Episode 6 Script (PDF)

PIUROWSKI Welcome Welcome to Hidden Yardage. I’m your host, Joe Moore. This podcast is a journey back to the 1980 College Football Season through the memories of those that played, coached and covered it. New episodes, released each week, will carry listeners through that season, one week at a time. For more information, please visit the website at www.hiddenyardagepodcast.com. If this is your first time listening you may want to go back and start with Episode One. This is Episode Six, “On the Warpath.” Opener The Houston Cougars 1980 season had not gotten off to a great start. The team was 11-1 in 1979 and won a second-straight conference championship and started this season ranked in the top ten. Back-to-back season-opening losses dropped them out of the rankings entirely and a third loss to Baylor had them reeling at 1-3. So when long-time head coach Bill Yeoman was given the option to move his scheduled home game against Texas A&M to nearby Rice Stadium, he declined. He wasn’t going to give up any possible advantage. The offer was made because the Houston Astrodome, where the school played its home games, was set to host game four of the 1980 National League Championship Series between the Astros and the Phillies the same afternoon as the Aggies and Cougars football game. Instead of moving the game to a different day or a different venue, Yeoman elected to kickoff after the baseball game ended. Then first pitch of the NLCS was at 3:15 but it would take nearly four hours before Pete Rose scored the game-winning run in the tenth inning for the Phillies. Around 7:30, the grounds crew started to get the field ready for football. It had to cover the 2 warning track with turf, excavate the pitcher’s mound, board up the dugouts and re-line the field with chalk. The transformation took another four hours and it wasn’t until after 11:30 pm that Houston and Texas A&M could start their game. The contest wore on into the wee hours of the morning. Many of the more than 35,000 fans that attended had brought pillows with them and a local sports publicist served a champagne breakfast at halftime for the exhausted sports writers that had been there all day to cover the unconventional doubleheader. At 2:43 in the morning on Sunday, the final gun sounded and the Cougars had beaten the Aggies, 17-7, even though it took them two days to do it. The worst part of all was that Phillies victory forced a game five Sunday evening and the grounds crew would have to work through the morning to get the field ready for baseball again. That wasn’t the only game of note in the Lonestar state that day. Texas and Oklahoma had renewed their hostilities in Dallas - albeit at the much more traditional time of 11:50 in the morning. The two schools combined for 14 turnovers and Texas remained unbeaten while handing Oklahoma its second loss of the year. In Waco, the Baylor Bears kept pace with the Longhorns and preserved their perfect season by erasing a 21-point deficit against SMU. Texas and Baylor were two of the eleven teams that entered week six undefeated and it’s probably helpful to recap how we got to this point in the season. In the SEC, Alabama is 4-0 and ranked number one with a devastating ground attack. The Tide have one of the country’s easiest schedules and will not play the other unbeaten team in the conference, Georgia. The Bulldogs have climbed into the top ten after four straight wins to start the season and their star freshman, Herschel Walker, is proving to be better than advertised. In the ACC, North Carolina is still undefeated and its defense, led by Lawrence Taylor, hasn’t allowed a touchdown all year. The Tarheels don’t figure to be tested before their November 1 game in Norman against Oklahoma. The Pac-10 declared half of its teams ineligible for the conference championship or a 3 postseason bowl game, but two of them, USC and UCLA, are undefeated and ranked in the top six - threatening to muddy the national title picture. The Big Ten’s Ohio State started the year ranked number one but, like every other team in the conference, has at least one loss. The Big 8 had only Iowa State with a perfect record, though Nebraska’s narrow loss to Florida State hasn’t completely snuffed out its chances at number 1. The eleventh-ranked Seminoles are one of four contending independent teams joining unbeaten Miami, #7 Notre Dame and #4 Pitt. And it just so happens that in week six, the Pitt Panthers and Florida State Seminoles will do battle in Tallahassee on Saturday night. Pittsburgh vs