It goes back to the summer of 1977 when he was the new defensive coordinator of the Flyers after coming along with new head coach Rick Carter from Hanover College,
Although UD games had moved to Welcome Stadium three years earlier, the team still had its dressing room at Baujan Field, which had been the on-campus home of Flyers football for 49 years.
“It was the very first week of practice and I walked down there, and guys were going in and out of this dungeon-like room and throwing stuff into a big box truck they’d backed up there,” Kelly recalled Monday afternoon as he sat with filmmaker Roy Flynn in the Whalen Library at the Frericks Center.
“I said, ‘What’s all that?’ And they said, ‘Just old football film. We’ve got to get this room cleaned out. We’re taking it to the dump.’
“I’m like ‘Whoa!...Whoa!... Whoa! No, you’re not gonna throw it out. I’ll take care of it. I’ll get it out.’
“There were all kinds of film: 16 millimeter, Super 8, VHS, DVDs. Some of it went back to 1930. I didn’t know where we’d ever use it, but I knew that it was history and if it wasn’t saved, it’d be gone forever.
“So, over the next week I moved it into a little room in the basement of this building.”
The collection then went mostly untouched and forgotten for four decades.
But five years ago, when Flynn — who teaches media production courses at UD and whose past film work at various PBS stations had won six Emmys — was approached about doing a documentary on UD’s longtime football program, he became especially interested when he heard about the trove of old films.
“Plain and simple, if Mike hadn’t saved the film, this project never would have happened,” he said . “When you’re doing a historical documentary, you have to have visuals.”
Though a considerable amount of the film was in poor condition — some actually had turned to dust in the canisters —Flynn found plenty of fascinating footage.
There are clips of the 10,000-seat Baujan Field — then called the University of Dayton Stadium — so packed that people are standing several rows deep in the endzone and students are watching from the open windows of St. Joe’s Hall, which towered over the north side of the steel stadium.
From the late 1920s to the early 1940s — when Harry Baujan was the coach — Flyers football was, as Flynn narrates in the film, “the hottest ticket in town.”
“UD football then was what UD basketball is now to the community,” said UD Director of Athletic Communications Doug Hauschild.
The Flyers played teams like Cincinnati, Louisville, many of the Mid-American Conference schools and even Tennessee and Kentucky. Homecoming parades drew crowds in downtown Dayton and eventually the Flyers would have dozens of players drafted by the NFL.
There are clips in the documentary from the John McVay coached teams in the late 1960s and early 1970s and from the national championship victories in the Division III Stagg Bowl, but the footage that stunned everybody came from UD’s game at Tennessee on Oct. 11, 1941.
Fynn watched the color footage and, momentarily stumped, sent a note to UD athletics director Neil Sullivan.
“He said, ‘Everything I have says it’s Dayton playing Tennessee, but the colors don’t match,” Sullivan remembered.
UD wore dark blue jerseys, gold pants and golden helmets.
They came to find out that Baujan — who has been a celebrated end at Notre Dane dubbed The Blond Beast — had managed to work around the Flyers’ modest budget and had gotten Notre Dame’s old uniforms, then borrowed their back-up helmets.
“Pretty amazing!” Sullivan laughed.
The film will be released today at noon on the University of Dayton’s Athletics YouTube channel.
It includes several visual surprises, verbal remembrances — 30 people were interviewed, and many made the film — and impressive nuggets of information.
Some of the latter include:
- Former UD coaches and players have won 42 Super Bowl rings and Dayton football has had more Academic All-Americans this century than any other program in the nation.
- There’s a photo of one of UD’s first football fields, which was where Kennedy Union now stands.
- Before UD became known as the Flyers in 1923, they were referred to as the Regulars, the Hilltoppers and the South Parkers.
- While Miami University is known as the ‘Cradle of Coaches,’ UD, at the least, should be called a coaching crib with former lineman Chuck Noll, a winner of four Super Bowls as the Pittsburgh Steelers coach; McVay, who went from the NFL sidelines to the front office and won five Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers; backup quarterback Jon Gruden, winning his Super Bowl crown coaching Tampa Bay; and quarterback Brandon Staley, who became the Los Angeles Chargers head coach
Flynn said when he, colleague Greg Kennedy, the film’s editor, and the students they enlisted to help them went through the history of the program — which includes the eventual decision to go from an NCAA Division I program to non-scholarship Division III and eventually end up in Division I-AA — they decided “this just can’t be the story of three or four individuals, it should be the story of UD’s ongoing success.”
That said, it’s hard not to focus on Baujan.
“Roy found out when he came for his (1923) interview from his (Illinois) hometown, there was flooding and he made part of the trip by rowboat,” Sullivan said incredulously.
