University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: "You Create Your Own Atmosphere"
September 13, 2006 | Football
Sept. 12, 2006
by Lee Pace, Extra Points
It's been 35 years since the Bill Dooley era celebrated its first milestone - winning the 1971 Atlantic Coast Conference football championship with a 6-0 league mark and 9-3 overall record. The Tar Heels followed in 1972 with an 11-1 record that included another perfect 6-0 run through the ACC. Dooley, his staff and the 1971 and '72 teams will be recognized at halftime of Saturday's Furman game on occasion of the 35th anniversary of their back-to-back title run. "Both teams had good football players and good leaders," Dooley says. "Both had a strong will to succeed, to excel. They enjoyed competing. They were tough."
They called it "Carolina Country Club," home of pretty girls, infinite keg parties, High Noon under the Bell Tower, liberal politics and mediocre football teams. Bill Dooley was well aware of the soft image of Tar Heel football and, as he gathered his new team in a classroom in Woollen Gym in January 1967, set about changing the mindset.
"When I was at Georgia, we always loved to play the University of North Carolina," Dooley told his new charges.
Some players exchanged glances. They could remember three straight losses over the previous three seasons to the Bulldogs--24-8 in 1964, 47-35 in '65 and 28-3 in '66.
"We knew if we got to the third and fourth quarters and it was a close game," Dooley continued, "we'd win the football game. We knew we were mentally and physically tougher than North Carolina."
Dooley was 32 years old and had just been anointed the new head football coach at Carolina, replacing Jim Hickey. Friends in the coaching business told him he couldn't win in Chapel Hill, that three winning seasons in 17 years and all the social distractions were poison to the type of Southeastern Conference mentality he'd been weaned on at Mississippi State and Georgia.
"I told them, `The hell we won't win,'" Dooley said. "Don't tell me that. I believe you create your own atmosphere."
Dooley planned to spend the next month on the road recruiting. Meanwhile, his players would begin an intense winter conditioning regime. There was no weight-lifting. It was all running, sprinting and wrestling. The intensity was a shock.
"I still have nightmares about it," says Gayle Bomar, a safety under Hickey who would move to quarterback for Dooley. "None of us had been through anything quite like it in our lives. A lot of guys decided to hang it up. I think we had 90-some players in the winter, and about 30 dropped out before we made it to spring."
Spring practice was another ordeal. It lasted for almost two months--early March through the end of classes. One day a manager found a helmet in the bushes, just outside the gate to the practice field. Twenty yards farther up the sidewalk was a jersey. Then he found a set of shoulder pads. Then kidney pads. A player had literally undressed all the way back to Kenan Field House, never to return.
"More nightmares," Bomar says. "It was long, it was grueling, it was a tremendous amount of contact every day. I remember one scrimmage on a Saturday in Kenan Stadium. We started about noon, and we could hear the Bell Tower ring every hour. Before it was over, the Bell Tower rang five or six times. It was a long day, a very intense experience.
"Later, I went into the service and went to boot camp. It was a picnic compared to that first spring practice."
Schools in the ACC took a somewhat casual approach to the game of football in the 1960s. But under Dooley, the league got a dose of SEC-style emphasis. It's never been the same since.
"I don't think Bill Dooley gets enough credit for his force and impact on the ACC," says Bobby Collins, the chief offensive assistant on Dooley's staff on those teams. "He was responsible for the aggressive recruiting that caused the other ACC schools to take a second look at their program. They were forced to keep pace."
Dooley's Xs-and-Os in the early years were never complicated: a Wing-T offense built around thousand-yard tailbacks and a 4-4-3 defense designed to thwart the offense-du-jour of the late sixties, the triple-option. It was off the field where Dooley changed the way football at Carolina was played.
He hired a full-time recruiter to help land the best players. He put his assistant coaches in coats and ties and sent them on the road like traveling salesmen, visiting every high school in the states of North Carolina and Virginia. Recruiting became a 24/7 operation. It helped that the ACC operated under the same rules as the SEC at the time, allowing a school to sign as many players as it wanted during a given year but having no more than 120 on scholarship at a time. Dooley's first three recruiting classes had between 35 and 40 freshmen.
"My recruiting upbringing had been highly intensive," Dooley says. "I took the job after the signing date, but I was surprised to find out that the other ACC schools had only signed two or three players. We had a pretty campus and good academics. I felt we had something we could sell.
"I looked at the roster from their last good season [the 1963 ACC champion team] and saw almost all of those players were from North Carolina and Virginia. We bombarded Virginia pretty hard when I first got here. I had some pretty good contacts from when I was at George Washington, and because the ACC recruited pretty casually in those days, we weren't that far behind."
Next, Dooley hired a full-time academic advisor to keep those good players on track in the classroom.
"I saw where they were losing almost a third of every player they brought in," he says. "It doesn't matter if you have the best football players in the world. If they can't stay in school, they're no good to you."
And he hired a full-time conditioning chief to implement a winter program.
"I had to establish that our athletes had to pay the price," Dooley says. "That meant hard work and a lot of it. We did many new things in the ACC, and before long most of them were copied in some ways at other schools."
Dooley and his staff corralled who they could after he took the job in December 1966, landing Don McCauley, Flip Ray, John Swofford and Paul Hoolahan, to name a handful. His recruiting efforts clicked into high gear the next year, and his first full recruiting class included players like quarterback Paul Miller, wingback Lewis Jolley and linebackers John Bunting and James Webster, the four of whom would go on to grace the cover of the 1971 media guide. The next class included the likes of guard Ron Rusnak, who would earn consensus All-America honors in 1972, as well as future All-ACC players like Lou Angelo, Mike Mansfield, Bob Thornton, Jerry Sain, Eric Hyman and Gene Brown and a thousand-yard rusher in Ike Oglesby.
