New Marshall Coming to Morgantown

Twenty-seven years after a plane crash decimated the football program, Marshall culminates a hard-fought comeback Saturday when it opens the season against state rival West Virginia in Morgantown.

Just another game?

“It’s the biggest sports event in my time here, and I’m going on 50 years,” says Ernie Salvatore, 75-year-old columnist for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch.

Saturday marks Marshall’s football debut in Division I-A after

winning the I-AA title last year with a 15-0 record.

Bottom line: Marshall and West Virginia get along about as well as the Hatfields and McCoys. The schools last played in 1923, with West Virginia winning, 81-0. The story, perhaps apocryphal, holds that Mountaineer Coach Clarence Spears was so unconcerned about Marshall he skipped the game to scout his team’s next opponent, Penn State.

West Virginia had chosen not to schedule Marshall since.

“It was fundamentally a political and power play,” says Salvatore, a 1948 Marshall graduate. “WVU didn’t have to play Marshall.”

In a state with no major professional sports teams, Saturday’s game is West Virginia’s Super Bowl. Located in Huntington, on the Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia border, Marshall long has been cast as sad-sack underdog, a program racked by scandal in the late 1960s and devastated in 1970 when all 75 members of the team’s football entourage were killed in a plane crash after returning from a 17-14 loss to East Carolina.

West Virginia University, located in the north, is the state’s jewel. The Mountaineers long have been a major college power, having appeared in 10 bowl games the last 18 seasons under Coach Don Nehlen.

Just another game?

Marshall fans gobbled up their 7,200 allotted tickets in a matter of hours. On Aug. 16, 14 days before kickoff, this banner headline appeared on the front page of the Herald-Dispatch: “MU-WVU tickets mailed Friday.”

Another game?

In four previous meetings, West Virginia outscored Marshall, 210-21. The Mountaineers’ 92-6 victory in 1915 prompted an NCAA rules change. The bet going around Huntington was that Marshall would score at least one touchdown. Sure enough, late in the game, “Runt” Carter ran into the end zone, climbed on the shoulders of teammate “Blondie” Taylor and caught a pass from Bradley Workman, completing a play referred to in lore as “The Tower Pass.”

The NCAA outlawed it the next year.

West Virginia has done its best to ignore Marshall since.

The Mountaineers have refused so far to extend the series beyond Saturday’s game and have indicated they are not interested in traveling to Huntington to play in Marshall’s dinky, 30,000-seat stadium.

The tension in the state is thick as mud, though Salvatore says the pressure is on West Virginia.

“They can’t just beat Marshall,” he says, “They have to beat them.”

Salvatore thinks the Thundering Herd, led by heralded but controversial receiver Randy Moss (more on him later), has a chance to win.

Moss, a la Joe Namath, has guaranteed victory.

A Marshall victory would help tie up some emotional loose ends. The school was kicked out of the Mid-American Conference in 1969 after being cited for 140 NCAA rules violations.

Yet, that crisis became a footnote on the night of Nov. 14, 1970, when the Marshall team plane crashed into the hills outside Huntington’s Tri-State Airport.

Salvatore was then sports editor of the Herald-Dispatch and the now-extinct evening Advertiser. When he got the call at the office, he said it wasn’t clear the downed plane was the Marshall charter.

Jack Hardin, a news reporter, was dispatched to the scene. He phoned Salvatore from the crash site and asked if the name John Young meant anything to him.

Hardin had found Young’s wallet.

“He was a tight end on the team,” Salvatore recalls. “After that, all hell broke loose.”

The crash numbed the small railroad-town community. Huntington conducts an annual public ceremony on Nov. 14.

“Some people still don’t have closure over it,” says second-year Marshall Coach Bob Pruett, who played at Marshall in the 1960s and had friends on the plane.

One particular image is etched in Salvatore’s memory.

“One day there were 11 funeral entourages,” he says. “They were running into each other at the intersection. You can’t describe this stuff.”

Pruett says Marshall’s comeback is the story of a program returning “from the depth of the ashes of a plane crash.”

Marshall has even been welcomed back to the MAC, which banished the school almost three decades ago.

Pruett isn’t guaranteeing victory against West Virginia.

