Stroia recalls ‘88 season, reflects on career
The 1988 football season is synonymous with West Virginia fans everywhere.
This Mountaineer team finished that season with an 11-1 record and ended the year with a loss to Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl for the National Title.
To this day, this West Virginia team is the last to play for a National Championship and beat Penn State.
One of the captains of that team was offensive guard, John Stroia, who hails from North Canton, Ohio and played both offensive and defensive line as well as long snapper on punts at Hoover High School under Vikings head coach, Ed Glass.
Stroia weighed just 220 pounds as a lineman in high school and was known more as a defensive lineman during high school, but was recruited as a guard.
“I would call myself more of a second-tier level kind of recruit,” Stroia said. “The people that recruited me were really recruiting me more for my potential (and) were willing to take a chance.”
Michigan State, Purdue, Kentucky and Ivy Leagues schools such as Princeton were among those that were pursuing Stroia along with West Virginia during the recruiting process.
Stroia ruled out the Ivy League schools due to his desire to play division one college football and looked for a school whose football program was on the horizon. He found just that went he went on his first-ever college visit to Morgantown.
“In my life, I’ve always tried to look at being associated with things that are up and coming, that were on the right trajectory,” Stroia said. “I’d never been there before and everything was just so positive. You could tell it was an up and coming place.”
During his visit, Stroia got to meet head coach Don Nehlen, University President Gordon Gee, who’s currently the President for West Virginia today as well as some players from neighboring high schools near the North Canton area. He was also impressed by the program’s facilities and was recruited by offensive line coach, Mike Jacobs.
Stroia’s father and Nehlen both attended Lincoln High School in Canton, Ohio where they played baseball together, but he says that had no influence in his decision to attend West Virginia.
“It was nice that they knew each other,” Stroia said. “It was more like that Nehlen was a Canton guy, not so much that he knew my dad and (Nehlen) believed in kids that came out of that area and so forth, so it was good.”
Aside from seeing West Virginia as an up and coming program, Stroia credits Nehlen as one of the reasons he decided to sign with the Mountaineers.
“He was one of the big reasons I went there,” Stroia said. “Just a classy guy, straight shooter, you know where you stand, kept his word, just a man of real high character.”
Prior to Stroia’s arrival in Morgantown in the fall of 1984, the West Virginia football program had undergone some up and down seasons prior to the Don Nehlen era and went just 17-27 under head coach Frank Cignetti following the Bobby Bowden era.
Nehlen’s first few years with the program were highlighted by a few winning seasons and a couple of big wins, including an upset victory over No. 9 Oklahoma on the road in 1982.
“Until coach Nehlen got there, West Virginia struggled,” he said. “They had a couple big wins and you could see this was a program that had turned around and was really starting to grow.”
As a true freshman, Stroia reported to camp standing at 6-foot-5 and weighed 235 pounds and started out on the scout team, where he was forced to work his way up from the bottom of the depth chart.
“You have to prove yourself,” Stroia said. “Every practice is filmed, games are filmed, every class is checked to make sure you go to class, you’re held accountable for everything. It’s not like you can just up and fake your way through a football practice. You’re going to be successful based on how you play. You’re going to work hard and do well or you’re just not going to make it.”
Stroia wound up redshirting during his freshman year and saw minimal playing time during his redshirt freshman season with the Mountaineers, but earned the starting job at left guard as a redshirt sophomore thanks to an emphasis on both the mental and physical parts of the game.
“I would characterize myself as a technician,” he said. “I knew our plays real well, knew where to put my feet and all that other good stuff and then I spent a lot of time in the weight room.”
While playing at Hoover High School and with the help of now former track and field olympian, Jud Logan, Stroia gained an advantage in the weight room that carried over to West Virginia thanks to a different style of lifting that emphasized more on power and explosion.
“We were doing things like plyometrics and power cleans and front squats,” Stroia said. “Even at the college level, people weren’t focusing on that. It’s pretty common now, so I was doing some advanced thinking kind of lifting, more powerlifting before I went to West Virginia.”
From the 1984 season through the 1987 season, West Virginia accumulated just a 25-20-1 record, including a 6-6 mark during 1987, a season in which the Mountaineers lost five different games by five points or less.
Prior to the 1988 season, the Mountaineers knew ahead of time what they were capable of accomplishing with the majority of the senior class returning and as well as talent on all three sides of the ball.
“We knew before the season,” Stroia said. “It sounds weird, but we knew we were going to be great before the season.”