"We were fairly basic in those days," Bunting remembers. "Coach Dooley did a great job recruiting. We beat most teams with better personnel. Our point of emphasis was the line of scrimmage. If we came up against a passing team, we struggled sometimes. My junior and senior years, we lost to Tulane. They threw the ball a lot. The game when William & Mary almost beat us my senior year--they were a throwing team." Dooley's first two teams struggled with 2-8 and 3-7 records. The 1968 season included a 32-27 loss at home to South Carolina in the second game of the year.
"Maybe losing had become contagious here," Dooley says. "The hardest thing was turning the attitude around. I'll never forget when we had South Carolina 27-3 in the fourth quarter. But the look on the players' faces - somehow, someway, they were going to lose it. And we did lose."
Carolina opened the 1969 season with a 1-4 record but then reeled off wins over Wake Forest, Virginia, VMI and Clemson before losing to Duke to end the year with a 5-5 record. That, Dooley believes, was the turnaround.
"Once we changed the attitude and the younger players who had been in winning high school programs matured, we were on our way," Dooley says. "I believe that happened in the second half of the '69 season, when we won four of our last five."
Carolina challenged for the ACC title in 1970 but finished 5-2, losing to Wake Forest by a point on the road and by 14 at home to South Carolina. The Deacons collected the league title, but the Tar Heels posted an 8-3 mark in the regular season and earned a bowl berth against Arizona State in the Peach Bowl (the Sun Devils won in the snow and sleet, 48-26).
By 1971, Dooley's first true recruiting class had matured into seniors and was bolstered by two more years of excellent talent hauls. The Heels won their first two games on the road, shutting down Richmond 28-0 and Illinois 27-0.
"Rolling into the Big Ten and beating the stuffing out of Illinois was really big," says Bunting. "That told us how good we were."
Carolina beat Maryland and N.C. State, then suffered a two-game losing streak by falling to Tulane by eight at home and being shut out at Notre Dame, 16-0. The Heels ripped off five straight wins over Wake Forest, William & Mary, Clemson, Virginia and Duke to finish 9-2 and 6-0 in the ACC. They were edged 7-3 in a Gator Bowl match featuring Bill Dooley against older brother Vince, head coach of the Bulldogs.
Dooley was named ACC Coach of the Year in 1971 and had firmly established the parameters of his program - strong running game, consistent kicking game, excellent defense and the occasional flare of the forward pass. The Tar Heels averaged 265 yards running in 1971 and 100 yards a game passing.
"I'm not against the forward pass, contrary to what a lot of people think," Dooley said at the time. "I believe you have to throw well to win. And the key word is well.
"You have to be able to run the ball first, then it's much easier to throw the ball well. The past couple of years, Paul Miller completed 60 percent of his passes and led the league in touchdown passes. Now, that's throwing the ball well."
The '71 season was a bittersweet one for the Tar Heels, given their ACC title juxtaposed against the pall of Bill Arnold's death in early September after collapsing while running post-practice sprints. An investigation cleared Dooley and the Carolina program of any wrong-doing, but Arnold's death initiated a series of changes in medical and safety procedures that exist today all across the athletic spectrum. Emotions ran high that fall, and Dooley, his staff and some of the Tar Heels felt their very existence was being challenged.
"There were all kinds of questions being raised, people from outside campus were coming in to challenge our program," Bunting remembers. "We heard they wanted to dismantle the program. We didn't know exactly what was going on. Bill Arnold had something go wrong that day. I carried him off the field. I put him on the truck. We lost a loved brother. We went on, played the season for Bill. But we were strong as a team, strong behind Coach Dooley. It was a difficult time for all of us."
The 1972 Tar Heels had to replace Bunting on defense, Miller on offense and other key players, but the machine was up and running and just as strong the following year. Nick Vidnovic took over as quarterback, and Oglesby, Sammy Johnson and Tim Kirkpatrick ran behind a Rusnak-anchored offensive line. That team developed the "Cardiac Kids" nickname for its penchant to win close games at the end. The Heels beat Maryland by five, N.C. State by one, Florida by four and Texas Tech in Sun Bowl by four. A 15-point loss on the road to Ohio State was the only blemish of the season.
"That '72 team never got down," Dooley says. "Football is a game of momentum, and that team always found a way to regain the momentum after losing it. Some way, some how, they found a way to come back. They got knocked back and came right back at you."
The program would backslide over the next three seasons, suffering losing records in 1973 and '75, but Dooley rebuilt the program again and fielded an ACC champion in 1977. At the age of 42, the challenge to rebuild another program and to become an athletic director as well lured Dooley to Blacksburg, Va., and a job at Virginia Tech. He ended his coaching career at Wake Forest in 1992. Since then, Dooley has worked in sports development for the state of North Carolina, been a TV analyst and remained active in football by managing the Triangle Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame. It was at an annual banquet for the Foundation in April that Dooley was rushed into emergency surgery after suffering an aortic aneurysm. He has made an excellent recovery and saw his first game of the year last week when Virginia Tech game to Chapel Hill. He'll return again this weekend.
"It was touch-and-go for a while there for Coach," says Bunting. "But the `Old Trench Fighter' never gave up. He's a fighter. This reunion is good timing. I'm glad we can pay tribute to him and to a great bunch of hard-working guys. We worked hard and we loved the game of football."
Send your questions about Tar Heel football to Lee Pace at leepace@nc.rr.com. Please include your first and last names and hometown. Individual replies are not possible because of volume of mail received, and names of recruiting prospects and commitments cannot be published on a school-sponsored site until the national signing day in February . The Q&A column will appear each Friday during the season.
