Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [13]
Over the next two years, Kelly continued to develop physically. His best friend and roommate, Mark Rush, was the team’s exercise/weightlifting dynamo, and his “contagious” attitude contributed to Kelly’s increasing strength, size, and speed. But the aid of another mentor provided Kelly with the tools and knowledge to make the leap from talented underclassman to a polished and complete passer.
Just a month after Schnellenberger took over the team, he welcomed a critical new recruit to the Hurricanes program. But this was no teenage stud athlete; it was forty-four-year-old crew-cut-wearing Earl Morrall.
Morrall had played quarterback in the NFL for an incredible twenty-one seasons. The second overall pick in the 1956 draft out of Michigan State, he spent time, mostly as a backup, with San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and the New York Giants. At age thirty-four, he found career rebirth in Baltimore during the 1968 season.
In that year’s preseason, “something popped” in Johnny Unitas’ elbow following a defender’s hit on the reigning league MVP. Head coach Don Shula gave control of the offense to Morrall, who himself won the league MVP and quarterbacked the Colts to a 13-1 record and their famous doomed trip to Super Bowl III.
Shula left Baltimore to take over the Miami Dolphins in 1970. But two years later, he and Morrall (along with Schnellenberger, the Dolphins offensive coordinator) teamed up once again to replace a future Hall of Fame quarterback and guide a team to the Super Bowl. Bob Griese suffered a broken ankle in Week Five of the 1972 season, Morrall took over for the remainder of the regular season, and Miami won all eleven starts, including two playoff games. Griese returned to start Super Bowl VII for Miami, but the Dolphins’ undefeated season might not have been “perfect” without the thirty-eight-year-old Morrall at the helm.
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