Tag Archives: Howard Schnellenberger

Critical Year for U of L Cards, Part I: How We Got Here

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Warning: Some content contained herein may be painful for diehard Louisville Cardinal football fans. 

November 9. 2006.

It was the moment Cardinal Faithful had believed would arrive since The Schnell had proclaimed it inevitable years before.

The Cardinals were not only on the cusp of a seemingly implausible dream come true, they had breached the perimeter.

Yes, Schnellenberger, not as wise about the future of college football as he thought, had jumped ship in a pique. He didn’t like that the school prexy had joined a conference. So The Pipe left for a one and done campaign as Supreme Commander Sooner Nation.

Yet his promise remained in the hearts of the loyal, though the vision faded somewhat in the campaigns right after he abdicated. There was the immediate and precipitous decline under Ron Cooper. A revival of belief under John L. Smith. But he too didn’t buy in entirely, going AWOL in Mobile during a bowl game after some success.

Enter the savant. Bobby Petrino 1.0. Continue reading Critical Year for U of L Cards, Part I: How We Got Here →

SchnellSpeak Redux: Still the Master

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schindexOh those were heady times, the halcyon era when Howard Schnellenberger roamed the sidelines of gridirons across the land as THE meerschaum toting colossus.

From his days at Miami, his time at U of L, to his short stint as the erstwhile “Supreme Commander, Sooner Nation,” cut short by David Boren, the guy with the clankingest cojones in SoonerLand, to his years as His Highness of Hoot for the Florida Atlantic Fighting Owls, he was the Pigskin Poet Laureate.

And I, ever willing to ride the coattails of another to fame and fortune, hopped on board the skewed syntax and fractured bon mots of The Schnell, like Victor Espinoza on American Pharoah, to become a Behemoth of the Blogosphere.

SchnellSpeak of the Week was my franchise. A simple reiteration of the pigskin pontifications of Master Builder Howard Schnellenberger rocketed my clicks into the cybergalaxy.

The Schnell’s been in retirement these past few years, a Roving Ambassador for FAU.

But it’s oh so heartening to know that he’s lost nary a scintilla of semantical sensationalism, nor a grain of grammatical grandiosity. Continue reading SchnellSpeak Redux: Still the Master →