BOCA RATON, Fla. — Leaning forward from his chair in his spacious office at Florida Atlantic University, coaching legend Howard Schnellenberger extended his arms to show off two championship rings. With fists clenched, he drawled in a hoarse, Kentucky twang, “This one’s Don’s. This one’s mine.”
His right hand bore a Super Bowl VII ring from the 1972 Miami Dolphins undefeated championship season, when he served as offensive coordinator on Don Shula’s staff. The ring on his left commemorated his 1983 national title-winning Miami Hurricanes (“My wedding ring,” he joked). Just one of them would make any coach a national figure. With the pair, Schnellenberger became a legend in south Florida.
The rings clinked together when he gestured with his hands, which was often. They are relics of more prosperous times. His Owls are in a funk after Schnellenberger announced in August he would retire at the end of the season, winning for the first time last week after nine losses.
Schnellenberger, 77, will retire after Saturday’s game against Lafayette-Monroe. He sat down with The Daily for more than 90 minutes about his life in football.
DAILY: There’s a saying that a football coach learns something new about the game every season, no matter how young or old he is.
HS: Absolutely. More than that.
DAILY: What has football taught you this season?
HS: Take great joy and pride in your accomplishments and relish the time you have to spend on it. Because you got to get back to reality pretty quick, and nothing is guaranteed.
DAILY: Is it true you helped convince Joe Namath to play for Alabama?
HS: I spent 10 days up there trying to convince him, sure I did. I ran out of money and everything else. We were already in training camp when [Bear] Bryant gets a call from [then Maryland coach] Tom Nugent that Joe Namath was not going to be allowed into Maryland. And Tom and Bryant were great drinking buddies. He called Bryant to get him out of the East so he wouldn’t have to play against him. So I go in to see Carnie Leslie, the athletic director, and said, ‘Coach wants to send me up there.’ And the reason he wants to send me up there was because Joe’s brother Frank Namath was a freshman with me at the University of Kentucky, both of us recruited by Bryant in 1952.
So when Joe became available, Bryant sent me up there probably on a lark. Maybe I could do something before Notre Dame and Ohio State and Penn State and all those people descended on Beaver Falls [Pa.]. I told Carnie, ‘I got to get out of here. Coach wants me in Beaver Falls as quickly as I can, so please give me some money.’ So he reached into his corn sack and pulled out of a handful of bills, and gave them to me. He didn’t even count ’em out. He didn’t dig deep enough. He didn’t get to the twenty dollar bills.
DAILY: You spent 10 days up there for one guy?
HS: Maybe it wasn’t 10. It was eight. I was in a hotel. I didn’t have enough to feed me and Joe and buy airline tickets for the both of us. But I spent every moment I could with the Namath family, particularly his mother. His mother was going be the one Joe would listen to. So I spent a lot of time in the house with his mom even when Joe was down in town playing pool, or whatever. I couldn’t stay with him all the time. But anyway she finally asked me to come to dinner, oh, the eighth night. And when I got there Joe said to me “Boy, you must have really impressed my mom because she’s got chicken and dumplings.” At that time, he didn’t say he was gonna come, but he did say he would make the trip to Tuscaloosa. I got him back to Tuscaloosa, where Coach Bryant closed the deal. And he [Namath] made the difference.
DAILY: As a college coach you put south Florida on the map. What was your fondest memory from your time with the Hurricanes?
HS: The University of Miami? [Sighs] Well, obviously us going into 1983 with a loss to the University of Florida, 28-3, in the opening game. That was Bernie Kosar’s first year, redshirt freshman … We went in this time against their seniors, and they were really good. Kosar had the best game a freshman has ever had at Miami. He completed, whew, enough passes to tie Jim Kelly’s record, who was a senior when he set it. We had 350 yards throwing. We got beat. That was because we had six turnovers. We played a hell of a defensive game, a hell of an offensive game, in a loss. That was the backdrop to where we had to go to get to a chance to play Nebraska [in the Orange Bowl].
DAILY: So that set in motion your championship season? A loss?
HS: Yeah. I thought ‘God, coach, your team played like winners. We physically whipped them. We moved the ball. We did everything that we could control. And yet we got beat like that.’ Normally I would have taken that team back to Miami — we were in Gainesville — and got them up at 5 a.m. and scrimmage the crap out of them. Scrimmage so long we finally figure out how to not get beat that badly. We always said we would never be beaten. We might be behind when the clock ran out, but we are not going to be beaten. So I came into the locker room and I said, ‘I better get this right.’ So I went in there and said, ‘You guys played as hard and tough and as good a football game as I’ve ever coached. You guys were winners here today … we are going to go home and get ready to play Houston, a game we should win.’
