How Marshall University Football Came Back from Disaster
The worst sports related tragedy in United States history occurred on November 14th, 1970, when a DC-9 plane carrying 75 people connected to the Marshall University football team crashed near Huntington, West Virginia with no survivors. Among the dead were 37 players from the Marshall football team, along with five coaches and several prominent people that were boosters of the football program. Hired to rebuild the program, as the entire Marshall community mourned, was a football coach named Jack Lengyel, who will be the focal point of a movie soon to be released entitled “We Are Marshall”.
Marshall had lost a close game to East Carolina earlier in the day by the score of 17-14. On the return flight back home to Marshall, the plane crashed into a small hill during a rainstorm about a mile west of the Tri-State Airport and exploded into flames, killing everyone aboard. Marshall University decided against discontinuing its football program, and went about the task of hiring a coach for the next season. The first coach contacted refused the job outright when he realized there was such a dearth of talent remaining to work with, and the second coach left the campus after a week, changing his mind. In stepped Jack Lengyel, who would attempt to raise the program from the disaster that had befallen it.
Lengyel was a Division III football coach from Ohio when he took the position at Marshall in March of 1971 and the first thing he had to do was find some players. The NCAA allowed Marshall to make freshmen eligible, and when all was said and done, Lengyel had put together a squad of walk-ons, freshmen, ex-servicemen, and three basketball players. Lengyel had to advertise in the school newspaper for a kicker, and gave the job to a soccer player named Blake Smith after a try-out. Lengyel needed as simple an offense as he could institute, and went to future Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, then the coach of West Virginia, to take a crash course on his veer offense.
On the first day of Marshall football practice in 1971, Jack Lengyel read the team a letter that President Nixon had sent. “Friends across the land will be rooting for you, but whatever the season brings, you have already won your greatest victory by putting the 1971 varsity squad on the field,” Nixon wrote. One of the team’s best players was a linebacker named Nate Ruffin, who had missed the fatal flight because he had been injured. Lengyel made Ruffin the team captain. Marshall suffered through a 2-8 campaign, including five shutouts. A 66-6 shellacking administered needlessly by Miami of Ohio has never been forgotten at the West Virginia school, where they still feel special contempt for the classless act.
“We Are Marshall” ends with what had to be one of the most emotional sporting events ever staged. Marshall’s first victory in football after the plane crash came over Xavier University came in such thrilling fashion that anyone watching the movie may feel that it had to be a Hollywood happy ending made up for the film, but it actually occurred. In the 1971 team’s second game, Marshall found itself trailing Xavier by a count of 13-9 with less than two minutes to go. Although he had never kicked in a game prior to that contest, Blake Smith had hit a 31 yard field goal in the first half, but Xavier had scored on a punt return early in the fourth quarter to gain their edge over Marshall. Quarterback Reggie Oliver calmly engineered the winning drive, completing a key fourth down pass to keep it alive and threw the game winner as the clock expired, a thirteen yarder to freshman Terry Gardner.
The fans remained in the stands for over an hour after the contest was over, weeping and hugging one another, as so many of them had lost a loved one or known someone who had in the crash. Marshall would beat Bowling Green for their second win, but under Jack Lengyel they would understandably go just 9-33 in his four years at the school. Lengyel was fired in 1974, but went on to several other coaching jobs and was the athletic director at Navy for many years. It would be thirteen seasons before Marshall would post a winning record, but the program became a dominant one soon after, winning several conference championships and producing NFL players such as Randy Moss and Chad Pennington. Jack Lengyel is retired now at the age of 71, having recently worked with actor Matthew McConaughey, who will portray him in “We Are Marshall”. Nate Ruffin, the linebacker who survived the flight, passed away from a heart attack in 2001, and was buried in the Spring Hill Cemetery outside of Huntington, West Virginia near a memorial dedicated to six of the Marshall team members killed in the crash that could not be identified.
