Twenty-five years ago today, the Miami Hurricanes and Nebraska Cornhuskers played what may have been the greatest U.S. college football bowl game ever.
Miami's 31-30 win in the 1984 Orange Bowl over previously unbeaten Nebraska is remembered most for the way it ended, when Nebraska head coach Tom Osborne ordered his team to attempt a two-point convert in the dying seconds.
But when a pass by quarterback Turner Gill - who will coach the University at Buffalo Bulls against the Connecticut Huskies in the International Bowl tomorrow at Toronto's Rogers Centre - fell incomplete, it marked not only Miami's first national championship but a game that changed college football forever.
Big, powerful teams dominated American college football in the 1980s by running far more than throwing the ball. Nebraska was better at it than most, with Gill running an option offence powered by Heisman Trophy winner Mike Rozier.
By contrast, Miami head coach Howard Schnellenberger had revitalized the program by installing a pro-style offence he believed would shake-up the college ranks and allow the Hurricanes to compete with more talented teams.
"Schnellenberger's idea of a pro offence in college was something people looked at with one eye open and one closed, like, what's he doing here?" said Miami centre Ian Sinclair, a Canadian who would go on to play in the CFL for the B.C. Lions. "Now, you see it all over the place."
Schnellenberger, still coaching Florida Atlantic University at 74, is the type of coach who can quiet a room with just a stare, in the mode of his mentors Bear Bryant and Don Shula.
"Teams that didn't have the talent level to compete against teams like Nebraska, the only way to have a chance was to throw the ball," recalls Montreal Alouettes head coach Marc Trestman, who was Miami's quarterback coach that season. "We had a quarterback in Bernie Kosar whom we trusted and believed could get it done. And we knew the only way was to just let it go."
The Hurricanes did exactly that, jumping out to a 17-0 lead behind Kosar, then a freshman, who passed for 300 yards in the game. The Cornhuskers tied the game 17-17 in the second half, but Miami scored two more touchdowns to lead 31-17 before the 'Huskers mounted one more comeback, which ended when Miami safety Ken Calhoun deflected Gill's convert pass attempt.
Miami's stunning upset set in motion changes across the college football landscape.
Programs started adopting more pass-oriented attacks and today, pro-style offences are no longer the exception.
Can the 1984 Orange Bowl champions take credit for that?
"Look at what's happened in college football," Trestman said. "Teams effective at throwing the football have the potential to create upsets on a weekly basis. If you put it on a historical timeline and look at how many more teams are throwing the football, it's certainly multiplied exponentially over time. If you were one-dimensional, you could win in the 1980s. That's not the case any more."
But the 1984 Orange Bowl is forever remembered for its finish.
After Gill pitched the ball to backup running back Jeff Smith for a 24-yard touchdown run on fourth down to make the score 31-30, NBC announcer John Brodie said: "I have not seen the kicker come on the field and I don't think he's coming on the field."
With no overtime in college football at the time, Nebraska wasn't willing to kick for the tying extra point and settle for a record of 12-0-1 - no matter that the 'Huskers would likely have been crowned national champions.
"Our goal was to be 13-0 and I would have been shocked or stunned if we had not gone for two [points]" Gill said. "And I pretty much knew the play that would be called in. I was expecting it."
Former NFL star Joe Namath, who had played for Schnellenberger when he was an assistant to Bryant at the University of Alabama, was on the sideline that game. The night before he had given a speech to the team, and, as Nebraska scrimmaged for the two-point try, Namath turned to the players and told them not to worry.
"That's when it hit me," Sinclair said. "I was sitting there thinking 'if they get those two points, we'll be a footnote somewhere and it'll be like it never happened.' In three or four years, people would've just remembered Nebraska as the greatest team ever. To come up that short would've been the epitome of coming up short."