By Bill Koch
Not even the most optimistic UC fan could have peered into the distant future in 1989 when Tim Murphy took over the football team and seen an undefeated Top 10 Bearcat team knocking on the door of a national championship playoff and taking Georgia to the final seconds in 2020 before losing in the Peach Bowl.
In 1989, that would have been the stuff of science fiction.
Murphy was the head coach at Division I-AA Maine when he was hired by athletic director Rick Taylor to restore respectability to a UC program that had been decimated by six straight losing seasons and NCAA probation under Dave Currey. Forget an undefeated season or a New Year’s Day bowl game. How about a winning season?
The second-youngest Division I-A coach in the country at age 32, Murphy started his job at UC with his eyes wide open. Taylor hadn’t pulled any punches when he courted him for the job. Over the years, Murphy has frequently been asked if the program was in worse shape than he thought it was when he took the job.
“When people ask me that I tell them that a month after we got the job, we lost 19 scholarships due to probation by the NCAA for infractions committed by the previous staff,” Murphy said. “I tell them that not long after we got there our stadium was condemned and we didn’t even have a practice field. I tell them that the first offensive line coach I hired was killed shortly thereafter in a car accident. I tell them that we were already about nine below the limit for scholarships without the NCAA infractions because of attrition. They say, ‘No way, you’re making this up.’ I tell them, ‘You can’t make that up.'”
Murphy had worked under Taylor as the offensive line coach at Boston University when Taylor was the head coach there. He was young, driven and energetic. And he was committed to playing by the rules.
“We needed somebody who was clean,” Taylor said. “They were doing stuff at UC that you wouldn’t believe.”
Murphy’s first team had only 60 scholarship players, 35 below the NCAA limit. He first game as the Bearcats’ head coach – on Sept. 2, 1989 at Nippert Stadium - was a Saturday night game against Rutgers. At the time, I worked for The Cincinnati Post, which had no Sunday paper. In search of a different angle for a story that would appear on Monday afternoon, I asked Murphy if I could chronicle his day from the time he left his Miami Township home in the morning until the game was over late that night. I knew there was a good chance he’d say no. To my surprise, he asked me if I liked blueberry pancakes.
He lived with his wife, Martha, in a house that overlooked Deer Run Country Club. Steve Green, UC’s new associate athletic director, was staying with them until he could find a place of his own. I showed up for breakfast at about 10 a.m. By the time I arrived, Murphy had already run three miles.
At 10:45, he decided to head to the stadium, not at all happy that he still had almost nine hours to kill before kickoff. Martha had his game clothes pressed and waiting on a hanger along with an apple for an afternoon sack. As he began to head out the door with his game clothes in hand, Martha had to remind him not to forget his apple. He grabbed the apple and started out the door again. This time Martha reminded him that he forgot to kiss her goodbye.
As game time approached, he gathered his players in the locker room and gave them his first pre-game speech as a Division I-A coach.
“Fellows,” he said, “I want you to remember why we’re here, why we’ve been busting our butts since last January. A lot of those other guys couldn’t handle it, and that’s why they’re history. That’s why they’re out of the program. We want to bring some pride back to wearing red and black.”
The Bearcats then went out and tied Rutgers, 17-17, on a 34-yard touchdown run by Joe Abrams with 2:43 to go. Perhaps never was a tie more celebrated.
“No one in this room should be satisfied,” Murphy said in the locker room after the game, “because we should have and could have won.”
It was a great start to the Murphy coaching era at UC. As it turned out, it was probably too great.
“It probably gave us a very false sense of security,” Murphy said, “especially with non-existent depth.”
The following week the Bearcats lost, 21-14, to East Carolina. After they beat rival Miami (Ohio), 30-14, in game three, they lost their last eight games to finish 1-9-1. The following season, with Nippert Stadium under construction to shore up its foundation, they played only three home games – all at Riverfront Stadium. The rest were on the road. They lost 63-10 at Iowa, 70-21 at Florida State, and 45-7 at Alabama.
Then came the lowest point of Murphy’s five years at UC, the infamous 81-0 loss at No. 5 Penn State in the 1991 season opener. Thirty years later, Murphy remembers it well. In fact, he says, he uses it in recruiting at Harvard.
“I tell recruits, ‘Here’s a little bit about my history and why I came to Harvard.’ and we talk about the Penn State game, starting (almost) all freshmen," Murphy said. "It’s brutal, but you live through it. I also reflect on the next time we played Penn State and it went down to the last couple of plays in the game (UC lost 24-20 at Nippert Stadium the following season). At the end of the day, it’s history. It’s real, it happened. It’s how you handle those situations that are incredibly challenging.”
