Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Morrall remained on the Dolphins’ roster until 1977, then joined Schnellenberger as a volunteer coach in February 1979. And since Schnellenberger installed the Dolphins’ pro-style attack, Kelly learned the playbook from a quarterback who ran that offense at the NFL level for nearly a decade.

  “It was awesome,” Kelly said.

  He played professional football, and that was something I always dreamed about. That was my goal, to be a quarterback in the NFL. And to have him tutoring the right things—put air under the football when you’re throwing the deep pass, don’t feel like you have to make the big play all the time, take what they give you—all the intangibles that you need to be a quarterback. And some of the things you need someone to tell you, how to study film. He prepared me for the next level early on in my college career.

  That mentor-protégé relationship began to yield noticeable results in 1980. Miami opened up 5-0 before hitting a wall of three consecutive losses, each to a ranked opponent. The Hurricanes still finished 8-3, then defeated Virginia Tech in the Peach Bowl. The following season the team improved to 9-2. (The NCAA placed the school on probation because of a recruiting violation, making the team ineligible for a bowl game.)

  That year, Kelly enjoyed another tremendous season as the team’s star quarterback—and another sweet episode of revenge against Joe Paterno’s Nittany Lions.

  With Todd Blackledge becoming a fine college quarterback, Penn State improved to 10-2 following their disappointing 1979 campaign. And by late October 1981, the team was ranked first in the nation. On Halloween 1981, before a nationally televised audience, the two teams faced off again. But unlike the Hurricanes’ 26-10 upset two years earlier, this time the game was in Miami at the Orange Bowl.

  In the second quarter, Kelly and wide receiver Larry Brodsky hooked up for an eighty-yard touchdown that increased the lead to fourteen. With the score 17-0 early in the final period, Blackledge threw two touchdown passes to bring Penn State close—he would attempt forty-one passes and gain 358 yards for the normally grounded offense—but his interception with just over a minute left finalized another monumental win for Miami.

  “In order for us to become a mature football program, we had to get into a game like this and win. The first Penn State game in 1979 was sort of like Cinderella. We kind of snuck up on them. That wasn’t one of their best teams,” Schnellenberger said. “But this was one of their finest teams. They had forewarning that we could play and I think they gave us their best shot.”

  Jim Kelly now had two wins over his personal rival. Most important to him, however, was knowing that he had brought life to the once-unheralded Miami program.

  “People are going crazy down here,” he said after the home victory, “and that is what everyone wanted to do—get the city excited about the team.”

  That excitement only swelled with the start of the 1982 season. Their team ranked fifteenth in the preseason polls, south Florida fans now spoke of a once inconceivable goal.

  “Everywhere around the University of Miami, the talk is of a national championship for the Hurricanes this year,” Sports Illustrated reported prior to the 1982 season. “Obviously the thought of a national title for the Hurricanes is utterly laughable, except for one thing: Everything coach Howard Schnellenberger has said his team would achieve since he arrived on the Coral Gables campus on Jan. 8, 1979 has been achieved.”

  Schnellenberger never predicted that a transcendent figure would help deliver his team from the wilderness. Nonetheless, he had such a player, a fact the national media had begun to recognize. Reporters, photographers, and camera crews hovered around Kelly during August and early September. The senior was the preseason favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

  A few weeks into the 1982 season, all the promise of a national title for the Hurricanes and college football’s top individual prize for their quarterback quickly vanished. Miami lost the opener to Florida, then lost Kelly two weeks later: a defender planted him into the ground following a twenty-yard scramble late in the team’s 14-8 victory over Virginia Tech. Surgery to reattach a separated acromioclavicular (AC) joint was performed the very next day and Kelly missed the rest of the season. Though respectable, the Hurricanes’ 5-3 close to the season torpedoed any shot at a national championship.

  “Unfortunately, we rode Jim’s coattail way too hard and way too long,” Mark Rush said. “We depended too much on him and when he did get hurt it just shocked everybody, of course: ‘Now what are we going to do, our leader is gone, who are we gonna depend on?’”