The team also returned an offensive line consisting of Rick Phillips at left tackle, Stroia at left guard, Kevin Koken at center, Bob Kovach at right guard, Brian Smider at right tackle and Keith Winn at tight end, who had all played together for three years.
“We didn’t have to make line calls,” Stroia said. “We knew what each other did, so we fit pretty well together.”
One of the key pieces to West Virginia’s success came on the offensive side of the ball in dual-threat quarterback Major Harris, who started as a redshirt freshman during the 1987 season.
“Everybody forgets he was young,” Stroia said. “He didn’t drive, he didn’t have a license. He was just this young kid who was incredibly gifted.”
West Virginia’s offensive strength lied within its ability to run the ball which was displayed in its truest form that season against Maryland.
After rolling through Bowling Green State and Cal State Fullerton in the first two games of the regular season, West Virginia found itself down 14-0 against Maryland in week three and that’s when Nehlen made a call that Stroia believes jumpstarted the team’s historical season.
“I remember Coach Nehlen coming over and saying, ‘That’s it, we’re not throwing the ball for the rest of the first half,’” Stroia said. “I’m telling you, that moment is when we became undefeated.”
The Mountaineers went on to rout Maryland, 55-24, at Mountaineer Field.
Some other key victories that season included a 31-10 road win over a Pitt team that had six of its players selected in the 1989 NFL Draft and a 51-30 victory over Penn State in Morgantown.
“Pitt was supposedly the best team we would play all year. They had a great team that year,” Stroia said. “Penn State was memorable because we really thrashed them…and they were a little bit off that year, but it’s Penn State, they’re good every year.”
Stroia recalls the team’s 31-9 win over No. 14 Syracuse in the regular season finale at Mountaineer Field to be one of the most memorable moments from that season as the Mountaineers finished the regular season unbeaten.
“The crowd never went home,” Stroia said. “We went in the locker room after the game, did what we normally do and nobody left, so we actually came out, took a lap around the outside of the stadium which was just awesome. That’s maybe one of my two or three biggest memories of being at West Virginia.”
Another memory of Stroia’s includes getting elected team captain.
“The way they did that was the team voted and then everybody went into the stadium and they would just flash who the captains were on the scoreboard,” Stroia said. “That was the biggest honor, to me, I had when I was at West Virginia was being elected one of the captains.”
West Virginia’s unbeaten streak would then come to an end as the Mountaineers fell short of a national title against No. 1 Notre Dame, 34-21, in the Fiesta Bowl as the team suffered a vast amount of injuries.
Safety Darrell Whitmore was out for the game after suffering a broken leg during the team’s previous win over Syracuse, both Stroia (concussion) and Harris (separated shoulder) went down early against Notre Dame and several other players such as nose guard Jim Gray, Phillips and safety Bo Orlando joined the long list.
“I really don’t remember much,” Stroia said of the game. “It was just unfortunate. I’m not making an excuse, but it would’ve been nice if we could’ve played without injuries, but that’s part of the game.”
Stroia went on to earn Third Team All-American honors from The Associated Press and played in the Hula Bowl the week following the Fiesta Bowl loss to the Fighting Irish.
He was later signed as an undrafted free agent with the Pittsburgh Steelers under legendary head coach Chuck Noll, but was cut during the first week of the regular season. Stroia then participated in some team tryouts including one with the Atlanta Falcons and was eventually picked up by the Minnesota Vikings.
However, he decided to forgo his NFL career due to back injuries he suffered during his senior season at West Virginia.
“I kind of had to make the decision am I going to keep trying or do that,” he said. “I wanted to go back to school and get my graduate degree...if I had been healthy, I would’ve kept trying. I snapped for punts, so there was always a demand. I had a number of teams that called about doing that, but that didn’t excite me just doing that..it was a little bit of a relief when I was done because I didn’t feel very good everyday.”
Stroia earned his Master's degree in Business Administration from The Ohio State University and currently resides Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife, Elaine. He is the father of three and currently serves as the President of Hamilton Safe Company.
When he looks back on the 1988 reason, Stroia is most proud of the team’s senior leadership and the how the group came together and worked as a team to accomplish the program’s then-unprecedented 11-win season.
“Nehlen used to always say, ‘You get a group of people and they’re all heading in the same direction, there’s almost nothing they can’t accomplish.’ That was pretty much us,” Stroia said. “It was a good, cohesive group of people, which is awesome. You don’t get to experience that too much in life, you really don’t.”
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