Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [14]
“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