[Backyard Football Unblocked Games
Eliora Shopbell
John Shaffer. The name, like the way he played quarterback, is bland and forgettable, which is why few people outside of the state of Pennsylvania even recall it anymore. When he graduated from Penn State as an academic All-American in the spring of 1987, he had a national championship ring and a reputation as a solid citizen who had no legitimate shot of making it in the National Football League. He went to training camp with the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent. By the end of August, he did something that many football players could never muster the courage to do: He asked to be cut. He had a degree in finance, with an internship waiting on Wall Street. He had another life to start. Maybe, he says now, he could have hung around for a couple of years, could have made a roster as someone's second or third option, could have spent that time aspiring to be something he'd probably never be. Maybe, if he had lost that one game, on a January evening in the Arizona desert, he would have felt he had to aspire to something more. Maybe, if he had lost that game, his entire life might have unfolded differently. But that was the thing about John Shaffer: He was one of those quarterbacks who specialized in not losing, one of those quarterbacks you hardly see anymore in major college football, one of those quarterbacks who not only shows up for class but actually cares about his classes, one of those quarterbacks whose job is not to alter the course of the game but simply not to screw the damn thing up. Shaffer was not fleet of foot, and he did not have a prodigious arm, and while he was broad-shouldered and generically handsome, he was not an imposing physical presence. Yet, in all of his games as a starter dating back to the seventh grade, Shaffer won 66 times and lost only once, on New Year's Day 1986, to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. This is not the story of that game. This is the story of a game that took place exactly one year and one day later, the last game, the best game, and the most important game Shaffer ever played. And it's a funny thing. Because if you go by the statistics of that night, if you measure a performance purely by the numbers, John Shaffer could not have been worse.
WINSTON MOSS, LINEBACKER, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI: "Their quarterback? I don't remember their quarterback." DON MEYERS, FIESTA BOWL SELECTION COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: "Joe (Paterno) had this quarterback -- I think his name was Shaffer. Joe told me, 'He'll never get a call from an NFL team.' I do think Shaffer would have a hard time playing big-time college football today." BEANO COOK, COLLEGE FOOTBALL HISTORIAN: "Penn State had less firepower than Sweden did in World War II." DANIEL STUBBS, DEFENSIVE END, MIAMI: "They couldn't throw the ball! All night, we're screaming at them, saying, 'Throw the ball!' They couldn't do it!"
But this was not the type of game you could judge by numbers. This was a game that turned every number and every statistical notion and every prediction upside down. This was a game shaped by its own hype and pregame story lines, by its own bloated sense of self-importance, by the fact that it served as a thumb in the eye of the bowl system and its antiquated sense of propriety.
Rob Tringali for ESPN.comShaffer skipped his shot at the NFL, asking to be cut by the Dallas Cowboys. He now calls the signals for his four children-- from left, John, 13, Hayley, 11, Kohl, 8, and Reed, 10 -- in Summit, N.J.
This was Jan. 2, 1987, and for the first time, the college football season had been extended beyond New Year's Day. Because of a quirk in the system, because Miami was ranked No. 1 and Penn State was ranked No. 2, and both schools were independents at the time, with no ties to any conferences, meaning no affiliations with any specific bowls, the Fiesta Bowl landed the dream matchup. Before this, the Fiesta had been second-tier, unable to stand up to the cabal of Rose, Cotton, Sugar and Orange, but now the Fiesta Bowl was in the right place at the right time, and so was NBC, which took the radical step of shifting the game to a Friday night and preempting its most popular television show to make room for, of all things, a college football game.
Two decades later, the men who played that game have become stock traders and broadcasters and salesmen and coaches and ministers. Some have fallen ill, and some have died, and some have spent time in police custody and some have spent time in the Canadian Football League and two of them, a punter and a quarterback from Miami, have defied the laws of genetics and are still playing in the NFL. But wherever they may be, wherever they may end up, they will remain united by this moment, a game between two teams with such contrasting styles that it felt like maybe something much larger was at stake, that maybe this was a referendum on where American sports were headed, for better or for worse.
BRUCE SKINNER, FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE FIESTA BOWL: "We had just signed a contract with Sunkist. It was the first title sponsorship of a bowl game. So, yes, I'll take the blame for that. There was a certain feeling that a title sponsorship should not be involved in a college football bowl game. But the Sunkist sponsorship allowed us to be competitive. Those other four bowls, they wanted to keep it as the big four, and I don't blame them for that."
