By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
One of the more colorful characters to ever grace a football field died Thursday.
Pepper Rodgers was 88 when he slipped away at his home in Reston, Virginia. Rodgers starred as a player at Georgia Tech and was a successful coach, but that’s not why people remember Rodgers and are eulogizing him today.
After all, great players who become good coaches are a dime a dozen.
No, we remember Pepper Rodgers because he was one of the wittiest, most eminently quotable football men who ever lived, a man who never met a stranger and if he had any enemies, they were well-concealed.
Franklin Cullen Rodgers earned his nickname honestly, well before ever crossed town in his native Atlanta and went to play quarterback for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech.
Rodgers started at quarterback and was a fine kicker for the Yellow Jackets during two of the best seasons ever in the long history of Ramblin’ Wreck football.
In 1952, as a junior, he led Tech to a share of the national championship, capping the season with a touchdown pass, a field goal and two PATs in a 24-7 victory over Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl.
A year later, in his final game as a player, Rodgers passed for 195 yards and three touchdowns, plus he kicked another field goal and two more PATs in a rout of West Virginia in the 1954 Sugar Bowl.
Those two performances were enough to get Rodgers named to the Sugar Bowl Hall of Fame in its inaugural 16-man class of 2018.
I have sort of an odd peripheral connection with Pepper Rodgers. My father was born two months and a week before Rodgers in 1931, and he was a senior at Ole Miss when he and my granddaddy drove all night from Columbus, Mississippi, on New Year’s Eve to old Tulane Stadium in New Orleans for the ’53 Sugar Bowl, then drove all the way back after the game.
Rodgers began his coaching career as an assistant at Air Force, then served stints as an assistant at Florida and UCLA before getting his first big break, hiring on as head coach at Kansas in 1967.
KU football has a long tradition of mediocrity, but there have been some isolated oases of success, and one of those was early in Rodgers’ tenure as the Jayhawks’ coach.
Rodgers’ predecessor, Jack Mitchell, had had some modest success – several six-win, seven-win seasons – but in 1965 and 1966, his teams went 2-8 and 2-7-1, thus earning him a pink slip.
However, Mitchell had recruited extremely well during the last couple of years of his tenure, and he left Rodgers a well-stocked cupboard of talent.
Among the players Rodgers inherited were future Pro Football Hall of Famer John Riggins, a future longtime pro in defensive end John Zook and a left-handed quarterback named Bobby Douglass.
Now, if you were to ask who the most famous person was to come out of the town where you graduated from high school, the answer in my case would probably be Bobby Douglass.
In 1964, my dad took a job in the oil and cattle town of El Dorado, Kansas, and as a football fan he quickly learned that El Dorado High School had a hot-shot quarterback on one of the rare occasions when the EHS Wildcats were actually good at football.
So, we went to all the high school’s games in the fall of 1964 and watched Douglass tear it up with his passing and running. To this day, Dad insists that Bobby Douglass was the best high school quarterback he’s ever seen.
There may be a few other contenders for the most famous person to grow up in El Dorado, population about 10,000. One of the state’s current congressmen is from there and Barack Obama’s mother was born there, but I’d still say Douglass was the best-known person to hail from the place.
Today, the town is probably best-known as the home of Butler Community College, a major power in junior college athletics, with multiple national championships in several sports, including football.
Mitchell, a quarterback himself, recruited Bobby Douglass for Kansas, and Douglass thrived under the tutelage of Rodgers, an offensive guru who previously had helped turn Steve Spurrier at Florida and Gary Beban at UCLA into Heisman Trophy winners.
Rodgers installed an offense suited to Douglass’ unique talents – he is still known as one of the best running quarterbacks who ever played – and the Jayhawks were suddenly competitive.
KU went 5-5 overall in 1967, but were 5-2 in the Big 8, including a rare victory over Nebraska and a close (14-9) defeat at Oklahoma.
With Douglass going into his senior season and Riggins coming into his own as a running back, Kansas was poised for a big year in ’68. And they delivered. I was 13, going on 14, and the KU Jayhawks in 1968 were the first college football team I truly got emotionally involved with.
Everybody did in my little hometown, whether their first loyalty was to the purple-clad Wildcats of Kansas State, the Gorillas of Pittsburg State or another of the smaller schools in Kansas. After all, it was our town’s legendary big dog leading KU to sudden success on the football field.
The Jayhawks opened the ’68 season with a 47-7 victory at Illinois (on September 21, how quaint), and that got them into the rankings at No. 12. KU then whipped 13th-ranked Indiana, coming off a Rose Bowl appearance the year before, at home the next week.
After completing the non-conference schedule with a routine waxing of New Mexico, Kansas, now ranked sixth, went to Nebraska to play the ninth-ranked Cornhuskers, winning 23-13.
KU reached No. 3 in the rankings before a 27-23 home loss to Oklahoma dropped the Jayhawks to seventh. This is how topsy-turvy things were for football on the Plains in 1968; Kansas beating Nebraska at Lincoln wasn’t an upset, but OU beating KU at Lawrence was.
The Jayhawks finished the regular season with a couple of hard-fought road wins, 38-29 over K-State (future Packers great Lynn Dickey was the QB for the ‘Cats that year) and 21-19 over Missouri.
Kansas finished the regular season 9-1, 6-1 in the conference, and finished tied for the Big 8 championship. As a result, KU received an invitation to play in the Orange Bowl, which was at the time generally the reward for winning the Big 8.
