CHARMCO – As a kid growing up, I used to love the statistical graphics that would show up on a Monday Night Football game. You know the ones. Factoids like Joe Gibbs is the only coach to win three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks. Or how about Sammy Baugh and Steve Young being tied for the most times being the league-leader in passer rating, each claiming that title six times? For some reason, those kinds of tidbits interested me maybe more than they should.
It just so happens that something else grabbed my attention as an elementary student. It was the sight of a mammoth Greenbrier West tackle named Walter Worrell leading the way for a tailback named Walter Ratliff on a September night in 1979, a 27-18 win over Midland Trail. Ratliff carried the ball 45 times for 216 yards and four touchdowns. Ratliff set a Cavalier record for carries in a game with that effort and it landed him on the Special Honorable Mention list for AP Player of the Week. Ratliff shared his honors with Bill Legg of Poca and Steve Newberry of Peterstown, among others. Legg and Newberry would go on to play at West Virginia University under legendary head coach Don Nehlen. Heady company, indeed! Ratliff’s mark, as it was, would stand atop the West record book for 38 years. I watched the record fall on my birthday, October 13, 2017, when Chad Ramsey established a new benchmark with 48 carries.
Setting records is great. Keeping those records is sacred. When I looked around the campus of Greenbrier West, I couldn’t find the football records, at least not easily. I could walk in the gym and find a list of 1,000-point basketball scorers but not a list of 1,000-yard rushers. I could spot the school’s shot-put record but not the longest field goal. Incidentally, that shot-put record belongs to the aforementioned Worrell at 50’ 8”. That set the wheels in motion. I had to compile this football history so that future Cavaliers would know their roots.
The quest has been arduous at times, easier at others. Former coaches like Toby Harris and Butch Robertson shared the numbers for different periods of time spanning the late 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Lewis McClung provided me with stat updates on a weekly basis for radio broadcasts beginning in 2011 and through his final season in 2016. Current athletic director and assistant football coach Jared Roberston supplies me with the official information now. But with 56 years of Cavalier football history to document, there were huge gaps to fill. I have scoured countless newspapers, programs, yearbooks, and game films. I’ve acquired something akin to frequent flyer miles on the Raleigh County Library’s microfiche reader. Local and statewide sports reporters and fellow researchers have gone out of their way to accommodate me. I can’t even begin to credit every local individual that has contributed information from their scrapbooks, mementos, and personal collections. I’m indebted to them and want to thank them all.
At the time I wrote my recap for the Petersburg game, I used the stats that were taken live during the game. I used those numbers and my database to write an account as accurately as I could. Official stats, however, always come a few days later after careful video review. I also acquired, by sheer luck, a cache of records from the first era of Coach Harris’ coaching stint, 1968-77. For a researcher, this was like looking for a penny and finding out you inherited a fortune. It also altered the facts that I presented in my article. New information is part of the challenge. It either validates data that was taken from stat sheets or extrapolated from multiple sources, or it changes the facts as I know them to be true. With such a massive undertaking that relies mainly on research rather than scorebooks, most info is usually only 99.9% accurate.
For instance, one of my “projects” within this research was not only documenting every final score, but every score by quarter for every game ever played by Greenbrier West. 598 games. Sometime around October of 2019, I was down to needing only eight games to complete that aspect of my project. By December of last year, I had whittled the list down to one game. Now, imagine for a moment a puzzle with 598 pieces. It’s a nice picture, but you’re always staring at the hole where that one missing piece goes. I even had that last gap narrowed down to needing only two quarters of the opponent’s portion of the score. Did they score 14 in the first quarter? 14 in the second? Seven in the first and seven in the second? Why is that even important? Well, it becomes very important when you want to show what the Cavaliers’ chances of winning are when leading, tied, or trailing after a quarter, at halftime, or at the end of the third quarter. It goes back to those interesting tidbits I loved as a kid. It’s also very eye-opening. You see, Greenbrier West has a fabulous record when leading a game at halftime, 316-28. It gets even better when West leads after three quarters, 342-15.
