Herschel Never Played Defense

Recently I had the opportunity (thanks to my friends at Original Retro Brand and my good friend Andy Hyman) to go to the Touchdown Club of Atlanta's weekly luncheon honoring the week's top football players and coaches and the event is concluded with a guest speaker. This week however, the guests were members of the University of Georgia's 1980 National Championship team. Today's blog is a recollection of my experience at this event as well as a compilation of the stories that were told about the great Junkyard Dawg defense. Enjoy!


The smell of great food, and the discussion of how good or bad different teams are is going on, and football is definitely in the air.  But this wasn’t the campus of Georgia, Auburn or Georgia Tech.  It was the Fox Sports Grill at Atlantic Station at the Touchdown Club of Atlanta weekly luncheon.  And on this day Buck Belue reminded us all of something that most Georgia fans and college football fans seem to forget…”Herschel never played defense.” The 1980 National Champions had a RB that rushed for 1,616 yards and 15 touchdowns.  Yes, they also had a pretty good QB in Belue and receivers in Amp Arnold and Lindsay Scott.  But their defense was the anchor to their undefeated season, and eventual title.  The Junkyard Dawgs never gave up more than 21 points in any game and against a high-powered Notre Dame offense in the title game, they gave up just 7 points.  The Junkyard Dawg defense was created, motivated and loved by none other than 3-time National Championship coach Erkskine “Erk” Russell.  According to 1980 Team Captain Frank Ros (pronounced Ross), as the I-Formation was becoming more popular the Split 60 defense was used to stop the Veer and Option, but Russell morphed the defense to move the Sam linebacker (strong side) to a D-tackle, and then would move back out, and the end would shift back in to stop the I-form, Iso, and Dive plays. Thus with the combination of speed, intelligence and motivation, this defense earned their nickname“Junkyard Dawgs”.  Frank Ros, Bob Kelly and Robert Miles all agreed that their defense was centered around Russell.  For instance there is a pretty famous picture of Erk that most college football fans of that era have seen with Erk’s head gushing blood, but this wasn’t from his famous head butts of defensive lineman. You see he created a tradition with his defensive lineman where in pre-game warm ups he played a game called “Bull In The Ring”. For those that don’t know, it’s when one player would stand in the middle of a circle of other players, and they would come from all over to hit the man in the middle, one at a time. Well, Erk would stand in the middle and he would butt his head into his player’s chest.  He had a player that just moved from linebacker to D-line who didn’t know this, and he dropped his head and the screws on the helmet cut Erk’s wrinkled bald cranium.  Frank Ros recalls that before going out on the field that Erk stopped him at the door, swiped his hand across his head, and wiped the blood on Frank’s jersey.  Ros told us “At that point I would have run through the wall for him”.


Russell had an uncanny ability to motivate his players by knowing their personalities and loving his players.  All the players on the panel agreed that Russell’s coaching style was to never criticize the athlete, and instead he would only critique the action.  Never saying “you screwed that up” or negative statements that would potentially put someone down, but instead he loved and respected his players enough to use positive motivations and only talk about the action.  In closing, there are two other notable points that I found worthy of mentioning.  Bob Kelly recalled that when the Dawgs lost homecoming in 1979, Coach Vince Dooley moved curfew up to the moment they returned back to the dorms. Then the next morning (Sunday morning) the trainers woke them up for practice at 7am.  At this point they still had a JV team who was going to play Clemson Sunday afternoon. After practice was over, the JV was put on the bus with a sandwich and sent to the stadium.  After that experience they didn’t want to lose another game so they just went undefeated the next year. They all also agreed that in their era, having a Junior Varsity team and everyone having to play on the Scout teams helped propel them to the Elite.  That and bloody Tuesday’s! As Buck Belue said referring to Bloody Tuesday’s, “When you have that #1 offense going against the #1 defense in practice how could anyone beat us.”


