Gerry Quinlivan and his football teammates walked off the practice field at the University at Buffalo in September 1983 and saw a bus rolling towards them.
The Baldwin-Wallace College football team had arrived for a game the next day against the Bulls and saw players coming off the practice field wearing gear that essentially was hand-me-downs from the Buffalo Bills. The word “Bills” was blocked out on each blue-and-white practice jersey. The shirts and shorts were baggy on the Bulls, who didn’t have the same sizeable stature as Buffalo’s NFL players.
One of Quinlivan’s teammates noticed the players on the bus and said, “You know what? Those guys are laughing at us!” Quinlivan doesn’t know if that was true, but he knew the sentiment was enough to motivate the Bulls. The next day, they beat Baldwin-Wallace 29-28.
“That showed the scrappiness of where we were at, how sparse equipment and other things were for the program, but how we were there because we loved football,” said Quinlivan, a linebacker at UB from 1981-84. “And playing football became some of the best memories of mine from college.”
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Two years prior, Quinlivan wasn’t sure if he’d commit to being a college football player, as he was a chemical engineering major at UB. But in his first game with the Bulls, less than three months after he graduated from Amherst Central High School, he had two interceptions in a 35-0 win against Cortland State.
The list of those inducted into the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame is extensive enough to make one consider, half-kiddingly, whether most everyone who’s played the game has been granted admittance. Almost 1,000 players have received the honor. And more than 200 coaches. But before accusing electors of rubbing stamping the masses consider that the numbers
He graduated from UB in the spring 1985 with a degree in chemical engineering and Division III All-American honors as a linebacker for the Bulls.
Nearly 40 years later, Quinlivan is in a unique place. He is UB’s representative on this year’s College Football Hall of Fame ballot as a divisional candidate, on a 2025 College Football Hall of Fame ballot that includes Cleveland Browns and former Buffalo Bills offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey, former Bills running back Fred Jackson and legendary college coaches Nick Saban and Urban Meyer.
“I’ve been on the ballot before, and I’m not sure when I was first on it,” Quinlivan said. “And I didn’t find out directly that I was on it. Sometimes, I don’t get contacted when it happens.
“I’m not even sure how many years I’ve been nominated,” he added, with a laugh. “As of this fall, it will be 40 years since my last college football game. I don’t feel old, but it’s amazing to me that all these years later, there’s still some awareness that my name comes up for recognition like this.”
Saban, Meyer, Quinlivan
Dorsey compiled a record of 38-2 as starting quarterback for the University of Miami from 1999 to 2002 and led the Hurricanes to a national championship in the 2001 season.
Quinlivan has been on the College Football Hall of Fame’s divisional ballot every year since 2014. He first found out he was part of a class when he looked up the ballot and saw his name.
“I said, ‘Oh, hey, I’m nominated,” he recalled, laughing.
This year, Quinlivan learned he was on the 2025 ballot when he was contacted by The Buffalo News through the National Football Foundation for this story.
This year’s ballot is made up of 77 Football Bowl Subdivision players, nine FBS coaches, 101 divisional players (FCS, Divisions II and III) and 34 divisional coaches. The new class will be announced in early 2025; the 2024 class had 19 former players and three coaches.
In an email to The News, the National Football Foundation said Quinlivan will remain on the College Football Hall of Fame ballot until 2034 – 50 years after his last season of college football.
But it also raises a question: Why is Quinlivan UB’s representative?
It is a bit of a mystery as to how Quinlivan was added to the ballot. He doesn’t know who nominated him; nominations either come from a player’s school or from a National Football Foundation chapter.
Charlie Donnor, a longtime coach at UB, thinks former Bulls coach Bill Dando may have nominated Quinlivan. Dando died in 2022. The UB athletic department provided The News with a digital copy of the nomination form, but it does not list who nominated Quinlivan.
UB has had many memorable football players that are worthy of Hall of Fame consideration, including linebacker Khalil Mack, running backs Branden Oliver and Jaret Patterson, quarterbacks Tyree Jackson, Drew Willy and Joe Licata, wide receiver Naaman Roosevelt, linebacker Craig Guest and safety Davonte Shannon.
But the nomination criteria for the College Football Hall of Fame is strict.
According to the National Football Foundation, a nominee must have been named as a first-team All-American by an NCAA-recognized selector. A nominee also must be at least 10 years removed from their last college football season and has to have played their last season of college football within the last 50 years.