  Luckily for Miami fans and the returning varsity players, that question would be answered the very next year . . . and most of the next three decades. With Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde ready to fill Kelly’s spot beginning in 1983, the Hurricanes found new and supremely capable leadership under center. Kosar would lead Miami to the national title in January 1984. Three seasons later, Testaverde, the Heisman Trophy winner, took the Hurricanes to the Fiesta Bowl, where the Hurricanes battled for (and lost) the national championship against Penn State.

  Jim Kelly did not get to compete in either one of those thrilling national championship contests. The extremely premature end to the 1982 season also marked the end of his collegiate career. And, as a quarterback, such a serious injury to his throwing shoulder greatly jeopardized his professional prospects.

  An entire team of people—doctors, trainers, teammates, family members—assisted Kelly in his efforts to regain his powerful throwing arm. And after several months, he did.

  “I would drag his ass over to the rehab room with [Hurricanes trainer] Mike O’Shea and myself, twice a day even in the summertime,” Mark Rush remembered.

  And sitting in our dorm room, just two chairs across from each other and he would slowly just throw a tennis ball back-and-forth to me, trying to get that range of motion. . . . I can remember finally being able to get back out on the field, down on our knees, we’d be like three yards apart and we’d just start throwing the football. Then we’d go back five, then we’d go back eight, then we’d go back ten. And then he was just zinging the ball, better than he ever did before. And it was such a nice feeling seeing him come back. We rehabbed him to death.

  NFL coaches, scouts, and executives speculated—from afar and in person at workouts—about Kelly’s value in the following April’s draft. And although his arm was not completely healed by draft day, he assuaged any doubts.

  During the first round of that now famous 1983 draft, six quarterbacks were selected: John Elway, Todd Blackledge, Tony Eason, Ken O’Brien, Dan Marino, and Jim Kelly. And each man would go on to experience his own unique professional football journey.

  Eason helped quarterback the New England Patriots to Super Bowl XX and O’Brien earned a pair of Pro Bowl selections during a long tenure with the New York Jets. Ironically, Todd Blackledge enjoyed the least success of any members of the “Quarterback Class of 1983.” As a Kansas City Chief, Blackledge threw more interceptions than touchdowns and completed less than half of his pass attempts.

  Elway was unhappy that the Baltimore Colts had selected him with the first overall pick and threatened to give up football to pitch for the New York Yankees. A week later, the Colts granted his wish and dealt the former Stanford quarterback to Denver.

  Marino was similarly discontent on draft day, not because of who chose him, but rather when they had done so. By the impossible standards he had set as a freshman, sophomore, and junior, the Pitt quarterback was subpar as a senior. That perceived drop-off caused twenty-two teams to choose someone else. The Miami Dolphins finally selected Marino with the last pick of the first round.

  And while Elway’s and Marino’s prolific careers each got off to a well-publicized rocky start, it was Jim Kelly who made the biggest splash.

  Desperately in need of star power, the Buffalo Bills took Kelly with the fourteenth overall selection. Kelly would not, however, attend the team’s training camp at Fredonia State College that July. Nor would he spend a single
Sunday at Rich Stadium that autumn dressed in Bills red and blue.

  Three months before Buffalo drafted him, Kelly was selected—in the fourteenth round—by the Chicago Blitz of the United States Football League, the professional alternative that attempted to outspend and out-flash the NFL’s monopoly. (The Blitz waited fourteen rounds to choose Kelly because they expected him to join the NFL.) Officially founded on May 11, 1982, the new league opened play nine months later, and growing pains persisted from the outset.

  Blitz General Manager Bruce Allen continued to pursue Kelly into May. So too did the Montreal Concordes (formerly the Alouettes) of the Canadian Football League. Kelly continued to listen.

  “I always wanted to play in the National Football League. But there are other things you have to look at,” he said a week after being chosen by the Bills.

