Glory falls behind big at Machine, rally too late

Ohio Glory offensive coordinator Wally English, middle, didn’t see eye-to-eye with Head Coach Larry Little on play-calling. After a disagreement with Little on the sidelines in the Glory’s 31-20 Week 4 loss at the Montreal Machine, English didn’t coach again during the 1992 season.

There was plenty of blame to go around for the Ohio Glory’s 0-3 start to its expansion season.

That blame, unfortunately, was starting to become public. And during the Glory’s 31-20 Week 4 loss at the Montreal Machine, that blame ended up costing one assistant coach his job.

Glory Head Coach Larry Little favored a running attack, one like what resulted in running back Amir Rasul setting a World League of American Football single-game rushing yards record in Week 1. Offensive coordinator Wally English was more of a pass-oriented coach, having tutored the likes of Dan Marino and Jim McMahon in college.

Those differences came to a head in Montreal.

Little, in an interview two decades after his and the Glory’s only season, said he didn’t know English before hiring him, only of him, since English coached under Little’s old Miami Dolphins Head Coach, Don Shula.

It was clear Little and English weren’t on the same wavelength. And English didn’t coach for the Glory after the Montreal game, as running backs coach Joe Viadella called the plays for the rest of the season. According to reports, English had been hospitalized the week after the Machine game due to fatigue.

To this day, both Little and English blame each other for the failure to get along – as was evidenced by a 2012 Columbus Dispatch story.

Little said, “The players would come to the sideline and (English) would try to say something to them and they’d keep walking. They were loyal to me, I believe.”

English said, “Larry didn’t know anything about a passing offense.”

As for the game itself, Montreal had a 24-0 lead after three quarters. Ohio scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns behind backup quarterback Babe Laufenberg (starter Pat O’Hara suffered a concussion late in the first half), but the damage already had been done.

“When you’re 0-3 and you fall behind 21-0 in the first half on the road, it’s easy to lay down. Our guys didn’t do that,” Little said after the game. “They showed a lot of character. They kept fighting.”

Rasul ran for 102 yards and a touchdown in 18 carries, and wide receiver Walter Wilson caught 10 passes for 113 yards and a score.

The team statistics from the game were bizarre – the Glory held the ball for 37:44 and Ohio’s defense kept Montreal to just 215 yards of total offense while forcing two turnovers. But the Glory also coughed the ball up twice and committed 10 penalties for 110 yards in markoffs.

Special teams continued to haunt the Glory, as a chip-shot field goal try by kicker Jerry Kauric was blocked, and three consecutive bounced punt snaps by Mike Graybill ended in a wobbly Tom Rouen punt, a Rouen scramble for a first down and Rouen being tackled deep in Glory territory.

And when Laufenberg found wide receiver Melvin Patterson for a successful two-point conversion with 18 seconds left in the game, it marked the first time the Glory had successfully scored on a conversion after a bad hold on a kick in Week 1, a blocked extra point in Week 2 and two failed two-point tries earlier in the game vs. the Machine.

For the second week in a row, a Glory player tried to diagnose the team’s problems in the press. This time, it was Laufenberg’s turn.

“We looked at the films today, and we’ve got guys that at times just flat-out didn’t hustle,” he said to the Dispatch. “To me, there’s no excuse for that and I wouldn’t want that guy on my football team. I don’t care if it’s flag football, high school football, college ball, pro ball. I wouldn’t want them lining up. I know I can’t count on the guy.

“A guy who doesn’t hustle, to me, that’s a loser.”

Little, however, disagreed, saying, “It’s not like the guys are dogging it out there because they’re not. We’re giving up the football, and we’ve gotten a lot of bad breaks, too.”

Going into the rematch with the San Antonio Riders, the team which may or may not have run the score up against the Glory in the teams’ lone preseason game earlier in the season, the Glory still was winless and looking for answers as to why.

      Unfortunately, those answers weren’t going to come in the Lone Star State.