“One thing I do know,” he says. “Moss is going to go deep.”

MOSS, THE BACKLASH

Marshall’s star receiver held a damage-control news conference in Huntington last week to address recent comments he made in the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated.

In the SI story, Moss was quoted as saying of the 1970 plane crash: “It was a great tragedy, but it really wasn’t nothing big.”

In The Times story, Moss said he sensed there was resentment on the team because of his celebrity status. Pruett said The Times quote was taken out of context.

Here is Moss’ quote, which was tape-recorded: “Even though I hate to say it, I think there’s really a little bit of hatred on the team, just for the fact I came in with all this publicity.”

In a statement, Moss said, in part, “in recent news releases, I have been portrayed as not wanting to be at Marshall. That is not true. I am very appreciative of the opportunities given me by this university.”

Oh, Marshall announced Moss would not be granting any more interview requests this season.

UNHOLY ALLIANCE?

Turns out there’s a significant snag in the “deal” to incorporate the Western Athletic Conference and Conference USA in next year’s Super Alliance:

Notre Dame doesn’t like the arrangement and says it has veto power to block it.

“It is not a fact,” Notre Dame Athletic Director Michael Wadsworth said this week of the proposed settlement. “It can’t be until we agree to it.”

Under pressure from Congress, the WAC concession was made in the wake of last year’s fiasco in which fifth-ranked Brigham Young was snubbed from an $8-million bowl essentially because the WAC was not in the Alliance.

The new amendment grants any future WAC or Conference USA team finishing No. 6 or higher in the polls an automatic Alliance bowl bid.

This, however, potentially leaves only one at-large Alliance bowl spot available for Notre Dame, an independent.

The Irish, an Alliance partner, agreed to the original July 1996 contract in which the Rose Bowl will join the Alliance beginning in 1998, but the WAC decision was made without Irish approval.

Notre Dame says it won’t accept the deal unless it is taken care of first.

“We’re looking at the very real prospect of a 9-2 Notre Dame team not being selected for the Alliance,” Wadsworth said.

What can be done?

Notre Dame already has a safety-net arrangement with the ACC and Big East in which it can go to the Gator Bowl if two teams from same conference are Alliance selections. It nearly happened last year in the ACC with Florida State and North Carolina.

Notre Dame is looking for similar agreements with other bowls.

Prediction: What Notre Dame wants, Notre Dame gets.

ADD ALLIANCE

You ask: “Why doesn’t Notre Dame just join a conference and earn an automatic bid by winning the league title?”

(The Irish are members of the Big East in several other sports).

What, and give up that sweetheart exclusive television deal it has with NBC?

Wadsworth says the Irish intend to remain staunchly independent.

“We don’t have a need for scheduling, we don’t have a need for TV exposure,” he said. “There isn’t any compelling reason for us to go into a conference for our football program. Everything would point in another direction.”

The downside is Notre Dame could finish 8-3 again this year and still end up not going to a bowl game.

Suggestion: Don’t go 8-3.

FIFTH DOWN

The Rose Bowl doesn’t join the Super Alliance until next year, but there is a scenario in which Washington could play for the national championship in the Orange Bowl this season. How? Washington and Stanford don’t face each other this year. If both end up 11-0, Stanford goes to the Rose Bowl under the tiebreaker eliminating the school that last appeared in the game, Washington. That would free Washington to play in an Alliance game.

Say the final regular-season polls end up No. 1 Florida, No. 2 Penn State, No. 3 Washington, No. 4 Nebraska, No. 5 Stanford. Penn State and Stanford would play in the Rose Bowl, while the Orange Bowl would have to match Florida against Washington.

“It’s conceivable,” Pac-10 spokesman Jim Muldoon said of the scenario. . . .

Finally, an NCAA rule change that makes sense. Senior defensive tackle Joe Salave’a is back at Arizona because of Proposition 68, approved at January’s NCAA convention. The act restores a year of eligibility for players who enter school as partial qualifiers but earn their degrees in four years. Salave’a, who originally failed to score high enough on both his ACT and SAT, graduated last spring with a sociology degree. He’ll be working on his master’s this fall. “He could be the first guy who plays in the East-West game twice,” Arizona Coach Dick Tomey says.