Knox News staff
| Knoxville News Sentinel
Carl Torbush, who ushered East Tennessee State back into the world of college football after humbling beginnings as a star high school athlete in Knoxville, has died. He was 72.
He spent 42 years working as a college football coach.
Torbush was a graduate of Austin-East High School and the only white football player in the first graduating class. He became an NAIA All-American in football and baseball at Carson-Newman.
Torbush joined ETSU in 2013 with little more than faith to get him started. The school, which had eliminated the football program after the 2003 season, had no equipment, no stadium and no players. Four-and-a-half years later, the program was on solid ground.
Torbush had a record of 11-22 in three seasons at ETSU.
“I came to ETSU because of my love for football, East Tennessee, ETSU, the people and the passion for restarting a program that hurt all of us when it was dropped,” Torbush said at his retirement announcement in 2017. “My love, appreciation and respect for everything that makes this university special will last a lifetime.”
Torbush was also a football coach at Louisiana Tech (1987) and North Carolina (1997-2000), compiling a 31-48 record, including two bowl victories with the Tar Heels.
He left his position as defensive coordinator at Kansas in 2011 after he was diagnosed with low grade prostate cancer. He resurfaced at Liberty as linebackers coach in 2012 before retiring after one season.
During Torbush’s second retirement, Phillip Fulmer called. Fulmer, who had been recently named athletic director at Tennessee, had been hired to help ETSU find a coach for a program that had been dormant for a decade.
Caught in the shuffle of coach Doug Dickey’s hasty departure for Florida and Bill Battle’s surprise hiring, Torbush barely missed the cut for the last grant-in-aid at Tennessee.
He still walked on at UT and played center during spring practice, but quickly became disillusioned because his mentality was a linebacker’s. He eventually crossed paths with Carson-Newman’s Frosty Holt and Dal Shealy and transferred.
“I was not on scholarship (at UT), but just realized it was time to move on,” Torbush told Knox News in 1998. “I would have done anything to get to go to college at Tennessee, but there never were any hard feelings. Some things like that just don’t work out because you are meant to be somewhere else.”
He even gave pro baseball a shot after being an undrafted free agent signed by the Kansas City Royals.
“I played a season (in Sarasota, Florida) and had a good year and made the all-star team,” said Torbush, who resigned as Carter High baseball coach to pursue his big-league dream. “But I didn’t have a good enough arm and it was pretty clear to me that (Class) AA would be about it. If I hadn’t been so darn hard-headed, I would have tried first base because I could hit.”
Instead, Torbush went to Baylor, earning a master’s degree and spent a season as a grad assistant in 1975.
He also worked as assistant at Southeastern Louisiana (1976-79), Louisiana Tech (1980-82), Ole Miss (1983-86), North Carolina (1988-97), Alabama (2001-02), Texas A&M (2003-05), Carson-Newman (2006-08) and Mississippi State (2009).
2023-11-07 00:08:52
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