Howard Schnellenberger, College Coach Who Built Winners, Dies at 87

After posting a 41-16 record at Miami, Schnellenberger left in 1984 for a prospective head-coaching post in the short-lived United States Football League. But that deal collapsed, and in 1985 he returned to Louisville, where he had grown up, to coach the Cardinals.

He said he was unfazed by the challenge of reviving a football program that had long been in the shadow of the school’s basketball squads.

“We’re on a collision course with the national championship,” he said at his introductory news conference. “The only variable is time.”

He coached Louisville to a pair of bowl victories, most notably a 34-7 rout of Alabama in the 1991 New Year’s Day Fiesta Bowl, the climax of a 10-1-1 season.

Schnellenberger became the head coach at Oklahoma in 1995. But the Sooners went only 5-5-1, and he resigned.

He retired after that, but Florida Atlantic University hired him in 1998 to raise funds for the creation of a football program. He began recruiting players as the head coach a year later, and his first team took the field in 2001, in Division 1-AA. Florida Atlantic transitioned to the higher Division 1-A in 2004 and won the 2007 New Orleans Bowl and the 2008 Motor City Bowl at that level.

Howard Leslie Schnellenberger was born on March 16, 1934, in Saint Meinrad, Ind. He was of German-American descent. His father was a truck driver, and his mother worked in a munitions plant during World War II.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/sports/football/howard-schnellenberger-dead.html