Published: August 21, 2008 01:49 am      

COLUMN: Dunlap’s skills go beyond coaching

MORGANTOWN — The West Virginia University safety got into his backpedal quickly, just as you would want him to if you were coaching the safeties. He looked back toward the left-hander with ball, trying to read his eyes, trying to sense if there was a receiver coming toward him.

He saw the left-hander cock his arm and unleash a pass in his direction. He broke perfectly on the ball and it seemed like a sure interception until the ball slipped through his fingers, the pass being too hot for him to handle.

“Catch the ball,” shouted the left-hander who had just uncorked that perfect spiral that ripped through the safety hands.

Steve Dunlap was given another ball. Another safety went into his backpedal and the sequence repeated itself.

Turns out, Steve Dunlap was coaching the safeties and, with no disrespect meant toward Patrick White, if all you had seen was the flight of the football, the accuracy of the pass, the velocity with which it was thrown, you’d have thought it had been thrown by the quarterback who is a contender for the Heisman Trophy rather than a 55-year-old former Mountaineer linebacker.

Steve Dunlap may not be the best passer on the West Virginia roster, but he’s close.

Seldom do you think about the skills a coach sometimes needs to possess. It takes something more than owning a clipboard and whistle and possessing a voice that can be heard above the roar of 60,000 people to coach football.

If you coach the secondary, your job description includes having to throw the football during drills, and it doesn’t do a whole lot of good if you are a rag-arm who can’t get the ball there with something on it.

“You have to throw the ball with some velocity because when it comes from a quarterback that ball is moving,” Dunlap explained. “The problem with a lot of coaches is they don’t put enough heat on the ball when they run drills. They have to get used to catching a hard ball. We don’t get many opportunities, so when we get one I want them to catch it.”

Dunlap could not always throw a football very well. In his early days, he threw as you’d expect a man who spent most of his life knocking receivers and ball carriers down to throw.

“I was left-handed and threw sidearm,” he recalled the other day after practice. “It was back when Major Harris was here. We were in two-a-days. After six days of practice, I had my arm packed in ice. I couldn’t throw the ball at all.”

Dunlap was, so to speak, on the fast track to coaching Don Nehlen’s defensive line. Something had to be done, so he approached Dwight Wallace, an assistant coach then and today a color commentator on WVU’s football broadcasts.

“He showed me how to throw it properly,” Dunlap said.

Wallace has been working with Harris, which might tell you just how good a coach he was to be able to spend part of his day working with one of the great quarterbacks of all time and part of it working with … well, let’s say as a passer, Dunlap was very good bass fisherman.

What Wallace did with Dunlap was nothing short of a miracle. The man really can throw a football.

“I’m just like Steve Young. I should have been there,” Dunlap joked as he sat, his leg propped up on a coach, a bag of ice taking the swelling out of the area where he had undergone knee surgery. “If I’d been a quarterback, who knows what might have happened.”

As it was, Dunlap became more than a pretty good linebacker under Bobby Bowden in the mid-1970s after having grown up in Hurricane with his lifelong friend and coaching partner, Doc Holliday.

Dunlap still holds the school record for the 28 tackles he made in a single game against Boston College in 1975 and for the 190 tackles he made during that 1975 season.

If you want to know how good, you can Google Dunlap and find a YouTube.com entry of his highlights from 1975, narrated by Jack Fleming and featuring an interview with him as a collegian with a thick head of dark brown hair and wearing a flowery Hawaiian shirt.

Both looks have gone out of style. The shirt he could bring back. The hair? Well, Rich Rodriguez did suddenly seem to spurt a new head of hair after he passed 35.

Some would say that Dunlap was born to coach West Virginia, and that might not be an overstatement. As noted, he has been entwined with much of the Mountaineers’ history. A player for Bowden, a coach for Nehlen, Dunlap was a finalist for the Broyles Award given college football’s top assistant when his 1996 defense led the nation.

When Rodriguez came in and purged Nehlen’s coaching staff, much to Nehlen’s dismay, Dunlap wound up at North Carolina State, at Syracuse and, yes, at Marshall.

“You know I’ve never coached a day of offense in my life,” he said.

When Bill Stewart was putting his staff together, he turned it into a homecoming party, reuniting Dunlap and Holliday on the same staff, along with Bill Kirelawich and David Lockwood and former WVU player Dave Johnson.

So now, Dunlap is home with his wife, Wendy, whom he met at WVU, and children Matt and Megan, trying to help create a national championship team at his school and find a lake where he can go off in his 19-foot bass boat and catch a smallmouth bigger than the 6-pound, 6-ounce one he lists as his record.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.