  Money was a factor for Kelly, as was a real disinterest in joining the small-market Bills.

  “Buffalo would have two chances (twelfth and fourteenth), and I was praying they would pass on me both times. Everything I had heard about the team and the city was negative,” he wrote years later.

  Negotiations with the Bills dragged out into June, when Kelly’s agents received a phone call. The USFL executives and owners were so eager to sign a big-name talent for their infant league, they offered Kelly, in addition to an enormous salary, the opportunity to join whichever team he wanted. Kelly—and Mark Rush, who was also allowed to sign with any team he chose—flew to Texas to meet with the owner of the USFL’s Houston Gamblers.

  “Jim and I always wanted to try and play [professional] football together,” Rush said. “And of course he was drafted by Buffalo, I was drafted by Minnesota, we’re living in Florida: who the hell wants to go to the cold weather?”

  The opportunity to play in Texas (and the Astrodome, where weather would never be a factor) clinched it. On June 9, Kelly inked a multimillion-dollar deal with the Gamblers. Giving this young quarterback with western Pennsylvania roots an outrageously lucrative contract to spurn the NFL and join an upstart league sounded like a familiar tale.

  “His signing is the equivalent of Joe Namath signing with the American Football League. In fact, Jim’s a much better player. Namath’s college statistics can’t compare. Jim did more in three years than he did in four,” boldly proclaimed the Houston owner, Jerry Argovitz. “We had Jim Kelly rated as college football’s top quarterback even before the NFL draft. We like everything we see about him. This signing has impact.”

  An organization named the Gamblers seemed an appropriate one for Jim Kelly to join after leaving Miami. An expansion team, Houston would not play its first game until late February 1984. (As part of its early appeal, USFL games were played in the spring, opposite the NFL’s fall schedule.) Having seen no playing time since the injury to his throwing shoulder in September 1982, Kelly would go nearly eighteen months without taking an in-game snap. The stability of the newfound league as well as the quality of play (and his teammates) were also issues that Kelly had to consider.

  “There are risks in what I’m doing, but I made up my mind,” he said upon signing his contract. “Everybody has to take a risk once in his life. But I’m happy I did and I won’t regret it.”

  

  Jeff Hostetler also took an enormous risk leaving Penn State in January 1981, another decision that he would not regret.

  “Our family had a meeting with coach Joe Paterno to inform him of our decision. Joe tried to change Jeff’s mind, but his decision is final,” Norm Hostetler told the Harrisburg Patriot. “Because of all our past connections, it was an extremely difficult thing to have to do. But we felt that Jeff will not get his chance here.”

  Family had played a central role in Jeff enrolling at Penn State. And in his second college search, again a fellow Hostetler pointed him in the next direction.

  “My older brother Doug was recruited by West Virginia when he was coming out of high school,” said Hostetler. “After he had graduated [from Penn State in 1979] he was in sales and he was traveling and he had always gone down through Morgantown and told me I have to go down and take a look. And he is the only reason I went down to take a look.”

  Jeff had actually been to Morgantown the previous fall. In late October 1980, Penn State traveled south along Interstate 68 to play at newly opened Mountaineer Stadium. Hostetler relieved an injured Todd Blackledge in the second half and preserved a 20-15 victory over first-year head coach Don Nehlen’s team.

  “It was a cold, miserable, wet day,” he remembered. “It was a big day for us and I had a big part in it. I remember walking down through their stands in order to get to their locker room—because the stadium still wasn’t completed—so we had to walk through the stands to get down to the locker room. And I can remember the fans yelling at us and saying stuff to us. And I can honestly remember thinking, ‘Wow, is this great. This would be a great group of people to play for. They just absolutely loved their Mountaineers.”

  Although he weighed opportunities from Ohio State, Michigan State, Maryland, and nearly transferred to Pitt (where, by Hostetler’s senior season, Dan Marino would have just left), West Virginia soon became an easy choice. Only eighty miles south of the family farm near Holsopple, Morgantown was a short drive for the Hostetlers each Saturday afternoon of the college season.