And we won and we won and won. Got some close ones. The last one against Bobby [Bowden] at his place [Florida State], we had to kick a field goal with no time left to go to the Orange Bowl. And then Nebraska. If we found a way to beat those guys, it would be earth-shattering. A football fan’s delight, because they were an awful monster. A gigantic Goliath. We were David. Kosar then plays the game of his life, the defense may have played the game of their lives because Nebraska averaged over 35 points a game. Think it was 42. And they got 30. We had to come up with some good plays at the end there to win it, but we did force them to resort to the f——-ing fumblerooski. I told them before the game if those bastards have to run the fumblerooski, come to the sidelines and party because they have given up their right of manhood.
DAILY: Who developed into your greatest player at Miami?
HS: Kosar made the most difference, but there may not have been a Kosar if not for Jim Kelly. Kelly was our pivotal one; won the pivotal game … I had this dilemma with Kelly when he was a freshman. I took the smart way out, the easiest way out, and I didn’t play him at first. He played in a backup role. We had three wins, four losses going into our eighth game of the season. Penn State. And I said, ‘I don’t give a s—-, if we have any chance of going into Penn State and beating them with that new addition to their stadium up there, it’s gotta be Kelly but I’m not going to tell anyone about it.’ So I did.
I didn’t tell Kelly until right before the game. I told him at the pregame meal. He walks out right after I told him, goes to the bathroom and throws up. I thought ‘What the hell have I done? The guy throws up over a football game? What kind of clown is this?’ So we go out there and after a little luck, we got the ball. The wind was in our face. The second pass we throw, it’s a crossing pattern over the middle. Goes 50 yards … We end up beating them. We win that game. We go 2-2 with Kelly. Not bad. That was the beginning.
DAILY: It’s almost been 40 years since the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ undefeated season. What does a team like the Packers have to do to pull off a perfect year?
HS: Well, I knew what Shula did to pull it off. His take on how you win football games is tailor-made for consistency over a long period of time. His major tutor was [Hall of Famer] Paul Brown, and Paul was the most consistent coach. He was the one that started using playbooks. He did all the scholastic things that went with football. Don picked up on that. His dad was a fisherman. He was educated by the Jesuits. He went to Mass every morning, 6 a.m., the only guy that beat me to work in my life. And I told everybody, if you knew what day it was, if you looked at the calendar and it was September 6, and that’s a Friday, you knew where you were if you worked there. If you were a Dolphin, you knew what you were gonna do that day, 365 days before that day, and 365 days after that day. You never looked past the upcoming game. You’d dwell on it, win or lose, for one day. On the second day, you were right back where you were before. There wouldn’t be many new plays, just enough to make a little bit of a difference.
DAILY: What advice would you give someone trying to break into coaching?
HS: Make sure this is what you want to do, son. Because unless you put your whole body and heart and soul into it, you don’t have a chance. But if you do, then anything is possible.
DAILY: You played and worked for Coach Bryant, won national titles and Super Bowls, and built a program from scratch here at Florida Atlantic. What do you think your football legacy is going to be?
HS: I guess it’s gonna be ‘not very smart.’ Could have coached [the University of] Miami for a long time. Leaving Don Shula and the Miami Dolphins in ’72 to take the head job in Baltimore [was dumb]. Those two things were very, very dumb. I wasn’t smart enough to follow Coach Bryant’s instructions and never go to any school or become the head coach anywhere where you don’t get hired by the head man …
When I left the Dolphins, I should have dealt with [Colts owner Bob] Irsay. Irsay wasn’t involved with the negotiations. It was all [general manager] Joe Thomas. When I got up there, I was invited to go to his home, I found out what everybody else knew and I didn’t know: He was a terrible alcoholic. And he’s the guy that fired me on the sidelines in Philadelphia because I didn’t have Bert Jones in the game. I was a one-year coach up there.
When I went out to Oklahoma, I was hired by Donnie Duncan, their athletic director. He was in a battling match with Barry Switzer to keep him from having his choice to become the head coach, John Blake. The president of the school was a senator who came back just as I was being hired. He didn’t have anything to do with hiring me. I went out to his house to meet with him, and I could tell he was in Switzer’s corner. So I was a coach that didn’t make very good choices about where he should coach, or how long he should stay in a place. And I found out that God makes better choices for me than I do …
He led me to Louisville. It was a great decision because I had a major impact on football in the state of Kentucky. I was able to revive that Louisville program, I was able to win two major bowl games that they had never won before. When we beat Alabama, 34-7, in the [1991] Fiesta Bowl, Louisville swelled like a gigantic beach ball. It was ego swell … Louisville has now taken its place as a good football program. I coined a phrase up there: ‘It’s on a collision course with the national championship, the only variable is time.’ People still shout it up there.
