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The ’83 team:
A picture of
the future of Pirate football
Arguably, Emory Assembled
the Greatest ECU Team
Ever to Hit the Field
By
Ron Cherubini
©2002, 2004 Bonesville.net
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Photo: ECU SID |
Though many East Carolina
fans used 1991 as the baseline for the start of the Pirates’ ascension
into the ranks of competitive Division I-A football, the stage was set
almost a decade earlier.
The 1983 team, the bunch
that went 8-3 — losing to the only Miami, Florida State and Florida by a
total of 13 points — was arguably the greatest, pound-for-pound, Pirate
football team ever trotted out onto the gridiron.
Save a few of those
players, the bulk of that team was Ed Emory’s first recruiting class,
courted to Greenville in 1980.
Though Emory is slow to
accept credit for the success of that team and its importance in the
chronology of ECU football, he will not deny that the talent assembled
on that team was unique.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever
have another bunch like that team,” he said. “We all were very close and
have stayed close to this day. It all started in 1980. And that season,
(we) had a few things gone our way, (and) had I not made a couple of
(coaching) mistakes, we’d have been in the Orange Bowl.”
That ’83 team was headlined
by a bevy of players who would go on to professional careers — Earnest
Byner, Steve Hamilton, Reggie Branch, Stefon Adams, Norwood Vann, Tony
Baker, Kevin Ingram, Jeff Pegues, Hal Stephens, Henry ‘Gizmo’ Williams,
Terry Long, Dave Robertson, Calvin Adams, Jeff Heath — all names highly
identifiable in the folklore of East Carolina football.
As history bore out, that
team was left out of the bowl scenario while a 6-5 UNC-Chapel Hill team
went to the postseason. But the team’s impact on the recognition of the
school as a viable football power was unmistakable.
“We knew we were going to
have a very special team in 1983,” Emory said. “But we also had lost
some very valuable coaches from ’82. To this day, I am convinced that if
we had not lost my offensive coordinator, Larry Beckish, we would have
won the national championship — I believe that.”
Lou Holtz had raided the
East Carolina staff to fill slots with him in Minnesota, taking Beckish
and defensive backs coach Phil Elmassian.
“Lou is a hell of a coach,
but he is famous for (raiding) coaches,” Emory said. “Our guys couldn’t
live on the money they were being paid. He came in and doubled their
salaries… Ain’t much you can do no matter how much a coach loves the
program in that situation.”
Notwithstanding an
environment in which the football program had, by today’s measures,
little financial commitment from the athletic administration or the
school, Emory and his team of talented players made do with minimal
environs and won anyway.
“I’ve always believed that
you win with people,” Emory said. “You overcome resistance with
persistence… and we were a persistent bunch. I just wish we could’ve
kept our coaches. Those kids deserved that.
“It was very frustrating
trying to get new coaches up to speed with the players we had on that
roster. And we played them all on the road… all of the big games. We
went to Florida, Florida State, Miami, Missouri, and N.C. State. It was
a tough, tough situation.”
One of the special things
about that team was its chemistry, according to Emory. The group was a
bunch of survivors who clung together to overcome the lack of external
support.
“I’ll tell you this, those
kids wouldn’t back down from anyone,” Emory said. “We’d play anybody,
anywhere. It was always the story — line them up and we’ll play them.”
The 1983 season opened on
the road at Florida State, where the Pirates, under Emory’s leadership,
had lost by a combined 119-24 score in 1980 and ’82. Yet the attitude on
that team was that FSU would simply be the first of a season’s worth of
victims.
After the brutal 56-17 loss
in 1982, Emory and Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden talked and the Pirate
skipper made one thing clear to Bowden:
“I said to Bobby, ‘Don’t
drop us from your schedule,’” Emory recalled. “I told him, ‘We’re gonna
on coming down here to play you guys until we beat you.’ I thought we
had them that year, I really did.”
Instead, what unfolded in
that opener was a barnburner of a contest in which Bowden and his
Seminoles were barely able to hold off the Pirates 47-46. While ECU lost
the game, the near-earth-shattering upset sent a clear message to the
football world that Emory’s Pirates would be a force to be reckoned with
all year — and North Carolina State was the first to feel the pain.