And then there’s the story former Flyer, Tim Quinn, told about his dad, Joe, who played for Baujan.
He said the UD team was headed on a five-day trip by rail to California to play St. Mary’s in 1939 and every time the train stopped, Baujan made the players get out onto the stations’ platforms and do calisthenics or drills.
“He was,” Quinn laughed, “a very interesting coach.”
‘The Dayton Way’
When we spoke the other day, Kelly wanted the focus to be on Flynn:
“He did all this. My only contribution was keeping the film from being pitched.”
Well, not exactly.
There were his 27 years as head coach, a Division III national championship, teams that went 246-54-1 and his 2011 induction into the College Football Hall of Fame, just as Baujan was enshrined 21 years prior.
Kelly’s dad worked alongside Carter’s dad at the massive NCR factory that was across Brown Street from the Dayton campus, which made their son’s return to UD something special.
“We’d meet at Flanagan’s for lunch every Friday,” Kelly said.
Carter was an instant success at UD. He won a national title in his fourth season, was named the Division III Coach of the Year and that springboarded him to the head job at Holy Cross, where he again found success, until, as the film sensitively notes, “we lost him too soon.”
Carter’s suicide is not mentioned, though the film ends with a public service reference for the National Suicide Prevention hotline.
Kelly had been named Carter’s successor and though he’s often praised for his work ethic, his football mind and the way he and his staff could find players to adapt to “The Dayton Way” of approaching football, school and life, one of his former players took delight in mentioning the coach’s superstitions on game day.
Kelly would drive his personal car to the games and because the team had once won with three certain players riding alongside him, they had to take those same seats during the rest of their UD careers.
The superstition not mentioned in the film was the buckeye Kelly always put in his pants pocket on game day. Pressed about that Monday, he admitted he did forget it once.
“We were at Robert Morris, and I left it in the bus, and I panicked,” he said with a sheepish grin. “It was in my briefcase and just before the game I grabbed a manager and said ‘Get out to that bus! Get me my briefcase!’
“He didn’t know what was in it. I took the briefcase and got the buckeye out myself.
“I didn’t want anyone else touching it. I didn’t want to ruin the luck.”
A legacy of success
When it comes to that old football film, current coach Trevor Andrews — who once played for the Flyers and this Saturday opens his second season at the UD helm after taking over from Rick Chamberlin — has shown he has some buckeye-like luck himself.
“I’d just started on the job here last year when Neil’s assistant came in and said a pipe had burst in the room downstairs where the rest of the old film was being stored and the place was flooding,” he said. “I ran down there, and we got the film to safety again.”
Andrews said former players have stopped by his office in the past year and he senses their excitement to see the documentary that — because of the COVID interruptions — was five years in the making.
He said they’re all glad the rest of the world now will see what they know as former Flyers players.
“Some people don’t realize the gem Dayton football has been for a long, long time,” Chamberlin said.
Credit: Staff photo by Lisa Powell
Credit: Staff photo by Lisa Powell
Though there once was something of a divide between the guys who played Division I football at UD and those who came after, that has healed, so much so, that Sullivan noted:
“I don’t mean this as disrespect to any other sport on campus — basketball included — but none of our sports has more of a form of brotherhood or a sense of commitment to what came before them than does football. It shows in terms of alumni, giving and engaging in the program.”
No one understands UD football better than Chamberlin, who spent 48 years with the program, first as one of the nation’s best linebackers, then as a grad assistant, linebackers coach, defensive coordinator and finally head coach for 15 seasons.
This fall he’s in Austin, Texas, for six weeks. His son Jason and daughter in law — former UD basketball player Cyndi Stuhl – live there with their five children.
Chamberlin wanted to be around the grandkids and he’s now a substitute teacher at two local high schools and two middle schools. He’s teaching everything from math and English to science, physical education and art
“I enjoy being engaged with young people,” he said. “That’s what I miss from coaching.”
The Flyers open at home Saturday with a noon game against St. Francis. Chamberlin plans to watch the game live on the UD Facebook page, then head to his grandson Bear’s youth league game.
The documentary includes a few old photos of Chamberlin from his playing days. Senior year he sported a big blond afro.
As Kelly remembered it: “The pros came in and they asked how tall he was and I said, ‘Well, he’s right at 6-foot-3′
“So they had him stand against the wall to measure him. They had him take off his shoes. Then his socks. And when they put a ruler on top of his head, they started pressing it down through that Afro.
“Down…down…down.
“And underneath all that hair, he turned out to be 5-foot11 ¾!
“Geesh!”
Even so, Chamberlin ended up an All-American and went on to a near half-century career at UD that Kelly believes is a one-school tenure unmatched by few people in the history of college football.
No matter how you measure it, UD football is about a legacy of success.
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