RIP Howard Schnellenberger, who should have been Nick Saban before Nick Saban | Commentary

The last time I sat down for an interview with Howard Schnellenberger was 17 years ago when he was just starting the fledgling football program at FAU and he sat in his office underneath a painting of his old college coach — Paul “Bear” Bryant.

I asked him then if he ever thought about what might have been if he hadn’t left the University of Miami all those years ago to take a supposedly high-paying job with the United States Football League — a job that never, ever materialized.

Would he have been the modern-day version of his mentor — The Bear?

Would he have been Nick Saban before Nick Saban?

Schnellenberger admitted he used think about it a lot, but on this particular day he was in no mood to talk about it.

“It’s ancient history,” Schellenberger said then. “A closed chapter.”

Schnellenberger’s time at Miami isn’t just a chapter; it’s the Genesis of the college football religion in our state. And sadly, the father and creator of collegiate gridiron greatness in Florida passed away on Saturday.

Howard Schnellenberger was 87.

“He showed us it could be done,” Schnellenberger’s old rival, Florida State legend Bobby Bowden, told me several years ago.

Did he ever.

He showed the entire country what college football in the State of Florida was all about.

He took over a moribund Miami program in 1979 — a program bankrupt of money and morale and on the verge of being shut down by school administrators –– and transformed the Hurricanes into one of the greatest dynasties in modern college football history.

It was called the “Miracle in Miami” that Jan. 2, 1984 night in the Orange Bowl when Schellenberger’s Hurricanes won the national title and shocked the world by beating a seemingly invincible Nebraska Cornhuskers team that was being hailed as the greatest in college football history. As I wrote years later when Schellenberger announced his retirement, it wasn’t a “Miracle in Miami”; it was a “Metamorphosis in Miami.”

It was the night the college football landscape shifted. The big, plodding college football Clydesdales of the past were beaten by Schnellenberger’s swift, speedy Sunshine State Shetland ponies. Schnellenberger came to UM, built a recruiting wall around South Florida he called the “the State of Miami” and proceeded to load his roster with speed, speed and more speed.

“Coach Schnellenberger changed the way college football was played,” former college football head coach, ex-UM defensive coordinator and current U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville once told me. “He took wide receivers and made linebackers out of them. His whole philosophy was to put players on the field who could run.”

In the years to come, three other Miami football coaches — Jimmy Johnson, Dennis Erickson and Larry Coker — would go on to win four more national championships. Moreover, after Schnellenberger kicked the door in by winning the state’s first national title, the floodgates opened and eight other coaches — Johnson, Erickson, Coker, Bobby Bowden, Steve Spurrier, Urban Meyer, Jimbo Fisher and Scott Frost (upside-down face emoji) would combine to win 11 more.

“Without him, there is no Miami football,” UM’s official Twitter account posted Saturday after Schnellenberger’s death.

“The loss of Coach Schnellenberger is immeasurable in so many ways for the University of Miami family,” Miami AD Blake James said in a prepared statement. “He helped our University grow during a critical period of time and established a foundation for future success, on the football field and off.”

It is, of course, an absolute travesty that Schnellenberger never made the College Football Hall of Fame. The reason is because the HOF changed its criteria several years ago to mandate coaching candidates have at least 10 seasons and 100 or more games with a .600 winning percentage. Schnellenberger only won 51 percent of his games, mainly because any coach is going to lose a bunch of games when you resurrect two downtrodden programs (Miami and Louisville) and build another one (FAU) from scratch at a commuter school.

Which is why one of the great philosophical questions in college football history is what would Schnellenberger’s legacy be had he stayed at UM after winning the 1983 national championship? Would he have won four more national titles that his UM successors won? Or would he have won even more because UM would have had no coaching transitions and the instability that comes with them?

“Who knows how many national titles Coach Schnellenberger would have won if he’d stayed?” Coker told me right after he won his first national championship. “His success would have been off the charts.”

Instead, Schnellenberger resigned at UM after winning the national championship to accept a $3 million contract offer to become part-owner, general manager and head coach of The Spirit of Miami of the USFL — a franchise that was relocating from Washington, D.C. However, the USFL, at the urging of powerful, persuasive New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, announced it was shifting to a fall schedule to compete with the NFL. The owner of the Washington franchise did not want to go head-to-head with the popular Miami Dolphins, backed out of the deal and the Washington franchise instead moved to Orlando as the Renegades. Schnellenberger quit, Lee Corso became the coach of the short-lived Orlando Renegades and the USFL folded a year later.

“Yeah, it was a horse-[expletive] decision,” Schnellenberger once said of leaving Miami for the USFL. “… If you look at it objectively, it was the dumbest thing a human being could do.”

But there’s a reason Schnellenberger did it.

He did it because he was a dreamer.

He always believed in his heart that he could replicate what he did at Miami.

When he took over at Louisville, he declared the Cardinals were “on a collision course with a national championship.”

When he took over at FAU, I remember sitting in his office that day in 2004 as he smoked his trademark pipe, ran a finger-comb through his bushy mustache and said in that thundering, baritone voice of his, “By our seventh year, we will be competitive with the Floridas and Florida States and the top teams in the country.”

Of course, those bold predictions never came true.

But it doesn’t matter.

Howard Schnellenberger pulled off the greatest sports miracle in the history of our state.

He escorted national college football out of the dark ages and into the sunshine.

This column first appeared on OrlandoSentinel.com. Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2