  Teammates immediately welcomed their new quarterback. Linebacker Darryl Talley had been a junior when Hostetler and the Nittany Lions defeated the Mountaineers in 1980. Now he was elated to have Hostetler playing for, rather than against, West Virginia.

  “Jeff came in the game after I knocked Todd [Blackledge] out and proceeded to beat us,” Talley said about the 20-15 loss to Penn State in which he also recorded two sacks and recovered a critical fourth quarter Hostetler fumble. “And then the following year, he came to school at West Virginia. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why the heck did you come to school here now? Why didn’t you come last year? We could have beat Penn State!”

  The transfer meant that Hostetler would not be allowed to play during the 1981 season. West Virginia already had a starter in place, senior and Phi Beta Kappa candidate Oliver Luck, so playing time would have already been limited. He spent that fall practicing with the team and going to classes. Suffering no drop-off as a result from the transfer, Hostetler earned a 4.0 his first semester, virtually the same grade-point average he achieved during three semesters at Penn State.

  Coach Don Nehlen viewed Hostetler as a worthy replacement for Luck, and not just in order to keep the team GPA steady.

  “He was our scout-team quarterback [in 1981] and we knew we had a big league quarterback,” said Nehlen, who would become Hostetler’s father-in-law within three years. “The great quarterbacks, when they walk in the other guys know ‘we’re gonna get it done.’ And that’s what Jeff brought to the table. And our kids knew that long before he was even eligible. They knew that when he was on the scout team.”

  After West Virginia won the Peach Bowl in December, Hostetler was ready to assume command of the team. He made it through spring camp with the quarterback job (as well as a sore knee) and started the season opener at Oklahoma.

  The Sooners were coming off a down year (7-4-1), but since 1970, Oklahoma had lost only one non–Big 8 Conference game at Norman. In the previous meeting between the two schools, the Sooners crushed West Virginia 52-10. Head coach Barry Switzer was already a college football deity, having won back-to-back national championships in the mid-1970s.

  Even after the Sooners scored a pair of first-quarter touchdowns, Hostetler was unconcerned by the Oklahoma mystique. Trailing 14-0 at the start of the second period, he tossed two touchdown passes and marched his team into the locker room at halftime ahead 20-14.

  The teams traded blows throughout the second half. With eight minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, Hostetler hit Rich Hollins on a forty-two-yarder, then connected with Wayne Brown in the back of the end zone. Hostetler’s fourth touchdown of the day put the Mountaineers ahead
for good.

  “The Oklahoma game resonated coast-to-coast,” Nehlen said three decades later. “All of a sudden people started to say, ‘Hey, who are these guys?’ And that was the beginning of West Virginia’s run at being a very highly respected football program.”

  The win kicked off a great year. An 8-2 regular-season record earned a trip to the Gator Bowl: never before had the university appeared in consecutive bowls. Although Hostetler’s passing statistics (47 percent completion percentage, 1,916 yards passing, ten touchdowns) didn’t earn him votes in the Heisman Trophy race or consideration as an all-American, he had become the team’s unquestioned leader. According to Darryl Talley,

  Jeff was a great football player, because in my opinion, he was what he thought a quarterback was supposed to be. He was tough, he was smart . . . he would lead a lot by example by saying, look, I’m willing to sit there and take these shots if you guys are willing to catch the ball down the middle of the field at the spot where I have to throw it. That I think endeared him to his offensive linemen because he was like one of the linemen. Back then, it didn’t seem like he wanted a whole lot of publicity around him. He just wanted to go out and do his job and win football games.

  By 1983, both West Virginia and Jeff Hostetler peaked. Winning their opening six games—including a victory against archrival Pitt—gave way to a number four ranking in the national polls. Hostetler became prominently mentioned as a Heisman candidate. Impressive passing numbers contributed to the attention. So did the school’s aggressive media campaign, which painted him as the boy next door that just happened to be a football star.