Presented by POOL SCOUTS.
This Day In Sports: August 18, 1986, 40 years ago today:
Without ever having played a down in the NFL, Jim Kelly signs the richest contract in league history—five years and $7.5 million with the Buffalo Bills. The value of the deal surpassed that of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. Kelly had been the biggest star in the USFL while calling signals for the Houston Gamblers, but the USFL had ceased operations that spring, making him one of the biggest free agents football had ever seen. The Bills had drafted him in 1983, so they had his rights.
Kelly started for Buffalo from Day 1, debuting with 292 yards and three touchdowns in a 28-24 loss to the New York Jets in the 1986 season opener. He started all 16 games and threw for 3,593 yards and 27 touchdowns. Despite also tossing 17 interceptions, Kelly served noticed that he was going to be an upper-echelon NFL quarterback. Midway through that season, the Bills replaced coach Hank Bullough with Marv Levy, and he and Kelly jelled.
Toward the end of the 1990 campaign, Levy and his staff unveiled the “K-Gun” offense, a no-huddle attack that would disrupt defenses and launch Buffalo’s run to its first Super Bowl. The game was a 20-19 loss to the New York Giants (the “wide right” game), but it featured Kelly’s best performance in a Super Bowl: 212 yards on 18-of-30 passing with no interceptions.
Kelly followed that with the best season of his career in 1991, earning first-team All-Pro honors and leading the league in touchdown passes with 33 while throwing for a then-team record 3,844 yards. He guided Buffalo to a 13-3 record and its second Super Bowl appearance, a 37-24 loss to Washington. Kelly would play 11 seasons for the Bills and lead them to four Super Bowls (none of which they won, of course).
Since his retirement in 1996, Kelly’s story is one of perseverance. He and his wife, Jill, lost their son, Hunter, at the age of eight in 2005 after a battle with a fatal nervous system disorder. Then in 2013, Kelly began a fight with a form of oral cancer and had to have his upper jaw reconstructed. But he has beaten back the cancer several times and is currently cancer-free. Most recently, he has bounced back from a stroke he suffered in May. Kelly has often said, “I may have lost four Super Bowls, but I kicked cancer’s butt!”
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
