The Zen of Howard Schnellenberger

rcade · November 20, 2006

Actual quote from Howard Schnellenberger to a Florida reporter about last night's game.

Well, it was a hard fought game by two teams that are looking for success who needed to have a game like this, needed to have any win, but to have a win like this was doubly gratifying.
I told the team, and I kind of felt that way, that it was the kind of situation you tend to think, ‘Boy this is getting pretty bleak and we are probably not going to win this damn thing.’ And then to have an interception like that save the game for you, you tend to get a feeling that God took a little mercy on us.
But in essence it is not that at all. It is the defense staying out there and battling it and battling it and battling it and many times could have given up because they had played so poorly in the middle of the field. They played well on the red zone end, forced them to kick two field goals. But then to have victory almost pulled away, but then to make an in-terception, someone in the quarterback’s face forcing an errant throw, somebody cover-ing a receiver, forcing an overthrow, then a guy came out of the secondary breaking on the ball making an interception. All the things you teach came into play, allowed us to keep the win.
As I told the staff, if I could orchestrate a win that would be the best vitamins for our football team it would have been the one that was orchestrated out there tonight.
Gary Nord said we wish we would have made a first down and not given them the ball back. And sure that would have been really good, a nice way to end it. But we wouldn’t have gotten all the stuff that happened after that in our memory bank.
For them to get the ball back and move it, and then they kicked it, and then we got the ball and couldn’t move it and had to kick, and then had to make an interception to save the win.
So all that was really good and I think that will be a big help to us in the development of our team.
It was a very hard-hitting game. I don’t know how many of their players were injured enough to be taken out of the game. We had three we had to help off the field. One has a broken leg, one has a major concussion, the other one has got an ankle.
So we’ll lick our wounds and sprint back home, as opposed to limp back home.

gksmith · November 20, 2006

Howard Schnellenberger is a class guy.

He was head coach of Miami before everyone after him turned it into a thug hangout. After he left, Miami was really talented, but very gansta-ish, full of themselves, and just very low class.

If there is a school other then UNT that I would like to see suceed, it is FAU under Schnellenberger.