Class of '73 keyed Pitt's magical season

About 10 minutes before Pitt's spring football scrimmage in 1973, new coach Johnny Majors turned to assistant Joe Avezzano and said, "Joe, where's the rest of the team?"

"Coach," Avezzano replied. "This is it."

So short of bodies were the Panthers that assistant coach Keith Schroeder - two years removed from his playing days at Iowa State -- was forced to suit up.

"He'd been out 'til about 3 o'clock," Majors recalled. "We woke him up at 8 and said, 'You'll be playing in the scrimmage today -- at linebacker.' "

It wasn't pretty, but Majors had a pretty good idea that the Panthers' luck was about to change, thanks to a massive recruiting class that included the best running back he'd ever seen.

Pitt's once-proud program had sunk to unfathomable depths. It hadn't produced a winning record in a decade, hadn't beaten Penn State since 1965 and was coming off a 1-10 season in which it was outscored 350-193.

The first key to the renovation project was a change in the school's scholarship policy. Previously, Pitt had been locked into the so-called "Big Four Agreement" with West Virginia, Penn State and Syracuse. It was designed to regulate the schools' football programs and limited each to just 25 scholarships per year.

Then-Pitt chancellor Wesley Posvar and athletic director Cas Myslinski sparked the program's revival by removing the self-imposed scholarship cap and by hiring the charismatic, 38-year-old Majors after the 1972 season.

Majors had coached the previous five years at Iowa State, where he had a 24-30-1 record. He brought most of his staff with him, including top assistant Jackie Sherrill. They had an unlimited amount of scholarships at their disposal - 1973 would prove to be the last year of unlimited scholarships in college football - and started hounding players from Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Maryland and, of course, Western Pennsylvania.

Majors gave his staff a simple directive: "Bring in anybody who can help us win."

Sherrill, in a recent phone interview, described the staff's philosophy as such: "We just put our heads down and our rear ends up and started digging."

That first class included quarterback Robert Haygood, tight end Jim Corbett, linebackers Cecil Johnson and Arnie Weatherington, center John Pelusi, kicker Carson Long, defensive linemen Al Romano, Ed Wilamowski, Gary Burley and Don Parrish and the biggest prize of all: Hopewell High School tailback Tony Dorsett.

Depending on whom you ask, the class ranged from 65 to 100 kids. Sherrill has it pegged at 76.

"Kind of ironic," he says, "because in '76 we'd win the national championship."

Sherrill was the lead recruiter on Dorsett, and he quickly discovered that Dorsett's closest friend and Hopewell teammate, Ed Wilamowski, was critical to the chase. He was a pretty good player, too.

"Ed was white and Tony was black, and at every school they visited, they were separated (in the college dorms)," Sherrill recalled. "I don't know if I was smarter than the others, but I didn't separate them. I knew Tony was very, very close to Ed. We kept them together."

Dorsett remembers.

"There's a whole lot of validity to that," he said in a recent phone interview.

There's also plenty of validity to the perception that Dorsett and many of his new teammates were ready to quit a few days into Pitt's 1973 summer camp in Johnstown.

See, the second part of Majors' rebuilding plan, after stocking his freshman class, was to instill a strong sense of discipline and to make his team the best-conditioned one in the country. He worked his players to the bone in the searing heat at Pitt's Johnstown campus.

"It was pretty damn hard and pretty damn hot, and I was ready to come home," Dorsett recalled, laughing.

What made him stay?

"A conversation with my mom and with Jackie (Sherrill). It was just really hard. I was pretty introverted -- quiet and shy. I hid behind those big, dark sunglasses. I didn't feel like I fit in very well socially. The only time I was really comfortable was on the football field."

Sherrill was the self-described drill sergeant of the staff. He'd played for Paul "Bear" Bryant at Alabama, so he knew first-hand what it was like to survive a brutal training camp. Looking back, he says Pitt's camp that year was about as close to the movie "The Junction Boys" - depicting Bryant's harsh training regimens at Texas A&M -- as one could get.

Tight end Jim Corbett remembered a bus coming by each day to pick up players who'd quit.

"We did lose a few," Sherrill said. "We went to Johnstown with 3-to-5 busloads, but we didn't come back with that many. It was very, very hot, as hot as any of the camps I remember."

Corbett recalled Majors constantly saying, "Don't be discouraged" as players competed with multiple challengers for starting spots.

"I'd look around see, like, 13 other tight ends," Corbett recalled. "It was wild. But Coach Majors kept saying, 'Those who stay will play.' "

Majors changed the uniforms and revamped the locker room before the '73 season. He coached and cajoled with all the enthusiasm of a southern preacher, which, in some ways, is what he was.

"I played for Coach Bryant and coached under Frank Broyles (at Arkansas), and Coach Majors was the best PR guy of all of them," Sherrill said. "He had a great ability to make people feel like they'd known him forever the first time they met. It's a trait that really separated Coach from 99.9 percent of the coaches out there."

Pitt's remarkable four-year run began with the season-opener in 1973, when it went on the road and played heavily favored Georgia to a 7-7 tie behind Dorsett's 101 yards rushing.

The Panthers finished 6-5-1, posting the biggest turnaround in college football that season. Three years and three more stellar recruiting classes later, they were playing Georgia again - this time with a national championship at stake at the Louisiana Superdome.

Majors had already announced he'd be going home to coach Tennessee the following season. No matter. Pitt destroyed Georgia, 27-3, to claim its first national championship since 1937.

In four short years, a punching bag of a program had become the neighborhood bully.

