War Chat: FSU's 1980 win over No. 3 Pitt one of biggest in school history
Until his retiring day, Bobby Bowden said the 1980 Pitt team was the best he ever faced as a head coach.
That year, the Panthers' roster included four future NFL Hall of Famers, 30 draft picks, seven first-round picks, the Outland Trophy winner, the Maxwell Award winner, the Lombardi Award winner, the Heisman Trophy runner-up and a quarterback that just so happened to retire from the NFL as the all-time leading passer in league history.
But on that memorable October night inside Doak Campbell Stadium, Dan Marino and the Panthers got beat, 36-22, by Bobby Bowden's upstart Seminoles.
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Thanks to an inspired defensive effort that included seven forced turnovers, a special-teams performance that might not ever be matched, timely passes from Rick Stockstill and over 100 rushing yards from Sam Platt, that FSU squad proved to the rest of the country that there was a real, legitimate football power growing in the state of Florida.
One that would win more games than any other team in the country over the next 40 years.
"Now, you had just beaten Nebraska, the No. 3 team in the nation (the week before)," said Bobby Butler, who was a senior cornerback on that 1980 team and wound up being Bowden's first first-round pick at Florida State. "And then the next No. 3 team in the nation was coming to Tallahassee. We were just on fire that night. It wasn't just the football team. It was the fans, the student body.
"It was live in Tallahassee."
Multiple times in the first half that night, a then-sophomore Marino had to go to the referee to ask him to quiet the crowd (there was a rule in college football back then that if the home fans were too loud for the quarterback to communicate to his linemen, a 15-yard penalty could be assessed).
Despite repeated stoppages, the crowd never really quieted down. And the supremely talented Panthers got rattled.
"That's the loudest I ever heard it," said Butler, who joined Warchant for this week's War Chat feature. "It was crazy."
So was the game.
The Panthers boasted the best defensive player in the nation that season in defensive end Hugh Green, who wound up finishing second in the Heisman voting to South Carolina's George Rogers (and ahead of Georgia freshman phenom Herschel Walker).
And Green made his presence felt early with a 12-yard sack of Stockstill on the game's first play.
The Seminoles were forced to punt (more on that in a moment), and Marino -- behind an offensive line that included future Pro Football Hall of Famers Jimbo Covert and Russ Grimm as well as Outland Trophy winner Mark May -- then led the Panthers right down the field for a score and a quick 7-0 lead.
That was the only lead the Panthers would enjoy as the Seminoles scored the final 23 points of the first half. Stockstill threw touchdown passes to Hardis Johnson and Sam Childers, and All-America kicker Bill Capece connected on three field goals, including a 50-yarder on the final play of the half to give the Seminoles a 23-7 lead.
Capece wound up kicking a school-record five field goals that night. And yet he might not have been the best FSU specialist in the game.
All-America punter Rohn Stark averaged 48.1 yards on seven punts against the Panthers. He had a 60-yarder, a 67-yarder and a 54-yarder as his left leg consistently flipped field position. In fact, if you take away a 25-yard punt in the fourth quarter when he pinned the Panthers at their own 12, Stark averaged right at 52 yards per punt.
Pitt's punter, on the other hand, averaged 36.8.
The Panthers cut the FSU lead to 29-22 late in the third quarter, but Stockstill put the Seminoles right back up by two scores with a 13-yard TD strike to Kurt Unglaub with 10:24 remaining.
The Seminoles' vaunted defense then ended any hopes of a miracle comeback with back-to-back interceptions in the fourth quarter. The first one came from safety Monk Bonasorte on a tipped pass, and the second was a diving interception by Butler with 3:10 remaining.
Marino was 19 of 35 on the night for exactly 300 yards, but he also threw three picks. And the Pitt running game, with that Hall of Fame offensive line, managed just 86 yards.
The 36 points the Seminoles scored against that Pitt defense, which featured future Hall of Famer Ricky Jackson opposite of the superstar Green, was the most the Panthers allowed all season.
Pitt would finish the season 11-1, and nine of the Panthers' opponents were held to less than 10 points. If not for the loss in Doak Campbell, Marino and company would have likely played Georgia for the national championship. To this day, that Panthers squad still is considered one of the most talented teams in the history of the sport.
But the 1980 Florida State Seminoles didn't back down.
"We didn't know those guys like we know them today," Butler said. "And it was Pittsburgh. We didn't play them much. ... It wasn't a team we were really familiar with. (In hindsight), it's probably the best team roster-wise of all time, but we didn't know that at the time.
"All we knew was Marino was the stud quarterback. Whoop-dee-doo."
Those back-to-back victories in 1980, over traditional powers Nebraska and Pitt, laid the groundwork of what was to come for the Florida State program.
The Seminoles had gone 11-0 during the 1979 regular season, but they only played two ranked teams all year. And neither was ranked higher than 19th. That's why the Seminoles were still only No. 5 in the nation when they earned an Orange Bowl berth against Oklahoma. And when the Sooners beat Florida State 24-7 that night, many college football fans likely thought it proved the Seminoles weren't ready for prime time.
The 1980 team (which was perhaps two points away from a national title that season) proved quite emphatically that wasn't the case. And five years later, they signed a cornerback from Fort Myers who just happened to be nicknamed "Prime Time."
"The foundation had been poured," Butler said. "So it was up to them to go out and build on that. And it made me so proud.
"It's just amazing. And what I have to say is that Coach Bowden, without him none of this is possible. None of it is possible without him. You think about the kind of athletes he started to recruit, with Deion and LeRoy Bulter and Odell [Haggins]. ... He started to get the guys everybody else was getting."
But that's only because his first recruiting class, which included the likes of Bulter, Ron Simmons, Bonasorte and Keith Jones, helped turn the program completely around. To the point that it was beating the mighty Pitt Panthers by two touchdowns on a Saturday night that will always live in FSU lore.
"We just had guys that wanted to play," Butler said, "that bought into the system, that played well together and that loved each other."
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Talk about this story with other Florida State football fans in the Tribal Council