Former Wooster Coach Profiled in Movie about Marshall Plane Crash

Jack Lengyel

WOOSTER, Ohio - As Jack Lengyel watched televised accounts of the tragic Southern Airways plane crash that claimed the lives of 75 Marshall University football players, coaches, and administrators, as well as prominent townspeople and civic leaders on the evening Nov. 14, 1970, he could not have known that he would play a pivotal role in the future of the program. Nor could he have imagined that his efforts to rebuild the program - and the community - would be immortalized on the big screen more than 35 years later. But next month, the former College of Wooster head football coach will be profiled when Warner Bros. begins filming a yet-to-be titled movie that stars Hollywood heartthrob Matthew McConaughey in the lead role of Coach Lengyel.

Hours before the crash, Lengyel had led the Scots to a hard-fought 9-6 victory over Oberlin, which raised Wooster's record to 8-0 for the season. Although the Scots would lose to Ashland in the final game of the year, Lengyel's success in turning around the program at Wooster from 1-8 in 1966 to 8-1 in 1970 made him a worthy candidate for the position at Marshall, where the incoming coach would face a rebuilding task of epic proportions.

Indeed Lengyel received serious consideration, but he was initially passed over in favor of an assistant coach from Penn State, who eventually turned it down. A second offer was then made to an assistant from Georgia Tech, who first accepted but then resigned after four days when he realized just how difficult an undertaking it would be. Finally, Lengyel was hired, and the ambitious young coach took over on St. Patrick's Day 1971, hoping that the luck of the Irish would be on his side.

When he arrived, there weren't even enough players to hold an intra-squad scrimmage during spring practice. But before he could think about putting together a team, he had to assemble a coaching staff. All but three of the assistants had perished in the crash.

"It was a very difficult job," says Lengyel. "We had to build the team from the bottom up, using the previous year's freshmen along with four players who were injured and did not make the trip and a handful of walk-ons, ex-servicemen, and basketball players using their fifth year of NCAA eligibility. We also had a soccer player with no prior college football experience who provided the winning field goal in our first victory."

Lengyel also had to be creative when it came to the offensive and defensive formations because he knew his players did not have the necessary talent or the experience, so he turned to future legend, Bobby Bowden, who was West Virginia University's head coach at the time.

"Coach Bowden was very helpful," remembers Lengyel. "He was running the veer option offense at West Virginia, and he was kind enough to help us implement it at Marshall."

Offensively, Lengyel and his staff spread the field to set up the passing game. On defense, they did a lot of stunting and gambling to cover up for a lack of experience. "We did unorthodox things on both sides of the football," says Lengyel. "It was the only way we had a chance to compete."

And compete they did. In the second week of the season, Marshall stunned Xavier 12-10 on the final play of the game and later upset a bowl-bound Bowling Green State University on homecoming. "It was a tremendous challenge," says Lengyel, "but it was also very rewarding."

After leaving Marshall following the 1974 season, Lengyel went on to a distinguished career in athletic administration at the University of Louisville, the University of Missouri, Fresno State University and the U.S. Naval Academy, but the autumn of 1971 and the three seasons that followed will forever define the man who turned tragedy into triumph and laid a foundation for a program that would become the most successful Division IA football program in the nation during the 1990s.

"Football was very important to me," says Lengyel. "I received a scholarship to play at Akron University, and later coached there before moving on to Barberton High School, Heidelberg College, Cornell University, and my first head coaching appointment at The College of Wooster. The position at Marshall was an opportunity to give back to football what it had given to me - a chance to be a college coach and work with young people. "