Florida State Part 1 Chuck Bonasorte grew up in Pittsburgh and won a national championship in 1976 playing for the Panthers. Now, in 1980, he and his mother ran the Chasmar, a restaurant near campus that was always full of Pitt players and fans. One of the Panther’s biggest stars, Hugh Green, would often eat there and even called Mrs. Bonasorte his second mom. Chuck’s younger brother would love to playing football with Hugh Green, but when he finished his senior year of high school, the Panthers didn’t offer him a scholarship. Nobody did. That’s when Francis Joseph Bonasorte, nicknamed Monk, took an unlikely path to an All-American career in Tallahassee. He started playing semi-pro football in sandlot leagues. A friend contacted the Seminoles’ defensive coordinator, Jack Stanton, also a Pennsylvania native to let him know about Monk and Stanton encouraged him to try and walk on to the team in 1977. Monk made the team and before the first kickoff that season, he had earned a scholarship. He led the team in interceptions as a junior in 1979 and returned to Pittsburgh during the off-season to work at the Chasmar while conditioning himself for the upcoming season and engaging in plenty of good-natured trash talking with players on the Pitt team. It was after some of these trash-talking sessions that Monk was working out inside Pitt’s stadium and he found himself being approached by Panthers head 4 coach, Jackie Sherrill. A newspaper reporter had published some of Monk’s comments about Pitt - who was garnering a lot of pre-season hype and would face the Seminoles during the 1980 season. Sherrill had seen the article and said to Monk, “Don’t let your mouth write a check that your ass can’t cash.” On October 11th, 1980, at 7:00 pm, payment was due. FLORIDA STATE VS PITTSBURGH TV INTRO Sports Illustrated placed Pittsburgh’s star defensive end Hugh Green on the cover of its 1980 College Preview Magazine with an 80-pound female panther named Orpheus. Green remembered that during the photo shoot, the jungle cat tore his shirt in two places and wouldn’t stop licking his ear. The caption on the photo said, “the baddest cat in the game” and you can add Orpheus to the list of creatures that had tried unsuccessfully to unseat Green from his perch. He signed with Pittsburgh out of Natches, Mississippi and had built one of the most dominant careers in college football history. Incredibly fast, he could chase down ball carriers from sideline to sideline and he always arrived with violently bad intentions. On a team of stars, he shone brightest and his Panthers defense was dominant through the first four games of the 1980 season. The team was undefeated, ranked fourth and Green’s improbable Heisman campaign was alive and well. Right around the time of the Florida State game, the University of Pittsburgh had printed out posters to announce Green’s candidacy for the prestigious award. A defensive player had never won the award before and the promotional piece contained a message to would-be voters that might shy away from breaking with tradition - “The conclusion is simple. If logic be your guide, and justice your conscience, why not a defensive player - if he so merits - for the Heisman Trophy in 1980?” 5 The matchup with the Seminoles would be the toughest test of the year for Pitt. The Panthers had not yet played a ranked team and the largest crowd in Tallahassee history promised to add to the challenge of a night time road game against the number eleven team in the country. The late kickoff time meant that head coach Jackie Sherrill could give his Panthers’ team more time to relax at the hotel with family before the game. It’s a decision that head coach Jackie Sherrill still regrets making. JACKIE SHERRILL If the leisurely pre-game routine had dulled the Panthers’ edge, it wasn’t clear on the first play of the game. The Seminoles called a pass play, confident in the defense it expected Pittsburgh to play. They were wrong. Rick Stockstill realized the miscalculation as Hugh Green was barreling in on him after a naked bootleg and slung him down to the turf at the one yard line. The Seminoles would go three and out and Pittsburgh would take over at midfield. As Florida State’s defense looked to stem the Panthers momentum, it would do so without the hero of the Nebraska game, Paul Piurowski. The senior linebacker was in surgery just 24 hours after learning he had won several national player of the week honors for his clutch sack to end the game in Lincoln.

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