ECU’s 22-16 win over the
Wolfpack would launch a five-game win streak that positioned the team
for its stretch run to an 8-3 season. Down went Murray State (50-25),
Missouri (13-6), Southwest Louisiana (21-18), and Temple (24-11), en
route to a showdown with the Florida Gators, once again, on the road.
“That Florida game, that’s
another one we should have, could have won,” Emory said. “That’s a whole
story all by itself.”
As much as the Florida loss
hurt, putting the Pirates at 5-2, it was the Miami game that haunts
Emory the most.
After trouncing East
Tennessee 21-9, ECU was jacked up to play against Howard Schnellenberger
and his star quarterback, Bernie Kosar.
“Now the Miami game, that
was a game we should have won… even after we gave them the go ahead
touchdown,” Emory said. “That was a case where I should have stepped in.
I made a terrible mistake. We were ahead 7-6 with about three minutes to
go. We had a third-and-two at their six-yard line. Calvin Adams had got
a cramp in his hamstring and I was over with the sports medicine guy
trying to get Calvin ready.
“Art Baker, who was my
offensive coordinator then, had put (Norwood) Vann at flanker and had
two walk-on tight ends in the game. He ran (Tony) Baker to the boundary.
The whole stadium knew, was waiting for that play. I should have
been over there.”
The play had been a staple
for the Pirates, and the Hurricanes had scouted Baker’s schemes well.
They stifled the play, leaving the Pirates facing a fourth down with an
extreme-angle kick awaiting a Jeff Heath attempt.
“It was a really steep
angle for Jeff,” Emory said. “But, I thought, we’d get the kick and
force them to have to drive the field to win. It was a real
difficult kick and we didn’t get it.”
Things got worse for ECU in
a hurry.
“We had to put Rally (Caparas)
in for Calvin,” Emory said. “They hadn’t completed a pass for more than
10 yards the whole game and they went right at Rally and connected on a
40-yard pass to set up a touchdown, to make it 12-7.”
Still, Emory said, the
Pirates should have won the game. The Pirates drove again and put
themselves in position to win the game.
Emory knew the very play
that would win it.
“We had a play that we
practiced and practiced for this situation,” he said. “Norwood just
didn’t do what we asked him to do on the play. We had a play where
Norwood would go right to the goalpost, under the crossbar. If
(quarterback) Kevin (Ingram) got into trouble, he would throw the ball
at the crossbar and Norwood – who could jump 40 inches – would just go
up and get it.
“Well, Kevin found Stefon
(Adams) and put the ball right there, I mean, right on the money, and I
think that Stefon held on long enough. Norwood didn’t stay put and he
started to move toward Stefon and ended up hitting him right under the
chinstrap and knocked the ball out of his hands.”
At the time, all Emory knew
was that the Orange Bowl was no longer an opportunity. What he never
could have imagined was that no bowl offer would materialize.
“The Orange Bowl… I’m
convinced we would have gone,” he said. “Those boys deserved to
go to a bowl game, a good bowl game. Those boys were robbed.”
The Pirates took out their
frustrations on their final two opponents in William & Mary and Southern
Mississippi, beating them by a combined total of 50-12, closing the book
on a season that has gained more and more respect as time has gone by.
That ’83 team.
“I haven’t been able to
equal the feeling of that ’83 team,” he said. “Maybe in ’92 at Anson
(High). But really, that was a special situation in 1983, and we knew
it.”
For Emory, the team was a
validation of what he had always dreamed he could do at East Carolina.
For the ECU football program, that season introduced the Pirate faithful
to the possibility of playing big-time college football.
“I wake up every morning
and say, ‘God, give me gratitude, not attitude,’” Emory said. “I put the
highlight film from that season in every now and then and it brings
tears to my eyes. There’s nothing like proving to the country that ECU
could be what I always thought it could be. I knew we could do it. And I
truly believe that ECU’s best football is still ahead of it.”
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