Burgh’s Best to Wear It, No. 33: Tony Dorsett gave Pitt football fans many ways to say great

The Tribune-Review sports staff is conducting a daily countdown of the best players in Pittsburgh pro and college sports history to wear each jersey number.

No. 33: Tony Dorsett

To simply say Tony Dorsett is the most decorated player in Pitt football history might be shortchanging him in the same way that ESPN did by naming Dorsett the No. 17 player in college football history. That ESPN ranked him the second-best player in Pitt history, behind Hugh Green, is highly debatable. That it ranked him the No. 13 running back is laughable.

Dorsett is one of the best, by any and every standard.

The dynamic running back carried the Panthers to a 12-0 record and the 1976 national championship, breaking the NCAA career rushing record and winning the school’s lone Heisman Trophy along the way.

His No. 33 jersey was retired at halftime of his final home game at Pitt Stadium, and Dorsett remains the best player to ever wear the number in Pittsburgh sports history.

And it’s not even close.

The Pirates retired Honus Wagner’s No. 33 but that’s what he wore as a coach (players didn’t wear numbers in his day). The number was worn by Penguins defenseman Zarley Zalapski, best remembered as part of the package in the trade with the Hartford Whalers that returned Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson. It was worn by Steelers running backs Frenchy Fuqua and Merril Hoge and by Pitt basketball stars Demetrius Gore, a forward who scored 1,563 career points in the late 1980s, and Aaron Gray, who scored 1,109 points and was a third-team All-American in 2007.

But nobody wore No. 33 like Dorsett, or made an immediate impact on a team the way TD did.

As Joe Paterno once said when asked to describe Dorsett: “How many ways can you say the word great?”

Pitt was 1-10 in 1972, the year before Dorsett’s arrival on the Oakland campus and his fast and fluid running style became the catalyst in their first winning season in a decade. Dorsett set an NCAA freshman rushing record with 1,586 yards — the first 1,000-yard season in Pitt history — and became the first freshman selected first-team All-American since Army’s Doc Blanchard.

Dorsett ran for 1,044 yards as a sophomore, when he broke Marshall Goldberg’s school career rushing record in the third game. By his junior year, Dorsett saved his best performances for the program that deemed him too small and skinny to play running back: Notre Dame.

The most memorable game came his junior year, when he rushed for 303 yards against the Fighting Irish at Pitt Stadium. Dorsett accounted for 290 yards at Notre Dame as a senior, including 181 rushing yards, and an eye-popping 754 career rushing yards on 96 carries against the Irish.

That put Pitt in national prominence, as did Dorsett breaking the NCAA rushing record with 6,082 yards (6,526 if you include bowl games) — which stood for 22 years — and winning the Heisman Trophy in a landslide (701 of 842 first-place votes).

Dorsett was drafted No. 2 overall by the Dallas Cowboys, where he rushed for 12,739 yards. He became the first player in football history to win the Heisman, a national championship and a Super Bowl, and was inducted into the college and pro football halls of fame in 1994.

Hopewell High School named its football stadium after him and Pitt named a street in his honor, so there’s both a Tony Dorsett Stadium and a Tony Dorsett Drive. Alas, there will never be another Tony Dorsett.

“I could coach 100 years and never get the opportunity to coach another back like Dorsett,” the late Pitt coach Johnny Majors said. “I consider it an honor to be his college coach.”

Check out the entire ’Burgh’s Best to Wear It series here.