Personally, I had a great time filling in for Andy at the Touchdown club, and I honestly enjoyed hearing about Erk and his Junkyard Dawgs.  As a former high school football coach, it was nice to hear that a coach treated his players the right way, and could still win.  Now days too many coaches think they have to belittle and berate players to get them to perform, and Vince Dooley and Erk Russell remind us of how you can win and treat players as people.  Coaching means you are the teacher, and these legends were the perfect example.  In conclusion, I have to give a shout out to the Georgia High School Lineman of the Week Joe Turner, who was noted for making 11 tackles, and played offensive line in a game in 2009 with a broken wrist!  Now that’s a beast!  Thank you to Andy and Original Retro Brand for the opportunity to write this blog.

Teaching The Hard Lesson

Well as usual the loyal haters, nay-sayers and pessimists made it a point to reach out to their Georgia friend today to let me know about the recent arrest of Caleb King (which I already knew). Of course one of them being a Georgia State Football blogger who truly eats up anything that comes out of Athens that is negative. The only thing more noticeable than his hatred for UGA sports is his love for GSU and FSU sports. This morning, I come back from a meeting to an IM that says "Caleb King got arrested" and the text message from my Auburn friend "I am out for Vandy. I saw Caleb King got arrested." Both of these were obviously before they knew what the situation was. But the point still the same....WE WANT TO SEE GEORGIA CONTINUE TO EMBARRASS THEMSELVES.

I don't really understand the point in it other than kicking a man when he's already down. That is the only angle I see in that behavior. Fine...GSU will ALWAYS have a squeaky clean program under Bill Curry it will never be explosive, dynamic, or even fun to watch (see Kentucky in 90-96). Auburn on the other hand is still mad at losing four straight. So that one is what it is.

On to my point.

Recently coach Richt (to my knowledge) has put a zero tolerance policy in place regarding players and the law. Because let's face it, our players have seen the inside of a jail cell more than T.I., Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne and Lindsay Lohan combined in the last twelve months. This policy is meant to keep players from getting into stupid situations, and because..well...everyone else in society has to follow the law. He has already acted on this once, when he kicked Demetre Baker off the team and we thought this was supposed to begin the revival  with our players. It was supposed to set the example that coach Richt was serious about this and that Georgia Football needed to be held to a higher standard.

Now insert Caleb King.

Caleb is a starting running back, and in this blogger's opinion the best one on the team. So does zero tolerance apply? Or do we go to the three strikes your out method? Personally, you have to send him packing. To steal a line from Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday "You make a ritual out of it; people are gonna respect you for it." If players know that you are not going to tolerate their immature "I a football player" attitude then they won't have one. They have be taught that they are not God's greatest gift to the world because they play football at Georgia. News flash: NO ONE CARES! The law is going to treat you no different than the rest of us.

How do you do that? You stick with being consistent. If you warned them that being kicked off the team and losing their scholarship was the punishment for breaking the law then you have to show them. Again, I love Caleb King. He's one of my favorite players on this roster, but unfortunately he didn't hold up his end of the bargain. Players today are not being required to act as higher citizens' like they once were, you're not being asked to wear your dress pants with your jersey to class on Fridays or to address everyone all the time with "Yes M'am" and "No Sir" heck...I bet they don't even have to look adults in the eyes when they are talking. They are only being asked to do the exact same thing the rest of us in society are not asked to do but EXPECTED to do. Why is that so hard?

Again, I love Caleb but you have to stick to your guns or lose the respect and control of your players, coaches, fans and anyone else that hears the story. If you said zero tolerance then stick to zero tolerance regardless of the crime. I know the ticket was paid, and I know it was only $300, but the point here is you knew you broke the law. You knew you had a ticket, and unless you handled it when the policy came down the treatment should be the same for everyone. As much as it hurts our chances of winning this year, it's better to be a disciplined team, than to be a winning to me. The goal is to help boys become men. NOT win football games, that should be secondary.