MORGANTOWN — The news of Jim Carlen’s death a couple of days ago at age 76 came across in sort of a low-key, laid-back manner, just as the news this year that he had failed to gain admittance into the College Football Hall of Fame even though he was on the ballot.

That was the way it always was with the one-time West Virginia University coach, a coach whose biggest victory at the school was probably every bit as big as Bill Stewart’s upset of Oklahoma, not that he gets much credit for that anymore, either.

Carlen was out of the Bobby Dodd School of Coaching at Georgia Tech, which was a different way of coaching. In an era when Bear Bryant was driving, pushing, punishing his players and making a name for himself, Dodd was coaching at a low key at Georgia Tech, a southern gentleman who played tennis and spent most practices talking on the sideline with his media.

I know. I was there in Atlanta sitting there on the sideline with him during the three years after Carlen left Tech and came to WVU.

Carlen had played for Dodd, a linebacker and punter, picked up Dodd’s belief in the punishing ground game that was in vogue at the time, and he had coached for Dodd as defensive coordinator before coming to WVU to replace Gene Corum.

It was an interesting time in the history of football, more interesting in the history of America, for this was the 1960s, and there was racial unrest that was erupting into violence throughout the South and in such northern cities as Newark and Detroit.

It was the era when Martin Luther King was at his height and the era when he would be gunned down by an assassin in Memphis, Tenn., his funeral procession going right past the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building where I was working.

It wasn’t a part of history that I was terribly happy to have witnessed, so crazed was the hatred in America. It was during this period, at the first Atlanta Jazz Festival was held at old Atlanta Stadium, I attended with Bill Lucas. He was one of the few black executives in baseball, who was serving as farm director of the Atlanta Braves, the team that employed his more famous brother-in-law, Henry Aaron. We sat just a couple of rows in front of Stokeley Carmichael of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and his lieutenants.

When Carlen came to West Virginia, the school had just integrated four years earlier, while Georgia Tech had not yet integrated its program.

While the football program took the integration well, the area was not really ready for it and simple things such as just getting a haircut proved to be a problem for the new players in Morgantown. Carlen knew and understood this, and while he wasn’t a players’ coach like Stewart or even Dana Holgorsen, he felt for them and understood their plight and went to the school administration and pushed for more minorities in school and on campus and even in society to help ease things for those who were here.

Carlen had other changes in mind, too, football changes. He knew little about the passing game when he came to WVU but felt the day was coming, especially with the speed and athleticism that was coming into the game via integration, when the passing game would be a necessary element.

So it was he went out to find someone to put in a passing game. He’d known of Bobby Bowden from his days in Atlanta; knew he was a young, ambitious, smart coach who was inventive. So he offered him the job of running the offense.

Being from Alabama and joining Carlen was a cause of concern for the WVU black players, as then-WVU running back Garrett Ford told the Charleston Daily Mail.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” said Ford, one of just a handful of black players on the roster. “Many of us had never been to the South, and the things we knew about the South were what we heard on the news. Then he brings in this offensive coordinator, a guy in his 20s, from Birmingham, Ala., which had a terrible reputation for racial segregation down there.

“Now, that guy was Bobby Bowden, but we just didn’t know. These guys had never coached black kids before. But it was never really a problem. I can never remember him saying, ‘I’m playing him because he’s black,’ or, ‘I’m not playing him because he’s black.’ He just did what he felt was right.”

Carlen and Bowden made a great combination, opposites in many ways who were able to feed off one another.

The rebuilding job at WVU wasn’t an easy one. There wasn’t much in the way of interstate highways and the roads were long and winding, the sell tough and the in-state prospects few ... but Carlen was a helluva salesman, and he brought in a really talented group of players as his record improved year-by-year.

In 1968, as the country burned amidst racial riots and as it mourned following the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Carlen’s football team reached respectability and moved into 1969 with really high aspirations.

“We had a ton of good players in 1969, players my assistants had worked hard to get over the last four years,” Carlen admitted years later. “We also had a bunch of good boys from great homes who didn’t care who got the credit.”

One was quarterback Mike Sherwood, who was molded into the passing game Bowden envisioned so much that in 1968 he passed for 407 yards against Pitt and broke the school’s single-season passing record.

The next spring, though, the conservative Carlen switched to a veer offense, which cut back on the passing dramatically while fitting his own personality and the team’s personnel better.

The Mountaineers roared through the first four games of the 1969 season before coming across Penn State with a pair of future All-Pro players in defensive tackle Mike Reid and running back Franco Harris of Pittsburgh Steelers fame.

West Virginia had risen to No. 17 in the nation but lost 20-0 in that game, falling out of the rankings.

“Of all the games I’ve coached in my career, the Penn State game in 1969 is one I wish I could have had over,” Carlen lamented. “I would have done some things differently in that game.”

That would be WVU’s only loss as it went into the Peach Bowl, not exactly the Orange Bowl it would have qualified for had it won that Penn State game.

Matched up against South Carolina in the Peach Bowl, Carlen wanted to try something new and sent Bowden and another assistant to Texas and Oklahoma to learn the wishbone, which now was a big-time offense. They learned it, returned to Morgantown and secretly put it in during the three weeks of practice prior to the Peach Bowl.

Sports writer Tony Constantine did uncover the ploy, having seen plays drawn on a locker room chalkboard, and got Carlen to admit what he was doing but was sworn to secrecy about it.

Game day arrived and so did a torrential downpour, playing right into Carlen’s plans. He denies, however, that he put the offense in because such things can come about in the South at that time of year.

“The reason we put in the wishbone was because we had several great running backs,” he says. “Plus, Oscar Patrick was hurt and we had very little depth at wide receiver.”

By now you know, WVU won the game easily, grinding it out, Eddie Williams gaining 206 rushing yards against an unsuspecting South Carolina defense.

As for Sherwood, the quarterback who threw for 407 yards just a year earlier?

He threw two passes all game.

The game changed the course of Mountaineer football and set the stage for the success Don Nehlen would see a little more than a decade later. As for Carlen, he left for Texas Tech the day after the South Carolina game, turning the program over to Bowden.

He coached at Texas Tech and South Carolina, where he became athletic director, finishing with a 107-69-6 record.

Hall of Fame?

The record may not qualify but the person does.

He was a Southerner who became part of the integration movement that changed the very game of college football; he was inventive enough to alter the history of West Virginia football; he gave Bobby Bowden, the game’s winningest coach, his big break.

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com. Follow on Twitter @bhertzel.