34 lettermen returning -- equally divided between the offense and defense. Owens, the school’s record-setting running back, recalled most of the team sticking around during the summertime before the ‘75 season and that helped them grow even closer.
“We kind of worked out together at the old stadium and then we ran up to the Coliseum for conditioning. We had a foundation right there,” said the Bethlehem, Pa., resident.
Bowden made a couple of changes on his coaching staff, adding wide receivers coach Paul Moran, offensive line coach Mike Working and secondary coach Greg Williams, whom the players soon began calling ‘Mole-Man.’
Pridemore admits the ‘Mole-Man,’ now coaching with Dunlap at NC State, made a big impression on the defense. “He was a high-energy, get-after-it kind of guy,” Pridemore recalled.
“He brought some toughness to our defense that I don’t think we had before.”
Chuck Klausing, then WVU’s defensive coordinator and Bowden’s assistant head coach, concurs: “He was a big difference,” said Klausing. “He was very enthusiastic and he coached his kids that way and they responded to him."
