Seventy-five years ago today, Don Shula was a halfback on the John Carroll University football team that beat Canisius College, 14-13, in the Great Lakes Bowl. This means Shula began bedeviling Buffalo sports teams long before his Miami Dolphins beat the Bills 20 consecutive times through the 1970s.
“That’s funny,” says Brian Polian, John Carroll’s new athletics director. “Coach Shula is why I came here as a student.”
When Brian’s father, Bill, was general manager of the Buffalo Bills, he served with Shula on the NFL’s competition committee. Bill’s son Chris, who played at St. Francis, was looking for a place to play college football. Bill happened to mention this to Shula, who highly recommended his alma mater.
“Chris came here and really liked it,” Brian said by phone from Cleveland on Monday. “And I ended up following Chris.”
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Brian, who also played at St. Francis, graduated from John Carroll in 1997 and has worked in college coaching for most of the years since, including a stint at the University at Buffalo. He was head coach at Nevada and an assistant coach at Notre Dame and at LSU, among several other stops. This year he came back to John Carroll as athletics director.
“I’m using different muscles, but it’s great to be back,” he says. “This is a place I know and love.”
At 48, he’s too young to know much about the Great Lakes Bowl, which lasted for only two years. The first one, in 1947, was the first bowl game for Paul “Bear” Bryant. (He would coach in 28 more.) Bryant’s Kentucky Wildcats beat Villanova’s Wildcats, 24-14, with George Blanda as Kentucky’s quarterback and placekicker.
The bowl was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus in Cleveland. They had originally invited Notre Dame and Michigan, but those mighty programs turned them down. Only 15,000 fans came out for Kentucky-Villanova, so the next year the Knights decided they needed an Ohio team. They considered Baldwin-Wallace, Dayton and Miami of Ohio before settling on John Carroll, which had lost its opener to Dayton but went 6-0-2 the rest of the way.
The next question was whom the Blue Streaks would play. As it turned out, a game between Canisius and St. Bonaventure served as a de facto playoff for the bowl berth. The Griffs came in at 5-1, their only loss at Youngstown. The Bonnies came in 4-0-1, with a win at home against William & Mary and a 7-7 tie at Boston College. A boisterous crowd of 32,451 watched the Little Three slugfest at Civic Stadium, not yet called War Memorial.
“Howie Willis, the little 160-pound triple-threat flash of the Canisius College football machine, made himself a niche among Western New York’s all-time collegiate greats,” wrote Mike Abdo in the Olean Times Herald. “And he made it in such a way that St. Bonaventure’s unbeaten grid skein lies smoldering in the wake of a 14-6 Canisius triumph.”
The Griffs added a win at Toledo and a tie at Marshall and came into the Great Lakes Bowl at 7-1-1 to the Blue Streaks’ 6-1-2.
John Carroll led 7-0 at the half, but Canisius scored twice in the third quarter to take a 13-7 lead. (Willis missed the first extra-point kick, and two-point conversions did not yet exist.)
The Blue Streaks put together a 55-yard drive in the fourth quarter to tie the game at 13 on a 2-yard run by fullback Carl Taseff – and the extra point won it for the home team. Canisius had two more chances in Blue Streaks territory but turned it over on downs both times.
“Canisius, an underdog despite its upset victory over St. Bonaventure, had a heavy, tough line and a brilliant back in little Howie Willis, the 155-pound flyer from Philadelphia,” wrote Chuck Heaton in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The Golden Griffins played the Streaks on even terms throughout the game, with Taseff’s terrific fourth-quarter running proving the deciding factor.”
Taseff and Shula were John Carroll’s sophomore running backs. The Circleville (Ohio) Daily Herald called Shula a “rangy halfback” in reporting that he would return to the lineup for the Great Lakes Bowl after missing the previous two games with a rib injury. But how much Shula played is unclear, as the only box scores that either school could unearth in the archives listed team statistics, not individual ones.
It's not hard to find Shula’s name on John Carroll’s campus, though. The Blue Streaks play at Don Shula Stadium.
“He came back here for a big celebration when I was a student,” Brian Polian said. “I got to spend some time with him that day. Coach Shula spoke fondly of his alma mater. He had a real connection to the people and the place.”
Shula, who died in 2020 at age 90, had 347 career wins as a coach, the most in NFL history.
And 75 years ago today, as a player, he got his first victory over a football team from Buffalo.