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The next day on his CBS radio show, veteran newsman Charles Osgood read a poem he had composed about the game. "When the odds are against you and everything's awful
and nothing is going your way," it began. "And everyone's saying, "it's out of the question",
for clearly it isn't your day, "Just remember what happened at Buffalo
when the Oilers came into town." Osgood concluded with a morality lesson: "For the contests not over until it's all over,
And in life it is also the same,
"Until it's all over, in mud or in clover,
You've got to keep playing your game." As historic as the Buffalo-Houston game turned out, it was not the first epic comeback for a Levy-coached team. In 1967, in an era when Navy fielded some of the best teams in the nation and produced two Heisman Trophy winners, Roger Staubach and Joe Bellino, the Midshipmen played William and Mary for what was assumed to be the last time, having severed the series because of the one-sided nature of the games over the course of several years. The aggregate score of the two previous meetings was 63-14. In '67 Navy had defeated Penn State, Syracuse and Michigan at Ann Arbor and was ranked the best team in the East. William and Mary, as usual, was a team filled with scholars who had lost to East Carolina and Virginia Tech, far from their quality of today's teams. The only thing the Indians had to buoy them was pulling out close victories against VMI and Ohio University in their previous two games. Navy deserved to be a 20-point favorite. Levy had an unusual background for a football coach. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Coe College and held a masters degree in history from Harvard. But put him in a dressing room minutes before kickoff, and he could be as eloquent as Knute Rockne. "Navy beat those teams – Penn State, Michigan and Syracuse – because they outfought them. But you're tougher than they are," he began his pre-game talk. "Chip (Young), you run back punts and kickoffs better than (Navy's Terry) Murray. (Joe) Pilch, you're a better fullback than anyone they've got. (Brad) Cashman, you know you can block better than they can. They play smart; we're going to play smarter. They play with frenzy; we're going to play with more frenzy. Are you ready to do that?" The players' answer was a roaring "YES!" but the score in the third quarter was Navy 16, William and Mary 0.  Levy tries to rebound one more time in Buffalo, this time as the GM. About the only factor the underdog Indians had to grasp for hope was that they had blocked a Navy punt in the second half and Levy, who emphasized the kicking game more than most coaches, had exhorted them in the previous day's practice, "We can block a punt on Navy," he said. "And if you can block their punt, you can beat them." The blocked punt had little to do with the outcome, at least materially, but William and Mary's quarterback, Dan Darragh, picked apart Navy's pass defense. Darragh threw for two touchdowns and a vital two-point conversion as well as scoring his team's first touchdown himself. Navy won, 27-16. In 1969, the 100th anniversary of college football, the National Directory of College Athletics voted that game one of the ten greatest upsets of all time, along with Notre Dame's 7-0 victory over Oklahoma in 1957, breaking the sport's longest victory streak; Columbia's remarkable 7-0 victory over Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl and the Centre College Praying Colonels' legendary 6-0 upset of mighty Harvard in 1921. For Levy, that victory served to straighten out a bump in his coaching road. In 1958 he got his first major head-coaching job at the University of New Mexico, making the most of the opportunity by winning Skyline Conference coach-of-the-year awards twice. In 1960, the University of California, his first taste of top-shelf football, hired him. Unfortunately it came at the same time as the introduction of counter-culture and locking the dean in his office to protest whatever was on the protestors' minds. Coaching football at Berkeley under those circumstances was summed up succinctly in a line used by Bob Hope: "Cal should have a good team this year if the players can fit their spikes over their sandals." After four hectic seasons, Levy was on the more placid campus of William and Mary. By 1970 he was in the pros, following Dick Vermeil as the second special-teams coach in NFL history. George Allen, the first coach ever to fully appreciate the value of devoting considerable practice time and game planning to kicking, the return game and various coverages, was Levy's boss. When Allen went to the Washington Redskins where he would qualify for his only Super Bowl, Levy came with him. Days after the Redskins lost to Miami in Super Bowl VII in January 1973, he became head coach of the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. In Montreal Levy found immediate success, coaching the Alouettes to the playoffs in all five seasons he was with the team. In his second year, the Als won the Grey Cup, Canada's Super Bowl. When his team repeated its Grey Cup victory three years later the Kansas City Chiefs hired him to return the franchise to the glory days of their Super Bowl teams. The Chiefs had grown old and fallen too low, while the expectations and impatience of owner Lamar Hunt, and especially team president Jack Steadman, were unrealistically high. Under Levy the team improved each year, but not dramatically, just an additional victory or two. Then, in 1982, disaster struck in the form of a players' strike, which rubbed out all games from early September to November. The long layoff took a disastrous toll on coaches. At the end of the shortened, nine-game season, Dick Vermeil, who had steered the Philadelphia Eagles to the Super Bowl just three seasons earlier, announced he was ending his coaching career, a victim of burnout. Chuck Knox, as stable a coach as there was in the sport, left Buffalo.
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