Joel Auerbach / Associated Press
Howard Schnellenberger, who led Miami to a national college football championship in 1983, died at the age of 87.
Florida Atlantic University, where Schnellenberger made his last stop as a coach from 2001 to 2011, announced the news on Saturday by Tim Reynolds from the Associated Press.
The Indiana native also served as the head coach of the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, as well as Oklahoma and Louisville at the college level during a career spanning seven decades.
Schnellenberger was a prominent striker in Kentucky in the mid-1950s and returned to the Wildcats program as an assistant in 1959 to begin his coaching career.
He rose through the ranks, spending time under legendary coaches like Bear Bryant in Alabama, Los Angeles Rams ‘George Allen and Miami Dolphins’ Don Shula, which helped pave the way for his own team leadership success.
“I trained with some great coaches,” said Schnellenberger Bill Levy in Naples News in 2015. “I learned by osmosis.”
His most successful coaching spell occurred in five seasons in Miami from 1979 to 1983. He broke a record 41-16, highlighted by an 11-1 mark in his last season with the program, when hurricanes defeated Nebraska 31 -30 in the Orange Bowl to win the national title.
Schnellenberger left Canes to look for an opportunity at the USFL, but laid the foundation they would have in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
He would spend 10 years in Louisville and a season in Oklahoma. He then became the director of football operations for Florida Atlantic in 1998, before returning to the sideline in 2001, when the program began to be played in Division I-AA.
FAU has since grown to become an FBS program that plays its home games at Howard Schnellenberger Field at FAU Stadium, which is called “The House Howard Built”.
His career accolades were honored in January, when he received the 2021 Bear Bryant Lifetime Achievement Award, closing his career cycle from his time on Bryant’s team in the 1960s.