The opponent was one of the first great teams Joe Paterno fielded at Penn State. It’s hard to believe now after the monstrous success Paterno enjoyed in his career at Penn State, but when he first took over as coach in 1966, the Nittany Lions were just another Eastern independent.
But in Paterno’s third season, Penn State was undefeated and ranked third in the country. Ohio State and Southern Cal were 1-2, and they were playing each other in the Rose Bowl, so the Lions were probably not going to win the national championship.
But going 11-0 is its own reward, and the Orange Bowl, on New Year’s Night in ’69, provided a real contrast.
The best team out of the Big 8, with an explosive offense, against the beasts of the East, a defensive-minded team led by Mike Reid, a defensive end who later became an accomplished musician, and linebacker Jack Ham, a future Pro Football Hall of Famer as a member the Pittsburgh Steelers.
We were, of course, glued to the old black-and-white TV set in our den. New Year’s Day football was already a tradition in my house, with even my mom getting in on the fun.
Kansas took a 7-0 lead in the first quarter, but Penn State tied it up in the second quarter, and that’s the way it stayed until the fourth quarter.
Although Douglass and Riggins were the big names, KU also had a little halfback named Donnie Shanklin who stole the show. It was Shanklin’s long punt return that set up Riggins for the go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter.
Leading 14-7, Kansas had a chance to put the game away, driving to the Penn State 11, but on fourth down, Rodgers went conservative, running Riggins straight into the line, and he was stopped short.
Looking back, I think that was when the first inklings of doubt crept in. Still, the Jayhawks got the ball back again with a chance to run out the clock. But, again, Rodgers took the conservative approach, running three times then punting, and the punt was blocked.
With the ball at midfield and 1:16 left on the game clock, Penn State hit a long pass to the Jayhawk 3-yard-line, and on second down, quarterback Chuck Burkhart snuck over with just 15 seconds to play for a touchdown.
The Nittany Lions tried a pass for the two-point conversion, but the ball was knocked away, leading to much rejoicing on the High Plains, until the back judge came in waving his arms for a penalty. Kansas had 12 men on the field.
Given a second chance, Penn State ran the ball over the left side, scoring the conversion for a 15-14 victory. Shanklin was named MVP for the game, but that was cold consolation for the heartbroken Jayhawks and their fans.
It has been 51 years, but that loss still stings, just for the sheer emotional swing of those last few seconds. I will say, though, that loss prepared me well for a lifetime as a New Orleans Saints fan.
More to the point, Kansas’ moment passed. While Penn State went on to a second straight undefeated season in 1969, capped by an Orange Bowl win over Missouri, Kansas hit the skids.
Riggins was back for his senior season in 1969, but that great senior class from ’68 was gone, and Kansas went 1-9 a year after winning the Big 8.
Riggins went on to fame and immortality with the Washington Redskins, while Douglass went to the Chicago Bears for a so-so career as a quarterback.
In 1972, he ran for 968 yards, a record for the most rushing yards by a quarterback that stood for 31 years. But the Bears were 13-31-1 during the five seasons he spent as their starting QB, and he bounced around a bit in the latter part of his career, including a stop in New Orleans.
Pepper Rodgers stayed one more season in Lawrence, a 5-6 campaign, then left in 1971 for UCLA and, subsequently, a well-traveled coaching career.
He coached three seasons for the Bruins, then spent six years back at Georgia Tech, where he went 34-31-2. He later coached in the USFL in the mid-1980s and a year in the Canadian Football League, both times at Memphis. His last job in football was a stint as director of football operations for the Washington Redskins from 2001-04.
But in all his years in football, Rodgers would never again have a team like the Kansas squad he coached in 1968. The closest he came was in 1973, going 9-2 at UCLA.
But at the time, the Pac-8, as it was called then, had a rule that only its champion could go to a bowl game, the Rose Bowl. So, the Bruins stayed home for the holidays, and I wouldn’t doubt that factored into his decision to take the job at Georgia Tech.
As Jack Mitchell had done for him at Kansas, so Rodgers left his successor, Terry Donahue, the foundation for some great teams in the ‘70s and ‘80s at UCLA.
Rodgers’ overall record in 13 seasons as a college head coach was 73-65-3 – good, but not great – and he was a .500 coach in the pros, 19-19 in the USFL and 9-9 in his only year in the CFL.
Although Rodgers never quite scaled the heights on the sidelines, he earned a well-justified reputation as a raconteur and a writer.
Rodgers wrote two books, Fourth and Long Gone, a fact-based novel about college football recruiting, and an autobiography, and he was always in demand as an after-dinner speaker.
Some of Rodgers quotes have become legendary, such as this one: “My only friend was my dog, and I told my wife (that) a man should have at least two friends. So she bought me another dog.”
Or his alleged pre-game speech to his UCLA team prior to a game against Stanford: “Men, the rest of your life, the Stanford man is going to have the best job, make the most money, marry the most beautiful women. This is your last chance to knock him on his ass.”
Fans could critically debate Pepper Rodgers’ relative merits as a football coach, but everyone agrees that the man knew football and he was about as well-liked as anyone has ever been. In every picture you ever see of him, he’s smiling like a man who is just enjoying life.
Rodgers is being fondly remembered at every place where he coached., with zany stories and much laughter. He was truly one of a kind, and he and his wit will be sorely missed.
Stan Caldwell is a veteran sportswriter with more than 35 years of experience in the Hattiesburg area.
