by Adam Lazarus
Although as a child and teenager, Jim hated this forced practice, he later said, “Looking back now, I’m really glad I had a father like mine.”
Joe’s training produced consecutive trips to the National Punt, Pass and Kick competition in 1970 and 1971. Jim was just as good at baseball and basketball. By age fifteen, he was ready to compete on the high school level, against kids older and bigger than he was.
The Bulldogs’ sophomore quarterback (during Jim’s freshman year, his brother Ray accounted for five touchdowns, six extra points, and a field goal in a rout of Shannock Valley), Kelly, and East Brady finished 7-2 in 1975. As a junior and senior, Kelly was the Little-12 Conference’s best player, on both offense and defense. He capped off his high school career with a twenty-three-game undefeated streak. In the team’s second consecutive bid for the conference championship—a 13-13 tie the year before meant East Brady had to share the honors with Clarion-Limestone—Kelly completed thirteen of seventeen passes for 155 yards and a touchdown.
“[East Brady] was a small town, I think we only had about thirty players on our football team. And in that community everything was about football, everything was sports. I think we only had about seven hundred people in our hometown,” Kelly recalled. “But the bottom line is we had passion, we took it serious. We wanted to win, we were used to winning.”
All that winning enticed powerhouse colleges programs—Tennessee, the University of Pittsburgh, Notre Dame—to court Kelly. But at the outset, only one school mattered.
“I wanted to play for Penn State, I wanted to play quarterback there. Penn State was my team. Where I’m from you’re either Pitt or Penn State and I was always a Nittany Lion fan.”
Paterno’s assistant, J. T. White, handled Kelly’s recruitment, visiting the boy’s home and attending his high school basketball games. But Penn State’s interest didn’t exactly mesh with Kelly’s boyhood dream. Paterno had already signed Terry Rakowski, from North Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, and Frank Rocco, from Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, each a high school all-American quarterback. Content with his quarterback prospects, Paterno offered Kelly a scholarship as a linebacker.
“Well, look at it like this,” Pat Kelly told his younger brother about a possible switch in positions, “I’ve been in football a long time and I’ve been on a lot of team planes. And I can tell you that the pretty flight attendants never ask where the linebackers are; they want to know where the quarterback’s sitting.”
Jim never again considered becoming a Nittany Lion.
“Quarterback was the only position for me. And nothing was about to change that. Not even a full scholarship offer from Penn State. I do give Paterno a lot of credit for being up-front with me before I signed on the dotted line. When talking to recruits, a lot of college coaches promise the moon, the stars, and the sun . . . and the kids end up being left in one big fog.”
Jim Kelly was not the only western Pennsylvania boy during the late 1970s that didn’t quite agree with the fabled Nittany Lions head coach.
Within a few weeks of signing the paperwork committing to Penn State, Jeff Hostetler received some off-putting news. Sports Illustrated had listed the nation’s top ten recruiting classes. Penn State had been ranked fourth, behind the University of Southern California, Notre Dame, and Southern Methodist (who had just nabbed a pair of star running backs, the famed “Pony Express” backfield of Eric Dickerson and Craig James). One phrase in the summary of Penn State’s class stunned the entire Hostetler family.
“Lots of big linemen, the nation’s premier tight end, Mike McCloskey, a hot quarterback prospect in Todd Blackledge, and, of course, a future All-American linebacker, Jeff Hostetler.”
Norm Hostetler compounded the confusion by telling reporters on signing day: “Jeff only wanted to go to college as a quarterback and Penn State is recruiting him as a quarterback. He has an understanding that they’ll let him stay at the position as long as he wants to.”
Hostetler was never guaranteed the quarterback’s job, and appropriately, Penn State added depth to the roster by recruiting other quarterbacks, such as Blackledge, a top prospect from Canton, Ohio. Frank Rocco and Terry Rakowski—the quarterbacks who kept Jim Kelly away from Happy Valley—were also on scholarship. A crowded quarterback pool for the 1979 season, Hostetler’s freshman year, made sense: Chuck Fusina, the Heisman Trophy runner-up a year earlier, had just graduated.
Paterno settled on junior Dayle Tate to run his offense, but each one of the underclassmen (except Blackledge) saw playing opportunities. Eventually, Rakowski was switched to flanker and Hostetler competed with Rocco for the second spot.
“Jeff Hostetler isn’t quite ready to run the show by himself,” observed one Penn State beat writer. “It is quite revealing, though, that Paterno considers this young freshman capable enough of doing the backup work only two months after he arrived on campus.”
An injured thumb bothered Tate late in the season, and Paterno switched back and forth between Tate, Rocco, and Hostetler. Rotating quarterbacks partly caused a disappointing 1979 season. Penn State finished 8-4, the single season between 1977 and 1982 that the school did not win at least ten games. Most disappointing was a 29-14 loss to rival Pitt, who the Nittany Lions routinely thumped. That day, Hostetler saw his most extensive action of the season, completing six of sixteen pass attempts for seventy-two yards and an interception. Another freshman quarterback from western Pennsylvania, Dan Marino, completely outplayed Hostetler that day at Beaver Stadium.
