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1975 Peach Bowl Champions
Klausing, one of Western Pa.’s most successful high school coaches and now a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, decided to go to Tennessee to see what the country’s No. 1-ranked defense in 1974 was doing.
Klausing and Tennessee defensive coordinator Larry Jones were friends all the way back to when the two were working on Paul Deitzel’s coaching staff at Army in the mid 1960s.
“We picked up some ideas of some things they were doing,” he said. “Everybody was playing the 50 defense but we played a little different technique than anybody else was doing at the time.”
Donnie Young, then WVU’s linebackers coach, explains: “There were multiple fronts within the 50 defense. In other words you could shade right or left or angle right or left,” he said. “We just didn’t line up in a straight 50 and take them on all of the time. Behind that we were playing a lot of two-deep coverage (both safeties back and both corners up at the line of scrimmage), which not a lot of teams were doing back then.”
“We felt we weren’t that big on defense but that we had some speed and quickness,” said Klausing. “You take (safeties) Mark Burke and Tom Pridemore and they had speed. Our linebackers Ray Marshall and Steve Dunlap also had good quickness and instincts.”
“They were a scrappy bunch and the kids played hard,” Young mentioned. “In 1974 we had the better talented team. We had Danny Buggs, Marshall Mills, Jeff Merrow and all those guys but we didn’t play well as a group. In 1975, we didn’t have quite as much overall talent but they played together as a team.”
Up front West Virginia’s five-man line featured Chuck Smith and Rich Lukowski at tackles, the ends were Eastwood and Andy Peters, and the middle guard or ‘mike’ was Ken Culbertson and later Joe Jelich when Culbertson broke his leg against Richmond. The two corners were Johnny Schell and Chuck Braswell.
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| Dave Van Halanger |
Offensively, West Virginia in ‘75 planned to rely on a big line anchored by right tackle Van Halanger, center Al Gluchowski, guards Bob Kamiski and Steve Earley and strong tackle Tom Brandner. A group of talented runners in tailbacks Artie Owens and Dwayne Woods, along with powerful fullbacks Heywood Smith and Ron Lee, made running the football a certainty.
“The big thing in my mind was the fact that we had maturity and experience along the offensive line and we had very good running backs,” recalled Frank Cignetti, Bowden’s offensive coordinator and today one of the country’s most successful coaches in the Division II ranks at Indiana, Pa. “I probably had a little more patient approach to it to protect the quarterback in terms of, ‘Hey, let’s run the football and let’s take the pressure away from the quarterback having to win games for us.' Play good defense and have a good kicking game - that type of thing.”
The two big questions heading into 1975 were: who was going to play quarterback and were there enough wide receivers to make up for the graduation of Buggs and Mills? Bowden and Cignetti couldn’t choose between sophomores Kendra and Danny Williams at quarterback so they decided to start the season playing both against Temple.
Randy Swinson, Steve Lewis and Tommy Bowden were pegged to play wide receiver along with Scott MacDonald, a basketball player who had used up his eligibility. Cignetti found out that MacDonald played football in high school and convinced him to come out for spring practice.
“You watched him play basketball and you saw that body and the type of athlete that he was and you knew if football was important to him that he could make the transition,” said Cignetti.
MacDonald recalls being a little more skeptical than Cignetti. “I was a little bit worried. I was an all-stater at a small school in Minnesota two years in a row but it was quite a while since I played football and these were the big boys.”
MacDonald played well in the two spring games, earned a scholarship, and was in the starting lineup for the Temple game. Cignetti won’t go as far as to say West Virginia at the time was employing cutting-edge tactics on offense, but the Mountaineers were changing plays at the line of scrimmage and doing things more commonly seen in today’s game.
