The 30th anniversery of Pitt’s ’76 national championship is this year, and the team will be honored at the season opener this Saturday. The Trib. goes full-feature in looking back at the team. They start with how new Head Coach Johnny Majors recruited the class of ’73.
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.
In part because Pitt gave out such a slew of scholarships — anywhere from 65 to 100 — the NCAA set caps on scholarships per year after 1973. The numbers are a little unclear, in part, because Pitt washed out a bunch of kids in training camp. There’s a great little note about what helped Pitt be able to get Tony Dorsett to stay local and come to Pitt.
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.
The end of the article features capsule reviews of every game from the ’76 season.
There’s also a “where are they now?” piece covering 11 members of the team. Plus a full feature on another member, Jim Corbett, who at age 51 is now doing relief mission work to Nigeria. He will be at the game on Saturday then leave for another trip in less than a week.