When Greenbrier defeated Petersburg, again on my birthday, I watched at least two more longstanding Cavalier football records fall. When I wrote the recap for the Petersburg game, I used the information that was available. I reported that Vandall threw for a school-record 15 completions and 309 yards. He didn’t. His official stat line came in at 16-22 for 318 yards and three touchdowns. So Vandall still owns the records for completions in a game and passing yards in a game, they’re just higher than initially reported. He is the only quarterback to ever throw for 300 yards in a game at Greenbrier West. I’m 100% confident in the yardage record and 99.9% confident in the completions mark. By the way, Vandall broke Robbie Bragg’s record of 14 completions in a game in 1994, not Kelly Vaughan’s previous record of 13 set in 1983 (tied by B.J. Adams in 1997 and Kaiden Pack in 2019).
Vandall also surpassed the 1,000-yard threshold in the win, doing so in only seven games. Vandall joins four other quarterbacks on that elite list. Chris Vaughan was the first to achieve the milestone, hitting the mark in game 13 of the 1991 season. Vaughan ended with 1,167 yards over a 14-game span. B.J. Adams accomplished the feat in back-to-back seasons, 1996-97. Adams hit his first 1,000-yard season in week nine of ‘96, finishing up with 1,140 yards over 10 games. Adams followed up with the single-season record of 1,315 yards in 1997, vaulting over the 1,000-yard threshold in week nine. Hunter Bevins joined the 1,000-yard club in 2015 by throwing for 245 yards and 2 touchdowns in week ten, finishing the season with 1,028 yards. Kaiden Pack was the last quarterback to hit the mark, doing so in week nine of the 2020 season. Pack finished with 1,036 yards in ten games.
In the James Monroe recap, I wrote about how Vandall broke Adams’ record for career touchdown passes. Adams completed his career with 22 scoring tosses. Remember that unexpected cache of information I mentioned earlier in my article? It ended up being crucial in helping fill a few cracks. As it turns out, Adams didn’t have that career record after all. Another quarterback that my older readers will remember by the name of Harold Wicks owned the top spot. Wicks, touted by many as the greatest athlete in the history of the school, threw 23 touchdown passes from 1975-77. Vandall hit career touchdown pass number 24 with a 6-yard toss to Tucker Lilly in the third quarter of the win over #1 James Monroe. After his three-touchdown performance versus Petersburg, Vandall stood alone at the top with 27 touchdown passes. He extended that record to 30 last Friday night at Sherman.
It just so happens that the Cavalier record for individual touchdown passes in a game is 3. It’s happened 17 times (at least as far as I’ve been able to find). Vandall passed both Wicks and Bevins as quarterbacks to do it three times in their career with last Fridays win over Sherman. Vandall’s caveat was he was the only one to do it in three consecutive games, and he set the bar higher by doing it in four. Others to throw three scoring tosses in one game are Dennis Burns in 1974, Jason Gwinn in ‘92, Bragg in ‘93, Adams twice in ‘97, Bryan Spitzer in ‘03, and Pack in ‘20.
With two games remaining in the regular season and the expectation that the Cavaliers will make a deep postseason run, Vandall should have the opportunity to break and establish even more Greenbrier West passing records. Vandall needs only 2 completions to break a record shared by two quarterbacks, Chris Vaughan and Adams. Vaughan set the single season completions record of 68 in 1990 and Adams tied it in 1996. Vandall needs 14 more completions to break Bragg’s career record of 169 and only 11 yards to eclipse Bragg’s career passing mark of 2,476 yards set between 1993-’95. Vandall is averaging 8.4 completions and 143.9 yards per game. Those numbers put him on pace to break all the marks mentioned by the end of week 10.
When asked how he feels he progressed since his first career start at Buffalo in 2021, a 7-17 night that saw him throw for 99 yards and his first career touchdown pass, Vandall said “I love being able to have people rely on me, and I love being successful in doing that.”
Vandall’s precision will be counted on for the remaining six weeks if the Cavaliers want to achieve their goal of a state championship. Individual records are one thing. A state championship would be another, and it would be one his teammates, coaches, school, family, fans, and community could share. Cole and the Cavaliers are coming.
Pass it on!