Both Penn State and Jeff Hostetler opened the next decade optimistic. A great spring convinced the coaching staff to give him the job for the 1980 season opener against Colgate, even though Paterno refused to announce his starter until the Friday before game day.
“At this stage, Jeff can do some things that will help us win the game,” Paterno declared. “[But] any one of them could start and do a great job for us. It’s going to be a long year and as much as we’re going to ask the quarterbacks to do, all three will see plenty of playing time.”
As Paterno hinted, the quarterback carousel continued throughout 1980. Although Blackledge posted better numbers against Colgate, and Rocco was not relegated to third string—“There’s a lot of things about being a head football coach that you don’t like. . . . I don’t know if we’re being fair to Frank,” Paterno said on his weekly television show—Hostetler retained the starting job.
While Penn State fans booed during a late September loss to third-ranked Nebraska, Hostetler did not play well, completing just one pass, fumbling two snaps from center, and being sacked four times. After the loss, Paterno selected Blackledge to run the offense. The move seemed ingenious from the start, as the redshirt freshman accounted for all three touchdowns (including a forty-three-yard fourth quarter scamper to clinch the game) during Penn State’s 29-21 road victory over ninth-ranked Missouri.
But Blackledge struggled with incompletions and interceptions during all but one of his starts. In early October, with the Nittany Lions behind 7-6 against Temple, Blackledge fumbled near the goal line (a few series after throwing an interception) and Paterno turned back to Hostetler. He rewarded the coach with six scoring drives. Hostetler accounted for two rushing touchdowns and completed seven of his ten pass attempts in the 50-7 comeback.
“I played extremely well and was told that I would start the next week against Pitt,” he said, “and practiced that way until a day or two before the game and then was told that I wasn’t gonna start but that I was gonna play a lot. And I never ended up taking a snap that game.”
Penn State lost 14-9 to Marino’s Panthers. A last-minute Nittany Lion drive ended when Blackledge, attempting to throw the ball out-of-bounds, was intercepted by Pitt’s Carlton Williamson. Again, Hostetler expected a return to the lineup in the team’s next contest.
“For the bowl game, I was told I was gonna start and practiced that way, and a day or two before the game, I was told I wasn’t gonna start but I was gonna be playing
an awful lot and the same thing happened: I didn’t get to play.”
Penn State defeated Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl 26-10, largely because of clutch passes and runs by Blackledge. Watching virtually the entire game from the sidelines of Sun Devil Stadium, Jeff Hostetler decided it was time for him to leave.
“Joe had to make a decision, and he made it,” Dolly Hostetler remarked a few years later. “It’s just that he made the wrong one.”
The mother of four Penn State varsity athletes, and now mother-in-law of a fifth one, did not have the most objective opinion. Blackledge would go on to lead the Nittany Lions to twenty-one victories during the next two years, win the Davey O’Brien Award (given to the nation’s top quarterback), and deliver both Paterno and Penn State their first national championship in January 1983.
As much as it pained him, Jeff Hostetler chose to abandon his boyhood dream of playing football for the Nittany Lions.
It was probably the most difficult thing for me to do, to pull up and leave Penn State which I had a sister that was living up there—who married a player that I was a teammate of—I had all kinds of friends there, my two older brothers had gone there, and my younger brother was there on a baseball scholarship. So it was an extremely tough decision to make. But I knew the Lord had blessed me with an ability to play and I felt like he wanted to use me somewhere. And so I thought, “I have to go somewhere.”
Jim Kelly moved past his Penn State disappointment and committed to the University of Miami in the spring of 1978. Lou Saban, former head coach of the Buffalo Bills and newly hired man-in-charge for the Hurricanes program, personally flew to the Kelly home to ensure the signing.
An injury to Kelly’s ankle during training camp clinched the freshman’s status as a redshirt during the 1978 season, although he did run plays with the first team in practice. Having been a focal point of a balanced offense at East Brady, Kelly was unaccustomed to Saban’s run-oriented, option-style approach. The team’s star running back “would constantly complain because I could never get outside fast enough to get him the ball for the option. I just didn’t have the speed to keep up with him.”
“What’s wrong with you,” the player once yelled at Kelly.
“Hey, I ain’t no option quarterback,” he replied.
“Well, if you want to be on this damn team, you better become one.”
Kelly adhered to the player’s order: the entire offense had been designed around the running back, who everyone called “O. J.”
A year of experience sent Kelly into his second training camp poised to contend for the starter’s job. Also to his advantage was a complete overhaul to the Hurricane’s coaching staff. Saban left south Florida after just two seasons to take over the top post at West Point. The Hurricanes’ athletic department did not look far for a new head coach, bringing in Miami Dolphins offensive coordinator Howard Schnellenberger and his pro-style, balanced offense.
