It was August of 1975 and Jeff Norman ’78 – then a sophomore at Saint John’s – was about to take over as the Johnnies’ starting quarterback.
Which meant he’d take charge of running a new offense that legendary head coach John Gagliardi had worked up in the backyard of his home in Flynntown that summer.
Norman and standout sophomore running back Tim Schmitz ’78 had each run some version of the option in high school, and with other talented running backs like Jim Roeder ’77, Scott Edstrom ’77 and Brad Eustice ’77 in the fold, Gagliardi wanted to make the best use of their skills.
So – using his four children as live chess pieces as he tested his theories – he came up with a revolutionary scheme that provided a quarterback with four choices instead of simply two or three.
“I was thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it,” Gagliardi said in 2002. “On paper, it looked halfway decent, but you had to see it. No one was around except for my family.”
By August, he was ready to put it into practice. But Norman – whose ability to make snap decisions would be key to making the offense work - admits to a bit of initial hesitation.
“It was the first day of practice and he holds up these 3x5 index cards with all the plays drawn on them,” Norman remembers. “I didn’t think it would work. I thought it would be too slow. But John knew the players he had coming back and how to get the most out of them. He turned out to be exactly right.”
Indeed he did as the new offense helped SJU finish 8-1-1 and win an MIAC title in 1975. But it was the following season when it really started paying dividends.
Running the ball for an average of 361.2 yards per game, the 1976 Johnnies finished 10-0-1 and claimed the program’s third national title (and first at the NCAA Division III level). The season was capped by a dramatic 31-28 victory over Towson State (Md.) in the national championship game played in Phenix City, Ala.
“Defenses just didn’t adjust very well to that offense,” recalls Mike Grant ’79, a tight end on the 1976 team who has gone on to huge success as a high school head coach, winning 11 state titles at Eden Prairie. “They’d never seen it before. It wasn’t like it is now where everything is on tape. Back then, you got two game tapes to prepare with. That was it.
“They had to make a decision. If they slanted inside, Jeff pulled it out around the corner and pitched the ball or ran it himself. If they tried to stop that, we had running backs who could take it up the middle. John was brilliant. He wanted you to adjust because he figured he could adjust better than you could.”
After tying Minnesota-Morris 15-15 in the 1976 season opener, the Johnnies won their next nine games by an average of 37.1 points. Aside from a 14-11 victory over archrival St. Thomas in St. Paul, only one other team kept the score within 16 points over that stretch, and the Johnnies won four games by a margin of 49 points or more.
“I was almost as heavy as our tackles,” recalls Schmitz, who rushed for 1,475 yards that season, then a school record. “I was playing at about 190 or 195. And when Brad (Eustice) was in the backfield with me, he came in around 240. It was like having two freight trains coming down on you.”
“In a lot of those games, I didn’t play more than a half. We were already ahead by so much, John would take me out.”
That included during SJU’s first two playoff games – a 46-7 win at Augustana (Ill.) in which Schmitz rushed for 197 yards, and a 61-0 win over Buena Vista (Iowa) played in below-zero temperatures in Collegeville that caused uncovered coffee cups in the press box to turn into mocha-colored bricks of ice.
“That was the game when I found out where I really stood on the pecking order,” recalls Grant with a chuckle. “John sent all the star players inside to get changed early, but not me. It was Schmitz go inside. Norman go inside. Roeder go inside. Grant, stay out here and keep playing in the cold. I was freezing by the end of that game.”
It appeared the Johnnies’ dominant run would continue in the national championship game as SJU took a 28-0 lead into the fourth quarter. But Towson State rattled off four unanswered touchdowns of its own to tie the score.
“They started adjusting to what we were doing defensively and they were able to start giving their quarterback a little more time,” said Ernie England ’81, then a 22-year-old freshman nose guard who would go on to become a two-time All-American.
“Before that, we’d gotten to him a few times. It ended up turning into a real nail-biter.”
The Johnnies got the ball back at their own 41-yard-line with 25 seconds left to play, setting the stage for a story that has been told often in the decades since. Norman connected with Roeder - who had been on crutches in the days leading up to the game, but was forced into action because of an injury to another player - for a gain of 58 yards to put the ball on the Tigers’ 1-yard line.
Then Norman lost the ball on a quarterback sneak, but Schmitz was there to pounce on it. Norman followed with a 19-yard field goal as time expired to give the Johnnies the win and ABC Sports footage it would reuse a number of times in the years that followed.
“In the immediate aftermath, I was just excited about getting the win,” said Norman, who was named the game’s most valuable player by the ABC crew. “I was still absorbing everything that had just happened. It took a while before it dawned on me that we’d probably be talking about that play and that game for the rest of our lives.”
While Norman and the offense have received a lot of the credit, the defense on that 1976 team was pretty good too. Led by England, who had spent four years in the military before enrolling at SJU, the Johnnies allowed opponents an average of just 12.8 points per game.
“I remember when Ernie first came in, he didn’t really understand how we practiced,” said Grant, the son of legendary Minnesota Vikings head coach Bud Grant, whose team was en route to its fourth Super Bowl berth in the fall of 1976. “He was going crazy. Some of the guys had to tell him to take it easy.
“But he was such a dominant player. He had tremendous quickness for a nose guard. He made a big difference on that team.”
Yet it was the quad-option that came to characterize the 1976 title run. Surprisingly, though, given the success it created, very few teams have attempted to utilize it in the last 46 years.
“No one ran that offense before John invented it, and not a lot of teams have run it since,” Norman said. “It really takes commitment and the right personnel at running back. You also have to have a quarterback that is OK running the ball and can make decisions fairly quickly.
“A lot of pieces need to come together to make it work.”
