Herb Orvis didn’t take the usual route to
the National Football League.
While most guys go from high school to
college to the pros, Orvis took a couple of detours — to Fort Knox,
Ky., for basic training and then to Berlin,
Germany, for service in the U.S. Army.
But it was those detours that steered him
toward All-American honors at the University of Colorado and a
10-year career in the NFL with the Detroit
Lions and Baltimore Colts.
“It turned out to be the best thing in my
life,” said Orvis, who will be inducted into his third hall of fame when he joins the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall
of Fame at the 40th annual banquet Dec. 7 at Genesys Conference & Banquet Center. He is already in CU’s
Athletic Hall of Fame (2014) and the College Football Hall of Fame(2016).
Orvis did play football for Beecher High
under Russ Reynolds but was drafted into the army in 1965 and left school before graduating.
“Next thing I know, I’m on a bus with a
bunch of guys and asking where Kentucky is,” he said.
A few months and 4,000 miles later, he was
manning a guard tower at Spandau Prison in Berlin, watching
war criminal Rudolf Hess walk the grounds
below.
But Orvis was also playing football on a
military team, helping the Berlin Bears win the European championship. The 6-foot-5, 219-pound
defensive tackle stood out and caught the eye of Colorado coach
Eddie Crowder, who was on a
government-sponsored coaching tour of Europe.
“He was looking for players and had me come
in for an interview,” Orvis said.
Orvis played at Colorado from 1968-71,
although freshmen didn’t play varsity then. He was the Big Eight
Conference Newcomer of the Year as a
sophomore in 1969 and first-team All-Big Eight his junior and senior years.
As a junior, he was National Lineman of the
Week after Colorado beat Penn State 41-13, snapping the Nittany Lions’ 31-game unbeaten streak.
Orvis had 12 tackles, three for loss, and two sacks in the game.
“Beating Penn State really established
Colorado as a good football team,” he said at a press conference years later. “We stood in the shadow of
Nebraska and Oklahoma for so long.”
In his senior year the Buffaloes rose to a
final ranking of No. 3 in the nation, and Orvis was a near-consensus
All-American. He has since been selected to
the Big Eight All-Decade team for the 1970s and CU’s All-Century
Team honoring the first 100 years of the
sport at the school.
The Lions picked Orvis in the first round
of the 1972 NFL Draft, 16th overall, the highest any CU player had been chosen to that point.
Jim Yarbrough, a fourth-year offensive
lineman with the Lions at the time, remembers his first impression of Orvis.
“Full throttle, full speed all the time.
Had an unbelievable motor; could run like a deer. I knew immediately when we drafted him, after a couple of
practices, what a terrific player he’d be.”
Orvis played 122 games in the NFL, 104 of
them as a starter. He was a second-team All-NFC tackle in 1975, then was traded to Baltimore after the 1977
season.
But it didn’t matter where Herb Orvis
played football — Beecher, Berlin, Boulder, Detroit, Baltimore.
“The thing I remember is how much fun he
had playing the game,” said Yarbrough. “He had a smile on his face from the start of practice to the
end. It was a Cheshire cat type of grin, like, ‘I’m going to whip up on somebody today.’ He was very aggressive,
which you need to be on defense.”
Orvis remembers where he got that from.
“I learned football with some pretty tough
people in Flint,” he said. “It wasn’t uncommon to get an elbow in your cheek, to let you know where you
stood.
“That was probably the biggest part of
being involved in sports. You had to assert yourself as often as possible.”