His right hand bore a Super Bowl VII ring from the 1972 Miami Dolphins undefeated championship season, when he served as offensive coordinator on Don Shula’s staff. The ring on his left commemorated his 1983 national title-winning Miami Hurricanes (“My wedding ring,” he joked). Just one of them would make any coach a national figure. With the pair, Schnellenberger became a legend in south Florida.
The rings clinked together when he gestured with his hands, which was often. They are relics of more prosperous times. His Owls are in a funk after Schnellenberger announced in August he would retire at the end of the season, winning for the first time last week after nine losses.
Schnellenberger, 77, will retire after Saturday’s game against Lafayette-Monroe. He sat down with The Daily for more than 90 minutes about his life in football.
DAILY: There’s a saying that a football coach learns something new about the game every season, no matter how young or old he is.
HS: Absolutely. More than that.
DAILY: What has football taught you this season?
HS: Take great joy and pride in your accomplishments and relish the time you have to spend on it. Because you got to get back to reality pretty quick, and nothing is guaranteed.
DAILY: Is it true you helped convince Joe Namath to play for Alabama?
HS: I spent 10 days up there trying to convince him, sure I did. I ran out of money and everything else. We were already in training camp when [Bear] Bryant gets a call from [then Maryland coach] Tom Nugent that Joe Namath was not going to be allowed into Maryland. And Tom and Bryant were great drinking buddies. He called Bryant to get him out of the East so he wouldn’t have to play against him. So I go in to see Carnie Leslie, the athletic director, and said, ‘Coach wants to send me up there.’ And the reason he wants to send me up there was because Joe’s brother Frank Namath was a freshman with me at the University of Kentucky, both of us recruited by Bryant in 1952.
So when Joe became available, Bryant sent me up there probably on a lark. Maybe I could do something before Notre Dame and Ohio State and Penn State and all those people descended on Beaver Falls [Pa.]. I told Carnie, ‘I got to get out of here. Coach wants me in Beaver Falls as quickly as I can, so please give me some money.’ So he reached into his corn sack and pulled out of a handful of bills, and gave them to me. He didn’t even count ’em out. He didn’t dig deep enough. He didn’t get to the twenty dollar bills.
DAILY: You spent 10 days up there for one guy?
HS: Maybe it wasn’t 10. It was eight. I was in a hotel. I didn’t have enough to feed me and Joe and buy airline tickets for the both of us. But I spent every moment I could with the Namath family, particularly his mother. His mother was going be the one Joe would listen to. So I spent a lot of time in the house with his mom even when Joe was down in town playing pool, or whatever. I couldn’t stay with him all the time. But anyway she finally asked me to come to dinner, oh, the eighth night. And when I got there Joe said to me “Boy, you must have really impressed my mom because she’s got chicken and dumplings.” At that time, he didn’t say he was gonna come, but he did say he would make the trip to Tuscaloosa. I got him back to Tuscaloosa, where Coach Bryant closed the deal. And he [Namath] made the difference.
DAILY: As a college coach you put south Florida on the map. What was your fondest memory from your time with the Hurricanes?
HS: The University of Miami? [Sighs] Well, obviously us going into 1983 with a loss to the University of Florida, 28-3, in the opening game. That was Bernie Kosar’s first year, redshirt freshman … We went in this time against their seniors, and they were really good. Kosar had the best game a freshman has ever had at Miami. He completed, whew, enough passes to tie Jim Kelly’s record, who was a senior when he set it. We had 350 yards throwing. We got beat. That was because we had six turnovers. We played a hell of a defensive game, a hell of an offensive game, in a loss. That was the backdrop to where we had to go to get to a chance to play Nebraska [in the Orange Bowl].
DAILY: So that set in motion your championship season? A loss?
HS: Yeah. I thought ‘God, coach, your team played like winners. We physically whipped them. We moved the ball. We did everything that we could control. And yet we got beat like that.’ Normally I would have taken that team back to Miami — we were in Gainesville — and got them up at 5 a.m. and scrimmage the crap out of them. Scrimmage so long we finally figure out how to not get beat that badly. We always said we would never be beaten. We might be behind when the clock ran out, but we are not going to be beaten. So I came into the locker room and I said, ‘I better get this right.’ So I went in there and said, ‘You guys played as hard and tough and as good a football game as I’ve ever coached. You guys were winners here today … we are going to go home and get ready to play Houston, a game we should win.’