MEYERS: "I started going down to Miami and talking to Sam Jankovich, their athletic director, and the coach, Jimmy Johnson. They said there was no way they were not going to the Orange Bowl, it was right in their backyard. But I kept going down there. We had to come up with a way to match the Orange Bowl's payoff, so we went to NBC and said if we could move this game off New Year's Day and move it into prime time, we could sell ads for a lot more money. They said, 'You're not moving it into prime time, because you're talking about preempting the most popular prime-time show on television. You're talking about "Miami Vice." ' But we sensed that this could change the entire bowl picture in college football. It was a true No. 1 versus a true No. 2, both undefeated, playing on a neutral field. And from NBC's perspective, it could change college football, too." This was his vision, grandiose and bold, and Meyers was unwilling to compromise on the scope of it. He exploited every angle. He stroked every ego. He played off the media. He worked his way up the ladder at NBC, and eventually he twisted enough arms in the entertainment division that they agreed to accommodate him, if he could actually secure the matchup. Getting Penn State wasn't much of a problem. Joe Paterno was 3-0 in the Fiesta Bowl; why wouldn't he want to play there? His team had more than a dozen fifth-year seniors who wanted nothing more than another chance at a national championship after the loss to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl the previous season. "If we have to play this game in a parking lot in Brooklyn," Paterno told Meyers, "we'll do it." But Penn State was never the No. 1 team that season, and in the end, the decision would not be Penn State's. There was never a question that Jimmy Johnson possessed the best team in the nation that year. The only question, in fact, was whether this was the most talented team college football had ever seen. It had a Heisman-winning quarterback in Vinny Testaverde, a top-flight backfield anchored by fullback Alonzo Highsmith, an unbearably cocky wide receiver, Michael Irvin, and a defense rife with size and speed and bubbling over with attitude. (Even the punter, Jeff Feagles, was one of the best at his position.) This was a new breed of college football team, an NFL developmental squad disguised as amateurs.
Johnson was new to the politics of the bowl picture, having come to Miami from Oklahoma State as a no-name coach in 1984. He saw no real reason for his team to leave Florida, home of the Orange Bowl, the Citrus Bowl and the Gator Bowl. His team had outscored its opponents 420-136, had already beaten Oklahoma, the defending national champion, and had been No. 1 ever since. Whoever they played, wherever they played, it would be a formality, a culmination of a season guided by destiny. What was the point in hauling across the country to play a team that might have been undefeated, yes, but had nearly lost to Cincinnati and barely beaten Maryland? So even after Meyers had secured more money from the sponsors, even after he'd coaxed more money out of NBC, even after he'd set up a fundraising banquet with Bob Hope, even after he'd delivered black satin sweat suits to the entire Miami team, and even after he'd arranged for the wives of the Miami coaches to get free treatments at a highbrow desert spa, he realized he needed one more flourish, one last appeal to the ego of a coach whose immaculate coiffure had already assumed a mythical significance. As an insurance policy, Meyers said he began calling reporters. Jimmy Johnson doesn't want to play Joe Paterno on a neutral field, he told them. Jimmy's afraid. When anyone at Miami asked him whether he might be the anonymous source making such statements, he denied it. Immediately after Miami's last victory over East Carolina, Johnson stood in front of a room full of reporters and confirmed that his team would be playing in the Fiesta Bowl, in prime time, against Penn State. With this team, why should he be afraid of anyone? TREY BAUER, LINEBACKER, PENN STATE: "As a group, they didn't seem very smart to me. No way that (expletive) would have happened at Penn State. But they were clearly at the front end of all that (expletive) you see now." STUBBS: "They were just ... bland. And we were doing things that teams are still doing today. You know how everybody puts up four fingers when the fourth quarter comes around? That was us. We were the first ones to cut our jerseys, and the NCAA made sure that isn't around no more. When we played Oklahoma, we didn't shake their hands, and now there's a rule you have to do it. People didn't respect us? We didn't care." ALONZO HIGHSMITH, RUNNING BACK, MIAMI: "Yeah, Jerome Brown had a gun on campus, and that put the program in a bad light. But they didn't mention how many of us graduated, how we weren't allowed to take those easy courses like other programs get away with. We were brash, and we did a lot of talking on the field, but if you asked the majority of college players, they wished their coaches would let them play like us."
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