UB has 11 first-team All-Americans in football at the Division I and III levels, including Mack, a first team Football Writers Association of America selection and a second-team Associated Press and Walter Camp Football Foundation selection in 2013. Mack is a linebacker with the Los Angeles Chargers who is beginning his 11th NFL season, so his name soon should be added to the ballot.
Marty Barrett, Quinlivan’s UB teammate from 1981-83, isn’t surprised to see Quinlivan on the ballot.
“You see guys like Peyton Manning, or the front-line NFL guys on that ballot, guys that were so good in college, but when you get down to the (Division) I-AA or II or III level, how many of those players are included?” said Barrett, now a senior personnel executive with the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. “They’re just as significant in their plays and their experience, but they’re not in the national rankings or in Division I. It’s good that they include players at different levels, who were significant in their time and in their play.
“The guys like Khalil Mack, those are slam-dunk guys. But there are guys like Gerry and many others out there, who played at places like Slippery Rock, Colgate or Columbia.”
‘An auspicious start’
Quinlivan played for the Bulls when they were a Division III program, and explained that he was part of the infancy of the resurrection of football at UB, which restarted its program in 1977, four years prior to Quinlivan’s freshman year.
He was converted to linebacker at UB, and found that on defense, he had a strong awareness for what was happening across the line of scrimmage, aware of identifying pass patterns or how an offense developed towards a run play versus a pass play.
He found another benefit in playing on defense when a coach suggested the switch.
“I thought, ‘I’m interested in giving the hits, rather than taking them,’ ” said Quinlivan, who was a running back at Amherst Central.
Quinlivan recalled what an offensive line coach said to him after he intercepted two passes in his first college game.
“That was the only time I’d ever had two in a game and Charlie Donnor had said, and it struck me as funny, ‘That’s quite an auspicious start,’ ” Quinlivan said. “Never would I have thought I would have heard a coach say ‘auspicious.’ ”
Those two interceptions were a small part of his college football experience. UB Stadium was still 12 years away from being completed for the 1993 World University Games, so UB played its home games at Rotary Field on the South Campus.
UB didn’t have the multimillion dollar budget it has now for its football program. As a Division III program, it didn’t offer athletic scholarships and the program didn’t even have a weight room. UB’s players held fundraisers at local bars and restaurants, then put the money towards the purchase of bars and racks of weights from a local gym that was closing.
Quinlivan was only going to play one year of college football, because he was unsure if he would be able to balance a chemical engineering curriculum with athletic commitments over the course of four years. But he found his time-management skills sharpened, and that the time he didn’t put towards football went towards his studies. He had to answer the question: “Is this too much?”
It wasn’t.
He had 248 tackles (including a team-high 79 in 1983), six fumble recoveries, eight pass interceptions and 16 pass deflections from 1981-84.
As a senior, he helped UB’s defense limit opponents to 2,717 yards, including 1,298 passing yards. He was a Kodak Small College and Associated Press Small College first-team selection, a College Division Academic First Team All-American and a Pizza Hut Division III honorable mention selection.
“You have to be instinctive,” Donnor said, when asked what made Quinlivan an All-American. “You have to be able to read the play and be very aggressive. You have to have speed and athleticism to make plays. He was an exceptional athlete. He could see the plays, and that’s the thing that separates the really good players from just the good players. You have to see things in slow motion, before they happen, and you have to know what’s going to happen. You can’t coach that.”
After he graduated from UB in 1985, he signed as a free agent with the Bills, but did not make the team, then took a job with Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati, where he still lives with his wife, Nina. He also earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard. In 1993, he was inducted into the UB Athletics Hall of Fame.
Decades after his last snaps with the Bulls, he considers the magnitude of what the decision to play college football meant for him, whether it was being among UB’s early Division III programs or being included on list of the sport’s great players and coaches.
“None of this could have happened if I hadn’t decided to give it a try,” Quinlivan said.
UB All-Americans
A look at first-team All-Americans who played at University at Buffalo:
1961: John Stofa, QB, East-West All-American Game.
1962: Gerry Philbin, OT/DT, North-South All-American Game.
1966: Gerald LaFountain, DE. Associated Press.
1983: John Bernard, DB, Pizza Hut Division III.
1984: Gerry Quinlivan, LB, Kodak Small College, Associated Press Small College.
1986: Doug Majeski, OT, Football News Div. III; Steve Nappa, DB, Pizza Hut Division III.
1987: Steve Wojciechowski, LB, Kodak Small College.
1995: Pete Conley, LB, Football Gazette.
1996: Mike Chichester, DB, Football Gazette.
2013: Khalil Mack, LB, Football Writers Association of America.