And we won and we won and won. Got some close ones. The last one against Bobby [Bowden] at his place [Florida State], we had to kick a field goal with no time left to go to the Orange Bowl. And then Nebraska. If we found a way to beat those guys, it would be earth-shattering. A football fan’s delight, because they were an awful monster. A gigantic Goliath. We were David. Kosar then plays the game of his life, the defense may have played the game of their lives because Nebraska averaged over 35 points a game. Think it was 42. And they got 30. We had to come up with some good plays at the end there to win it, but we did force them to resort to the f——-ing fumblerooski. I told them before the game if those bastards have to run the fumblerooski, come to the sidelines and party because they have given up their right of manhood.
DAILY: Who developed into your greatest player at Miami?
HS: Kosar made the most difference, but there may not have been a Kosar if not for Jim Kelly. Kelly was our pivotal one; won the pivotal game … I had this dilemma with Kelly when he was a freshman. I took the smart way out, the easiest way out, and I didn’t play him at first. He played in a backup role. We had three wins, four losses going into our eighth game of the season. Penn State. And I said, ‘I don’t give a s—-, if we have any chance of going into Penn State and beating them with that new addition to their stadium up there, it’s gotta be Kelly but I’m not going to tell anyone about it.’ So I did.
I didn’t tell Kelly until right before the game. I told him at the pregame meal. He walks out right after I told him, goes to the bathroom and throws up. I thought ‘What the hell have I done? The guy throws up over a football game? What kind of clown is this?’ So we go out there and after a little luck, we got the ball. The wind was in our face. The second pass we throw, it’s a crossing pattern over the middle. Goes 50 yards … We end up beating them. We win that game. We go 2-2 with Kelly. Not bad. That was the beginning.
DAILY: It’s almost been 40 years since the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ undefeated season. What does a team like the Packers have to do to pull off a perfect year?
HS: Well, I knew what Shula did to pull it off. His take on how you win football games is tailor-made for consistency over a long period of time. His major tutor was [Hall of Famer] Paul Brown, and Paul was the most consistent coach. He was the one that started using playbooks. He did all the scholastic things that went with football. Don picked up on that. His dad was a fisherman. He was educated by the Jesuits. He went to Mass every morning, 6 a.m., the only guy that beat me to work in my life. And I told everybody, if you knew what day it was, if you looked at the calendar and it was September 6, and that’s a Friday, you knew where you were if you worked there. If you were a Dolphin, you knew what you were gonna do that day, 365 days before that day, and 365 days after that day. You never looked past the upcoming game. You’d dwell on it, win or lose, for one day. On the second day, you were right back where you were before. There wouldn’t be many new plays, just enough to make a little bit of a difference.
DAILY: What advice would you give someone trying to break into coaching?
HS: Make sure this is what you want to do, son. Because unless you put your whole body and heart and soul into it, you don’t have a chance. But if you do, then anything is possible.
DAILY: You played and worked for Coach Bryant, won national titles and Super Bowls, and built a program from scratch here at Florida Atlantic. What do you think your football legacy is going to be?
HS: I guess it’s gonna be ‘not very smart.’ Could have coached [the University of] Miami for a long time. Leaving Don Shula and the Miami Dolphins in ’72 to take the head job in Baltimore [was dumb]. Those two things were very, very dumb. I wasn’t smart enough to follow Coach Bryant’s instructions and never go to any school or become the head coach anywhere where you don’t get hired by the head man …
When I left the Dolphins, I should have dealt with [Colts owner Bob] Irsay. Irsay wasn’t involved with the negotiations. It was all [general manager] Joe Thomas. When I got up there, I was invited to go to his home, I found out what everybody else knew and I didn’t know: He was a terrible alcoholic. And he’s the guy that fired me on the sidelines in Philadelphia because I didn’t have Bert Jones in the game. I was a one-year coach up there.
When I went out to Oklahoma, I was hired by Donnie Duncan, their athletic director. He was in a battling match with Barry Switzer to keep him from having his choice to become the head coach, John Blake. The president of the school was a senator who came back just as I was being hired. He didn’t have anything to do with hiring me. I went out to his house to meet with him, and I could tell he was in Switzer’s corner. So I was a coach that didn’t make very good choices about where he should coach, or how long he should stay in a place. And I found out that God makes better choices for me than I do …
He led me to Louisville. It was a great decision because I had a major impact on football in the state of Kentucky. I was able to revive that Louisville program, I was able to win two major bowl games that they had never won before. When we beat Alabama, 34-7, in the [1991] Fiesta Bowl, Louisville swelled like a gigantic beach ball. It was ego swell … Louisville has now taken its place as a good football program. I coined a phrase up there: ‘It’s on a collision course with the national championship, the only variable is time.’ People still shout it up there.
