The story of Joe Moore

The man considered the greatest offensive line coach ever in college football is a former Penn State player virtually unknown to Nittany Lion fans who gained fame as the guru for Penn State’s most historic adversary, Pitt.

Joe Moore is so revered that a new award saluting the nation’s best collegiate offensive line has been named for him and was given for the first time at the end of this past season, with eventual national champion Alabama beating out Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan State, Notre Dame and Stanford.

Finally, an award for those offensive guards, tackles and centers who work together to open the holes for the running backs and prevent their quarterback from being sacked and rarely are noticed themselves until they screw up, as when they miss a block or get caught holding.

Moore spent eight years coaching the offensive lines at Pitt, two years at Temple and another nine years at Notre Dame from 1980-96. He groomed 52 of his players for the NFL, including guard Russ Grimm of Pitt, the only member of the renowned Washington Redskins Super Bowl offensive lines of the 1980s nicknamed “The Hogs” to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“When God decided to create a football coach he created Joe Moore, then broke the mold,” declares another of Moore’s Pitt pupils, tackle Jimbo Covert, in a testimonial on the website of the organization that is sponsoring the new award, the Joe Moore Foundation for Teamwork. “He had a unique way of pushing you beyond even your own expectations and then took great pride in seeing you succeed.” When Covert was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2001, he publicly credited Moore, saying, “I owe everything to [him].”

What may surprise many readers just learning about this admired offensive line sage is that Joe Moore never played on the offensive line in his scholastic or collegiate career. Furthermore, how in Joe Paterno’s name did he wind up deep in the heinous Panther lair, of all places?

This is where I get personal, because I knew Joe Moore when we were both at Penn State in the late 1950s and he was a friend. I lost track of him for years, even while he was coaching at Pitt, and then around 1999 or 2000 I invited him to my tailgate at Beaver Stadium, and he accepted. But he never made it, as you will read later. I have often thought of that missed opportunity to renew our friendship and to hear that familiar gravelly voice tell me what happened since those youthful years at Penn State, with our destinies ahead of us.

What I had forgotten was that when I was in the ninth grade in Indiana High School in 1951, 50 miles from Pittsburgh, Moore was a highly recruited running back at Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School. Of the dozens of scholarship offers he received, he chose the University of Tennessee. But the native of the gritty steel mill atmosphere of Pittsburgh could not adjust to the laid-back, ole-boy nature of the South. After one year he transferred to Penn State, primarily to play football.

Academics and studying were not then part of Moore’s lifestyle, and within a year he joined the Army. The military woke him, and made him realize he not only wanted to play football but eventually be a teacher and a coach. Two years later Moore was back at Penn State, and that’s where he met the man who would become his best friend in life, Dan Radakovich.

Radakovich was another kid from the Pittsburgh area, a little younger with similar roots and temperament and was already a starting linebacker. They roomed together during preseason practice in 1956 when the team stayed at the now-defunct Phi Delta Theta fraternity house, a short stroll from Beaver Field.

A team photo in the 1957 La Vie yearbook shows Moore in the back row with the sophomores, wearing jersey No. 43, second man from the left. Standing to the right of Moore in the photo are two sophomores who I knew well because they had lived near me in McKee Hall during our freshman year. Dick Dill is next to Joe and then Steve Garban.

Yes, the same Steve Garban who would go on to become Penn State’s chief financial officer and subsequently the president of the board of trustees when coach Joe Paterno was fired 55 years later. Radakovich, who would also achieve fame as the father of Linebacker U after coaching Penn State linebackers from 1957 through ’69, is in the middle of the front row of the photo, wearing jersey No. 51.

“We were a lot alike,” Radakovich noted in his 2013 autobiography that I helped him write, “Bad Rad: Football Nomad.” “Joe was a few years older than me but a little crazy like me, and had once been temporarily suspended from the team for punching a teammate. Joe was a reserve halfback in ’56, and in our third game of the season against Holy Cross, he hurt his back so severely he could no longer play football.”

Moore turned to baseball in the spring of 1958 to use up his athletic eligibility in his junior year. He was the starting center fielder, batting sixth (with an average of about .210) and helped the Lions make it to the NCAA playoffs in Omaha before losing and finishing with a 14-5 record. Moore is also in the 1959 La Vie baseball team photo, top row, sixth player from the right. There is just one man separating him from one of Penn State’s all-time great players and my classmate, pitcher-first baseman Cal Emery, the only Nittany Lion to be named MVP of the College World Series – in 1957 when that team was the runner-up to national champion California.