After the 81-0 loss, Murphy was asked in his post-game press conference if he faulted Penn State coach Joe Paterno for running up the score. Murphy said that Paterno had done all he could to keep the game from getting so far out of hand. It had been up to his players to put up some resistance and they weren’t capable of doing it.
“I wasn’t going to throw him under the bus for how bad we were,” Murphy said.
As the losses piled up, Murphy had no choice but to put his head down and work to improve a dreadful situation. He was fortunate to have hired a staff of assistant coaches who were every bit as determined as he was to turn things around. One of those assistants was current Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, who was the Bearcats' tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator.
“I sold the opportunity, that there’s no place to go but up,” Murphy said. “We sold the community of Cincinnati. We told recruits that Cincinnati is a quality football area and we’re going to win. You get a chance to make an impact, to come in and play early.”
Things began to turn for the better during his third season. Just four weeks after the humbling loss at Penn State the Bearcats went to Louisville and beat the Cardinals 30-7. They still had a long way to go, but finally Murphy could see that his work was beginning to pay off.
The Bearcats went 4-7 in 1981, slipped back to 3-8 in 1992 and then broke through with an 8-3 season in 1993, Murphy’s last at UC. They finished that season with a five-game winning streak.
To Murphy's surprise, Harvard and Duke pursued him for their head coaching jobs. Harvard was the first to make an offer. After he interviewed at Duke, officials there suggested that he begin to look for a place to live in Durham, N.C. At that point, the athletic director at Harvard told him he needed an answer immediately. He chose Harvard and has been there ever since, posting a 178-81 record in 26 seasons with nine Ivy League titles.
Who knows if Murphy, had he stayed for the long haul, would have led UC to the heights they reached years later under Brian Kelly and Luke Fickell? But there's no denying that he took a broken program and put it back together during a very difficult time for football at UC.
“The hardest thing was that no matter how bad I thought things were they got worse,” Murphy said. “But as I look at the whole experience, I would not trade it for anything. I say this with complete conviction: Midwest people are the nicest people on the planet. We still get Christmas cards from our neighbors, from my dentist and my doctor.
“It was a great experience. It made the Harvard job a lot easier. You do come out of that experience having not only survived, but managing to bring the ship in with a bit of confidence and a bit of wisdom.”
Not even the most optimistic UC fan could have peered into the distant future in 1989 when Tim Murphy took over the football team and seen an undefeated Top 10 Bearcat team knocking on the door of a national championship playoff and taking Georgia to the final seconds in 2020 before losing in the Peach Bowl.
In 1989, that would have been the stuff of science fiction.
Murphy was the head coach at Division I-AA Maine when he was hired by athletic director Rick Taylor to restore respectability to a UC program that had been decimated by six straight losing seasons and NCAA probation under Dave Currey. Forget an undefeated season or a New Year’s Day bowl game. How about a winning season?
The second-youngest Division I-A coach in the country at age 32, Murphy started his job at UC with his eyes wide open. Taylor hadn’t pulled any punches when he courted him for the job. Over the years, Murphy has frequently been asked if the program was in worse shape than he thought it was when he took the job.
“When people ask me that I tell them that a month after we got the job, we lost 19 scholarships due to probation by the NCAA for infractions committed by the previous staff,” Murphy said. “I tell them that not long after we got there our stadium was condemned and we didn’t even have a practice field. I tell them that the first offensive line coach I hired was killed shortly thereafter in a car accident. I tell them that we were already about nine below the limit for scholarships without the NCAA infractions because of attrition. They say, ‘No way, you’re making this up.’ I tell them, ‘You can’t make that up.'”
Murphy had worked under Taylor as the offensive line coach at Boston University when Taylor was the head coach there. He was young, driven and energetic. And he was committed to playing by the rules.
“We needed somebody who was clean,” Taylor said. “They were doing stuff at UC that you wouldn’t believe.”
Murphy’s first team had only 60 scholarship players, 35 below the NCAA limit. He first game as the Bearcats’ head coach – on Sept. 2, 1989 at Nippert Stadium - was a Saturday night game against Rutgers. At the time, I worked for The Cincinnati Post, which had no Sunday paper. In search of a different angle for a story that would appear on Monday afternoon, I asked Murphy if I could chronicle his day from the time he left his Miami Township home in the morning until the game was over late that night. I knew there was a good chance he’d say no. To my surprise, he asked me if I liked blueberry pancakes.
He lived with his wife, Martha, in a house that overlooked Deer Run Country Club. Steve Green, UC’s new associate athletic director, was staying with them until he could find a place of his own. I showed up for breakfast at about 10 a.m. By the time I arrived, Murphy had already run three miles.