The following is a game-by-game look at the 1976 season (home team in caps):

• Sept. 11: Pitt 31, NOTRE DAME 10. Legend has it that the favored Fighting Irish, in hopes of slowing Dorsett, let the grass grow high at Notre Dame Stadium. It worked. Kind of. The Irish held Dorsett 122 yards under his total from the previous year's game. Problem was, he still managed to run for 181 in front of a national television audience and 59,035 fans. Notre Dame marched 86 yards for a touchdown on its opening drive, but Dorsett sprinted 61 yards on his first carry of the season to set up the tying score and get the ninth-ranked Panthers back in the game.

• Sept. 18: Pitt 42, GEORGIA TECH 14. Robert Haygood, Pitt's gutsy running quarterback, sustained a season-ending knee injury in the second quarter. Junior backup Matt Cavanaugh stepped in ably, connecting with Gordon Jones on a 51-yard TD pass to blow the game open in the third quarter. "Haygood's loss is a tremendous blow to our team," Majors told reporters. "And that's an understatement."

• Sept. 25: PITT 21, Temple 7. A crowd of 38,500 arrived for Pitt's home opener expecting to see their third-ranked team crush the Owls. Instead, Temple nearly pulled the biggest upset of several that occurred around the nation that week. Pitt had to overcome its only halftime deficit of the season (7-6). It did so mostly because of its defense, which did not allow a touchdown. The front five of Al Romano, Don Parrish, Randy Holloway, Cecil Johnson and Ed Wilamowski helped keep Pitt in the game until Dorsett (112 yards) broke loose.

• Oct. 2: Pitt 44, DUKE 31. Duke's defenders stacked up to stop Dorsett, only to see Cavanaugh torch them with play-action passes. He completed 14 of 17 passes for 339 yards and a school-record five touchdowns.

• Oct. 9: PITT 27, Louisville 6. Cavanaugh went down in the second quarter with a hairline fracture of his left fibula and was expected to miss at least three games. Pitt led 27-0 at the time, but Majors still sweated the second half, saying, "I was hoping that clock would run like hell, maybe bust a screw loose and go double-time."

• Oct. 16: PITT 36, Miami 19. Majors added the "I" formation to his offense so that Pitt could run the sprint draw with Dorsett and pitch it to him deeper in the backfield. It also helped walk-on quarterback Tom Yewcic, who suddenly found himself running the second-ranked team in the country. Dorsett, behind his stellar offensive line, gained 227 yards on 35 carries to move within 152 yards of breaking Archie Griffin's NCAA record of 5,177. <

• Oct. 23: Pitt 45, NAVY 0. A national television audience watched Dorsett become the leading rusher in NCAA history early in the fourth quarter. He did it in style. Needing four yards as Pitt lined up at the Navy 32, Dorsett took a handoff from Yewcic, burst through the line and raced to the end zone. His teammates joined him there for a wild, bench-clearing celebration. He carried 27 times for 180 yards on the day, and, judging by the following quote, didn't seem unnerved bv Pitt's dire quarterback situation: "It don't make any difference to me who gets the ball to me."

• Oct. 30: PITT 23, Syracuse 13. A goal-line stand preserved Pitt's closer-than-expected victory. Led by quarterback Bill Hurley (303 yards passing), the Orangemen drove deep into Pitt territory trailing 20-13 late in the fourth quarter. On third-and-one from the 11, Pitt stopped fullback Jim Sessler, who also got the call on fourth down. Defensive tackle Don Parrish and linebacker Arnie Weatherington stopped him cold. Dorsett rushed for 241 yards.

• Nov. 6: PITT 37, Army 7. "We're No. 1!" That was the chant at Pitt Stadium after the Panthers pounded Army and learned that Purdue had upset top-ranked Michigan, 16-14. Cavanaugh returned to the lineup and relieved Yewcic in the first quarter. When the weekly wire service polls came out, Pitt was ranked No. 1 for the first time since 1937.

• Nov. 13: PITT 24, West Virginia 16. Dorsett's No. 33 was retired at halftime, marking the first time a Pitt jersey had been retired in the program's 86-year history. He gained 199 yards on a season-high 38 carries, as Pitt held off a scrappy bunch of Mountaineers. With less than a minute left, Dorsett was ejected from the game after he came up swinging from a pile-up.

• Nov. 26: PITT 24, Penn State 7. Amid reports that Majors would bolt for Tennessee after the season, a crowd 50,360 filled Three Rivers Stadium and watched Pitt beat its cross-state rival for the first time since 1965. Dorsett - whom Majors moved to fullback for the game - essentially clinched the Heisman Trophy by racking up 224 yards to crack the 6,000-yard mark for his career. Pitt's defense suffocated the Lions, as Bob Jury picked off two passes, giving him nine for the season. Next up: A date with Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

• Jan. 1, 1977: Pitt 27, Georgia 3. It was over by halftime. Pitt used four first-half interceptions to grab a 21-0 lead before 76,117 fans at the Louisiana Superdome, which the New York Times said would "make all other stadiums in existence as obsolete as Rome's Colosseum." Keith Jackson and Ara Parseghian called the game on ABC, with Jim Lampley working the sidelines. Dorsett broke a 32-year-old Sugar Bowl record with 202 yards rushing on 32 carries, and Cavanaugh won the game's MVP award by completing 10 of 18 passes for 192 yards. "All year long, I haven't waved my finger in the air, and I haven't worn a No. 1 button," Majors said. "But after the game, I told the team it was No. 1, and they all agree that we are." A few disagreed, including Michigan coach Bo Schembechler and USC coach John Robinson, who were saying the winner of their Rose Bowl matchup should be the national champ. Each of those teams, however, had lost a game. The rest of the country knew better, and the memorable cover of the following week's Sports Illustrated - Cavanaugh leaping into Dorsett's arms in the end zone - said it best:

"PITT IS IT!"

Additional Information:

Complete coverage