Andy Talley is poised to become Villanova’s first member of the College Football Hall of Fame

It was an annual fall ritual. Little Andy Talley and his comrades bent down as they approached the cyclone fence that surrounded Villanova Stadium. Then one by one they held the fence in turn while the others crawled downstairs.

That was what you did when you grew up on the blue-collar Martin Avenue, in the backwaters of Bryn Mawr, Delaware County, to sneak into Villanova football games in the 1950s. Talley’s father drove a garbage truck and his mother cleaned houses to make a living.

It’s one of Talley’s earliest vivid memories of watching the Wildcats before taking over as head coach at Villanova in 1985 and reviving the program with former Villanova athletics director Ted Aceto.

On December 7, at ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, Talley will have the honor of being the first Villanova player or coach to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Talley, 78, is actually part of the 2020 class that also included, among others, former Eagle Keith Byars (running back, Ohio State 1982-85), NFL Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson (running back, Southern Methodist 1979-82), deceased Steve McNair (quarterback, Alcorn State 1991-94), Lomas Brown (offensive tackle, Florida 1981-84), Eric Crouch (quarterback, Nebraska 1998-2001) and Jumbo Elliott (offensive tackle, Michigan 1984-87).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Talley’s introduction was postponed a year and will be recorded along with the 2021 class, which includes former Eagle Darren Sproles (Kansas State) and former Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo (Eastern Illinois).

David Swanson / Philadelphia Inquirer / MCT / Sipa USA

Villanova’s Phil Matusz throws the cooler at coach Andy Talley in the final seconds of a 23-21 victory over Montana in the 2009 FCS Championship.

Talley is Villanova’s all-time winning coach and has a record of 229–137–1 over a 32-year period (1985-2016), including the Wildcats’ only national title in football, the FCS National Championship in 2009. He is a two – time winner of the American Football Coaches Association Coach of the Year Award (1997, 2009) and an Eddie Robinson Award winner (1997).

Under Talley, Villanova made a total of 12 FCS playoff appearances.

Villanova’s football program had grown dormant before Talley arrived. The school officially dropped football on April 14, 1981 due to “weak attendance and monetary reasons”, quoted by the Villanova Board of Trustees after a 6-5 season.

Weight from alumni and students brought it back in April 1984. One of their first tasks was to find a head coach who could handle a bare-legged budget in what was at that time a dilapidated stadium. Furthermore, it meant that interest resurfaced under the heavy cloud of a national-level basketball program that would go on to win its first national championship in 1985 under kinetic coach Rollie Massimino.

Talley literally built the program from scratch. The school was able to support 63 scholarships, and Talley, then 41, had a staff of under-30-something coaches who were paid very little.

Still, he built a winner.

The Wildcats had instant success, which was met by growing crowds for an fall sport, then there was basketball season.

Talley was first informed that he was admitted through a package in the spring of 2019 that included a football. Talley thought it was a nice gift from the National Football Foundation. But when Talley opened the package and started reading the inscription on the football, it said in part … “Of the 2.8 million people who have played football, only about 1,000 have entered the College Football Hall of Fame as a player, and only 217 coaches. Welcome, you are now one of our members. “

Courtesy / Andy Talley

A look at some of Andy Talley’s career achievements.

After a two-year waiting period, Talley was a first-vote College Football Hall of Famer.

Not bad for the son of a truck driver who once sneaked into Villanova football games in the 1950s.

“I never dreamed of any of this,” said Talley, born Andrew Talarico, a Haverford High School graduate. “I paid my dues and traveled around and trained. The Villanova job should probably have gone to a Villanova candidate. There were five other head coaches, plus me, who went after the job.

“I was doing my homework and I knew that hiring committee. There were a lot of questions like how were we going to revive this thing from scratch, how were we going to get football guys to come to this school, how were we going to get young college coaches who were GA?” is everywhere and has no real experience? How should we kick this stuff off and jump them into Division III after not even being a Division III team?

“Our third year we played Holy Cross, which was No. 1 in the country, and in our fourth year, we opened up with Wake Forest, at Villanova. I was really aggressive and I wanted to hit every single thing they needed to know. “

Talley went home after the interview, and the next morning, at. 2, Talley was called by Aceto. It’s never good when someone gets called up at 2 in the morning.

But Talley got up, put on his clothes, and drove to Villanova, signing a $ 45,000-a-year contract in 1984. When he got up, he was compensated significantly more.

“I never thought I would be in any hall of fame,” said Talley, who still lives in Bryn Mawr and is now in six hall of fame. “My father (Serafino) died when I was 20 in a car accident, so he never got to see me coach. My mother (Ann Talley), God loves her, she died after my first year at Villanova. She worked for Sisters of Mercy in Our Mother of Good Counsel parish, in Bryn Mawr, so she was a diehard Catholic, and Villanova was like Rome to her.

“So when her blue-collar son became a coach at Villanova, she threw it out into the world [laughs].

“I have my parents to thank. And there are so many others, just like my coaches. Dave Clawson (Wake Forest’s head coach) was on my staff, Stan Drayton (the associate head coach in Texas), Sam Venuto (manual offensive coordinator) and of course (current Villanova head coach) Mark Ferrante, and of course players we won with. “

Andy Talley / Courtesy

A look at the Talley Athletic Center on Villanova’s campus, which opened in 2016.

What cannot be forgotten in Talley’s Hall of Fame induction is a personal Hall of Fame for saving the lives of nearly 1,000 people through his Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation.

For 13 years now, the foundation has put college students on the “Be The Match” registry through a program called “Get in the Game” (GITG). To date, over 120,000 people have been added to the registry. Over 900 of these registrants have donated stem cells or bone marrow to save a life. A shining example of the program’s success rate is that 1 in every 150 GITG registrants continues to transplant, compared to the “Be The Match” average of 1 in 430.

“I had no idea how this was going to grow,” Talley said. “My wife had breast cancer and managed it since I have been involved in it. I really think it’s a calling. I wanted to do it, and I did it when I was still training in Villanova. It took a lot of time away from coaching and I had the staff who could handle things and coach Ferrante was a part of it.

“No one in the world does what we do. We are getting bigger and bigger. We need to raise money and I need to recruit college football teams, which is a love job. We work with Be the Match, they are our partners. It’s a great thing to get the Hall of Fame introduction because this keeps my name out there and it keeps the foundation out there.

“If I call a coach in Texas or California, I can tell them, ‘Hi, I’m Andy Talley, I trained at Villanova for a lot of years,’ and maybe they remember me from being admitted to the Hall of Fame. is important to me. I have never had a coach say no. We do all this through the power of college football. “

Courtesy / Andy Talley

Villanova running back Justin Covington and former coach Andy Talley.

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sports writer based in the Philadelphia area who has been writing for PhillyVoice since its inception in 2015 and is president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here: @JSantoliquito

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