There’s also a photo of Joe in his baseball uniform on page 7 of the May 28, 1958, edition of The Daily Collegian after Penn State had lost to Lafayette, 8-7, the previous Saturday. The caption under the photo reads. “…sparkles in defense” with this notation in the story written by an unnamed reporter: “Moore, incidentally, was one of the Lion defensive standouts. He made several run-saving catches, including a bases loaded job in the inning ala-Duke Snider” of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I was surprised to find other references to Joe in the newspaper’s stories about intramural football and basketball games. Moore played for his fraternity, Phi Sigma Kappa, and in a story on Nov. 1, 1958, about his football team’s 13-12 loss to Tau Kappa Epsilon, Joe was the star. Late in the first half, “Moore received a TKE punt and threw 65 yards to Parker Eldridge for the touchdown.” Then with two minutes left, “Moore threw a touchdown pass to Joe Sullivan to give Phi Sig a 12-6 lead,” but TKE came back, scored a touchdown and kicked the extra point to win the game.

OK, so it wasn’t a Beaver Field game against Pitt or Syracuse, but it was typical of the real Joe Moore on the gridiron when he was healthy.

In the fall of 1958, head coach Rip Engle asked Moore to help coach the freshman team and the varsity running backs. In that era, freshmen were ineligible and the team played two to four games a year against the frosh teams of such Eastern rivals as Pitt, Syracuse and West Virginia. Assistant Earl Bruce was the freshman coach, and in 1957 and ’58 he also had Radakovich, then a graduate assistant, helping with the defense while also specifically coaching the linebackers.

At the time, I was a sportswriter for The Daily Collegian and had become a casual friend of both Radakovich and Moore. They were both great sources about the football team, on and off the record. And while researching for this BWI column on Moore, I stumbled on a column I wrote as sports editor for the Sept. 12, 1958, edition of the Collegian with the headline: “Ex-Lions Coach Frosh Gridders.” Upon seeing the headline for the first time in decades, it all came back to me, and especially the friendliness of my relationship with Joe and Rad.

“A couple of ex-Penn State football stalwarts, Dan Radakovich and Joe Moore, are helping freshman coach Earl Bruce with the Lion yearlings this fall,” I wrote, and then went on to quote Radakovich about the outlook for the 1958 varsity.

After graduating in May 1959, I went off to the Navy and then a career in journalism. I have no memory of what happened to Joe over many of the years. I remember seeing Rad a few times in Pittsburgh in the 1960s but then did not reconnect with him until about a dozen years ago. It was not until helping Rad write his autobiography that I learned how close he and Joe had been since our undergraduate days. Joe is mentioned frequently in Rad’s book, and Rad’s incisive and often witty tales of their blood-brothers relationship are crucial to understanding the impulsive personalities and career successes of both men.

You can trace Joe’s notable career through their kinship, starting at Richfield Springs High School in Cooperstown, N.Y., in the fall of 1959 and ending in a surprising high-profile firing at Notre Dame in December 1996 and subsequently a winning lawsuit for age discrimination in 1998.

In two years, Moore turned a losing program at Richfield into a state champion. He moved on to Towanda (Pa.) High School for two years, then to Erie McDowell for nine years. McDowell quickly became a major challenger in the rugged WPIAL Class AA division, then the highest classification, with a 65-15-1 record during his tenure, including 41-4 in his last four years. In 1972 Moore took over at Upper St. Clair in suburban Pittsburgh and transformed the school into a powerhouse, going undefeated in his last 26 games while winning back-to-back WPIAL Class AA championships in 1974-75. In his 17 years as a scholastic coach, Moore lost just 32 games, won 119 and tied four.

An incident while coaching at McDowell in 1965 tells you all you need to know about Joe’s personality and coaching style. As described in the New Castle News, in a 16-13 loss to Erie East in mid-October, “Moore became infuriated when East scored its winning touchdown on a play in which he felt a penalty should have been called.” Moore proceeded to belt the referee, sending him to the hospital for X-rays on his jaw.

“I thought you were a tough guy and he didn’t even fall to the ground,” Moore’s wife, Fran, told him, as Radakovich recalled with laugh.

A few days later, the PIAA suspended Moore for the rest of the season.

Herein are another two examples of the small world we live in. At McDowell, Moore gave a young Slippery Rock player his first assistant coaching job. A few years later, Denny Douds, a childhood friend of mine from Indiana, became the head coach at East Stroudsburg and the mentor of Penn State’s head coach, James Franklin. Then there’s Kirk Ferentz, the head coach at Iowa since 1999. Ferentz was a senior linebacker for Moore in his first season at Upper St. Clair. Eight years later, Moore brought Ferentz to Pitt as a graduate assistant to help him coach the offensive line, and the next year, with recommendations from Moore and Radakovich, Ferentz became the offensive line coach at Iowa.

“If Joe came into your life, he really touched it,” Ferentz told the Chicago Tribune 12 years ago. “He was the best man I ever met.”

What is somewhat surprising is that Moore was not considered an offensive line specialist when Pitt’s Jackie Sherrill hired him in 1977. His expertise was in coaching running backs, and that’s what Sherrill hired him to do. However, in the winter of 1980 Pitt was looking for an offensive line coach, and Moore told his friend Radakovich. By then, Rad was coaching the Los Angeles Rams’ offensive line after previously serving in the same capacity on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 1974 Super Bowl championship team.