Once Bear Bryant’s top assistant at the University of Alabama—he famously recruited Joe Namath to Tuscaloosa—Schnellenberger worked in the pros under George Allen with the Los Angeles Rams and under Don Shula with the Miami Dolphins. In between, he had a brief stint as the head coach of the Baltimore Colts. In Baltimore, Schnellenberger learned a critical lesson in the nurturing of young quarterback talent.
“When I coached up there for one year, I had Marty Domres as the incumbent quarterback and Bert Jones as the [rookie] quarterback,” Schnellenberger recalled. “And like a rookie coach, I started Bert Jones in the opening game. I knew it was a big chance, but we would make quicker progress with him than with Marty Domres as the quarterback. But it turned out just like I feared. The offense wasn’t ready to win, the defense wasn’t ready to win, and Bert Jones had a really rough start up there and I almost ruined him. . . . When I got to Miami and saw a great potential in Jim Kelly, I didn’t want to screw that up again.”
Schnellenberger—who left Baltimore two years prior to Bert Jones winning the 1976 NFL MVP Award—chose sophomore Mike Rodrigue to start the 1979 season at quarterback. Rodrigue directed the Hurricanes to three wins in the first seven games, a characteristically modest record for a program that struggled to succeed, both financially and in the standings. The combination of gorgeous south Florida weather, a monopoly held by Shula’s two-time world champion Dolphins, and a historically mediocre product, meant the university’s football program failed to attract fans to the Orange Bowl.
Since its inception, the program earned a handful of bowl appearances and produced great players and all-Americans, including future NFL stars Ted Hendricks and Chuck Foreman. But in fifty-two seasons, the Hurricanes did not have a signature win that vaulted the program to an elite standing.
That all changed on November 3, 1979. Nineteen-point underdogs, Miami traveled north to State College, Pennsylvania, for another difficult test against Joe Paterno’s bunch. The Hurricanes had lost four consecutive matchups with Penn State, including a 49-7 drubbing two years earlier.
Schnellenberger knew that to have a chance, they would have to improvise.
“We felt we had to pass to beat Penn State . . . because we felt their secondary is not as strong as their front seven,” the coach told reporters. “Because we felt we had to throw the ball, we went with Kelly, because he is our best thrower.”
Penn State had expected to see the option quarterback Rodrigue under center. Schnellenberger didn’t tell anyone of his intended lineup change, including Jim Kelly.
“Just a few hours before the game, he said ‘I’ve decided to start you at quarterback today,’” Kelly said. “And the first thing I did was I went to the bathroom after I got done talking to him and threw up.”
That unique pregame ritual would continue throughout the remainder of his college and professional playing career. Aside from the unpleasant visual image, Kelly’s new warm-up routine had a surprisingly strong impact on his teammates.
“Schnellenberger was giving us our getting-ready-to-go-on-the-field speech and during the speech you could just hear Jim in the toilet puking his guts out,” teammate Mark Rush remembered years later. “From that day on every game, we were not ready to go on that field until we heard Jim puke. Once he started puking, everybody would just start screaming ‘all right, let’s go, we’re ready!’”
Kelly’s howling heaves inspired the Hurricanes. On the first play from scrimmage, fullback Chris Hobbs caught a short pass and raced fifty-seven yards to set up a short field goal. Minutes later, Kelly converted a Penn State turnover into a touchdown pass to Jim Joiner.
Beneath a rainy, cloudy sky, Kelly took command of the offense, calling audibles from the sidelines, completing a slew of short passes, and ignoring the dislocated jaw that he suffered on the game’s opening play. And although his brothers Dan and Kevin could not make the trip—they were playing Brockway for a Little 12 conference championship that same afternoon—forty-five friends and family members cheered Jim on from the Beaver Stadium stands.
Penn State’s trademark ground game—they would run the ball sixty-five times for 248 yards on this day—narrowed the score to 13-10 at the half. But Kelly tossed two second-half touchdown passes to give “lowly Miami,” as one newspaper noted, a 26-10 advantage.
“We’re not a real good catch-up football team,” said Paterno afterwards. “We used two tight ends and tried to control the football. We’re aware of our limitations. I blame myself, not (quarterback) Dayle Tate. Maybe we didn’t give him enough offenses to be a good football team.”
With freshman Jeff Hostetler watching from the Penn State sidelines, Tate completed eleven of twenty passes for 109 yards and threw three interceptions. The Hurricane defense tossed a shutout in the second half to give the university a landmark victory.
“This day will go down in the history of Miami football as the day we turned our football program around,” proclaimed Schnellenberger.
Jim Kelly, who completed eighteen of thirty passes for 280 yards and three touc
hdowns, was equally proud, of both the team’s win and his own personal victory.
“Afterward, Paterno shook my hand, but he didn’t say much. I think he just wanted to get off the field. Fast.”
Victory over one of the most storied programs in college football did not transform Miami into a national power overnight. In fact, the Hurricanes were dismantled 30-0 in the next contest against Alabama—Kelly completed only two of fifteen passes—then suffered a 40-15 loss to Notre Dame in Japan. But they defeated rival Florida in the season finale and entered the off-season confident about the future.
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.
