Virginia’s Welsh Is Worth Considering

Any discussion of college football’s A-list coaches would have to include Joe Paterno, Lou Holtz, Tom Osborne, Bobby Bowden and Steve Spurrier. It would be tough to make a case against any one of them considering their results over time. Only a few more names even bear consideration. Given the body of work he has produced over 24 seasons at two schools where winning was once somewhere between difficult and impossible, George Welsh of Virginia deserves some consideration right there with the best of his peers.

The U.S. Naval Academy has had one winning season in the 14 years since he left and Virginia had one winning season in the 13 years before he got there. Virginia had been unthinkably bad for so long that high-profile coaches wouldn’t even consider interviewing for the job when it became vacant in 1981.

Tom O’Brien, who has been one of Welsh’s trusted assistants for 21 years, recalled the day Welsh told staff members he was leaving Annapolis for Virginia. “I’d just recruited Napoleon McCallum and we’d built the program to the point we’d finally gone to a bowl game three times in four years at Navy. George said, ‘Virginia,’ and we said, ‘Virginia ?’ We had beaten Virginia like a drum when we were at Navy. We thought Virginia was worse off than Navy had been.”

It was. Welsh even says so. But therein lies the proof that he is one of the nation’s great coaches. Virginia is once again ranked in the top 20; the Cavaliers are 12th and undefeated going into Saturday’s game at Georgia Tech. Welsh has better players than he did at Navy, but nothing close to the number of high school stars who play at Penn State, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Florida State and Florida, among others. Nonetheless, Virginia’s the only Atlantic Coast Conference school to have beaten Florida State in league play.

When Welsh arrived in Charlottesville in December 1981, Virginia never had been to a bowl game, never had won an ACC championship, never had won 10 games in a season, and never had been ranked higher than ninth in the Associated Press poll. “We were bums before he got there,” is how former Virginia player David Ware put it. Now, it’s seven bowls in the past nine seasons, two ACC titles, a 10-3 record in 1989, and a No. 1 ranking for three weeks in 1990. The only ACC team capable of beating Florida State this year is, again, Virginia.

Yet, if you asked anybody other than a coach west of the Blue Ridge to name the head football coach at Virginia, you’d get blank stares. Welsh isn’t low-profile, he’s no-profile.

He’s not a schmoozer and he doesn’t give night-before-the-game inspirational speeches. Apparently he couldn’t if he wanted to. Asked to recount Welsh’s typical pregame speech, O’Brien, who has heard just about every one of them, said, “It goes something like, ‘You guys ready? Let’s go play.’ He has occasions, real important games, where he’ll say more than three, four sentences, but not many.”

Ware, who played for Welsh at Virginia from 1989 to ’92 and is now in sales for WTEM, said, “Vince Lombardi, George ain’t. You play college football, you want your coach to stand before the team the night before a big game and tell you a story about his dog getting run over by a car but limping all the way back home because the dog ain’t no quitter. ... You know what George did? He’d have the assistant coaches tell stories.”

But Ware and O’Brien can quickly rattle off all the things Welsh is.

He has studied pro football fanatically for years. “In college,” Welsh said, “we have to recruit and we have so many duties that don’t” pertain to football. “The pros are spending so much more time on football than we are. The Wing-T, the Veer, all that came out of college football, but it was years ago. All the innovations I’ve seen the last 15 years, they all come out of pro football.” Welsh, taking a cue from the pros, has turned his outstanding outside linebackers (James Farrior and Jamie Sharper) into attackers who blitz more than Welsh would have dreamed of six or seven years ago.

He’s one of the best anywhere at coming up with solutions. “If you have a problem, get a drill for it,” O’Brien said of his boss’s approach.