“They had three offensive line coaches in three years, and one had only lasted a couple of weeks of spring practice,” Radakovich wrote in his book. “I said to Joe, ‘Why don’t you take the offensive line job yourself. You’re always moaning about them, anyway. I’ll help you get started.’… Joe told [Sherrill] he wanted the job, got it, and I flew in from California a couple of weeks before spring practice started at Pitt [to help him].”

Joe was an instant success, as his protégés Grimm and Covert have said. In 1984, Sports Illustrated touted Moore as “the best line coach in college football.”

However, by then Pitt had drifted into mediocrity. Sherrill had given Moore additional responsibilities as offensive coordinator, but the head coach left for Texas A&M following the 1981 season. The next year, Sherrill’s successor, Foge Fazio, the former assistant head coach and defensive coordinator, added assistant head coach to Moore’s duties.

After reaching the postseason in 1982 and ’83, Fazio’s Panthers fell to 3-7 in ’84, and Moore lost his two extra titles. One year later, after guiding the team to a 5-5-1 finish, all the coaches lost their jobs. Moore moved on to Temple, where he coached in 1986 and ’87. Then in February 1988, Lou Holtz hired him to coach the Notre Dame tight ends and offensive tackles, and that team gave Moore his only national championship ring. The next season, he was in charge of the entire offensive line again, and after the 1993 season he was awarded an honorary monogram from the Notre Dame National Monogram Club.

Aaron Taylor and Andy Heck were among the All-Americans and NFL players Moore produced at Notre Dame, and Taylor, the 1993 Lombardi Award winner and now a CBS analyst, is credited with creating the Joe Moore Award after a conversation with Ferentz a few years ago. He is the chairman of the award voting committee.

“Coach Moore was a man of principle, and the principles he embodied helped us become the best versions of ourselves,” Taylor said in the news release announcing the award. “His focus on toughness, teamwork and hard work helped us become better football players and made us better men. The Joe Moore Award is an appropriate symbol of that legacy.”

In that same news release, Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin’s former football coach and current athletic director, also had high praise for Moore. Alvarez was Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator and linebackers coach during Moore’s first two seasons with the Irish.

“Joe was the best teacher of offensive linemen who I’ve ever been around, and no one got more out of his players than Joe did,” Alvarez said. “It is only right that this award honors Joe’s name and his legacy.”

But it was at Notre Dame where Joe’s illustrious career would end at age 64. After the 1996 season, Holtz’s successor, Bob Davie, shockingly fired the veteran assistant coach, triggering an age-discrimination lawsuit and highly publicized trial. It was a classic example of betrayal and disloyalty. Moore had helped the much younger Davie get an assistant’s job at Pitt during Sherrill’s tenure, and then recommended Davie for the defensive coordinator position at Notre Dame in ’93.

The lawsuit went to trial and Moore won, with the jury awarding him a cash settlement. It’s all chronicled in a well-respected 2001 book entitled “Personal Foul: Coach Joe Moore vs. The University of Notre Dame.”

I remembered seeing Joe on the Irish sideline when they played Penn State in the early 1990s. I thought about trying to say hello, but I was just a fan then, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed if he didn’t remember me.

Sometime after the lawsuit, Dave Putman, a reporter for my hometown newspaper, the Indiana Evening Gazette, came to my Beaver Stadium tailgate near the soccer field. He took a photo of all the Indiana natives who were there (which was later published in the Gazette) and then told me he was Joe Moore’s cousin. I didn’t know that. He had told Joe about me and Joe wanted to come to one of my tailgates in the near future. I was quite enthused, and from that moment on I looked forward to renewing my friendship with him.

What I didn’t know was that Joe was suffering from lung cancer. He never made it to my tailgate, passing away on July 3, 2003, at his home in suburban Pittsburgh.

Joe’s obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette included the perfect physical description of him. It was an excerpt from a 1983 profile in the Pittsburgh Press by Tom Wheatley: “At 51, Joe Moore is a man among men in a man’s game. He has a leathery face, leathery ears and even leathery-looking hair. Above all, there is that matchless leathery voice.”

Before the creation of this new national award for offensive lines, Joe was being honored annually by some of his former Pitt players. Grimm and Covert are the leaders of a group that operates the two-day Joe Moore O-Line Camp for high school players in early June at West Allegheny High School in suburban Pittsburgh. The camp just completed its fifth year. “Nobody [who coaches] gets paid to come to this camp,” Grimm told a reporter from a Pitt-oriented website during the 2013 camp. Added Covert, “Guys come in from everywhere. Every year, we get about 25 to 30 guys. [Coaching at the camp] is just a good way to pay back for all the things [Moore] did for us.”

From now on, all of college football will know about the coaching greatness of Joe Moore.

You missed a great tailgate, Joe, but you’ll be happy to know Bad Rad and I also have become very good friends. Were you really as crazy as he is? Quit laughing, Joe.