At 10:45, he decided to head to the stadium, not at all happy that he still had almost nine hours to kill before kickoff. Martha had his game clothes pressed and waiting on a hanger along with an apple for an afternoon sack. As he began to head out the door with his game clothes in hand, Martha had to remind him not to forget his apple. He grabbed the apple and started out the door again. This time Martha reminded him that he forgot to kiss her goodbye.
As game time approached, he gathered his players in the locker room and gave them his first pre-game speech as a Division I-A coach.
“Fellows,” he said, “I want you to remember why we’re here, why we’ve been busting our butts since last January. A lot of those other guys couldn’t handle it, and that’s why they’re history. That’s why they’re out of the program. We want to bring some pride back to wearing red and black.”
The Bearcats then went out and tied Rutgers, 17-17, on a 34-yard touchdown run by Joe Abrams with 2:43 to go. Perhaps never was a tie more celebrated.
“No one in this room should be satisfied,” Murphy said in the locker room after the game, “because we should have and could have won.”
It was a great start to the Murphy coaching era at UC. As it turned out, it was probably too great.
“It probably gave us a very false sense of security,” Murphy said, “especially with non-existent depth.”
The following week the Bearcats lost, 21-14, to East Carolina. After they beat rival Miami (Ohio), 30-14, in game three, they lost their last eight games to finish 1-9-1. The following season, with Nippert Stadium under construction to shore up its foundation, they played only three home games – all at Riverfront Stadium. The rest were on the road. They lost 63-10 at Iowa, 70-21 at Florida State, and 45-7 at Alabama.
Then came the lowest point of Murphy’s five years at UC, the infamous 81-0 loss at No. 5 Penn State in the 1991 season opener. Thirty years later, Murphy remembers it well. In fact, he says, he uses it in recruiting at Harvard.
“I tell recruits, ‘Here’s a little bit about my history and why I came to Harvard.’ and we talk about the Penn State game, starting (almost) all freshmen," Murphy said. "It’s brutal, but you live through it. I also reflect on the next time we played Penn State and it went down to the last couple of plays in the game (UC lost 24-20 at Nippert Stadium the following season). At the end of the day, it’s history. It’s real, it happened. It’s how you handle those situations that are incredibly challenging.”
After the 81-0 loss, Murphy was asked in his post-game press conference if he faulted Penn State coach Joe Paterno for running up the score. Murphy said that Paterno had done all he could to keep the game from getting so far out of hand. It had been up to his players to put up some resistance and they weren’t capable of doing it.
“I wasn’t going to throw him under the bus for how bad we were,” Murphy said.
As the losses piled up, Murphy had no choice but to put his head down and work to improve a dreadful situation. He was fortunate to have hired a staff of assistant coaches who were every bit as determined as he was to turn things around. One of those assistants was current Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, who was the Bearcats' tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator.
“I sold the opportunity, that there’s no place to go but up,” Murphy said. “We sold the community of Cincinnati. We told recruits that Cincinnati is a quality football area and we’re going to win. You get a chance to make an impact, to come in and play early.”
Things began to turn for the better during his third season. Just four weeks after the humbling loss at Penn State the Bearcats went to Louisville and beat the Cardinals 30-7. They still had a long way to go, but finally Murphy could see that his work was beginning to pay off.
The Bearcats went 4-7 in 1981, slipped back to 3-8 in 1992 and then broke through with an 8-3 season in 1993, Murphy’s last at UC. They finished that season with a five-game winning streak.
To Murphy's surprise, Harvard and Duke pursued him for their head coaching jobs. Harvard was the first to make an offer. After he interviewed at Duke, officials there suggested that he begin to look for a place to live in Durham, N.C. At that point, the athletic director at Harvard told him he needed an answer immediately. He chose Harvard and has been there ever since, posting a 178-81 record in 26 seasons with nine Ivy League titles.
Who knows if Murphy, had he stayed for the long haul, would have led UC to the heights they reached years later under Brian Kelly and Luke Fickell? But there's no denying that he took a broken program and put it back together during a very difficult time for football at UC.
“The hardest thing was that no matter how bad I thought things were they got worse,” Murphy said. “But as I look at the whole experience, I would not trade it for anything. I say this with complete conviction: Midwest people are the nicest people on the planet. We still get Christmas cards from our neighbors, from my dentist and my doctor.
“It was a great experience. It made the Harvard job a lot easier. You do come out of that experience having not only survived, but managing to bring the ship in with a bit of confidence and a bit of wisdom.”
stabintie_ku Jennifer Williams https://wakelet.com/wake/N53sLI18f3C8ENeeyR380
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