It had to be one of Howard Schnellenberger’s all-time best football Saturdays. In the afternoon, his Florida Atlantic Owls, playing only their fourth season in NCAA Division I, upset Minnesota, 42-39, their first victory ever over a Big Ten team.

Then — assuming he could find a TV that could get ESPN Classic — Schnellenberger probably watched his alma mater, Kentucky, upset Louisville, the team he put on the college football map, 40-34, in Lexington’s Commonwealth Stadium.

Before the UK-U of L game, ESPN Classic commentator Bill Curry, who was the Wildcat coach when the teams began playing in 1994, graciously praised Schnellenberger for being the driving force behind the series.

“Howard wanted to start in 1990, but I delayed a couple of years because I didn’t feel our program was ready,” Curry said. “But it was inevitable that we’d get it done and Howard deserves the credit. It has turned out to be great for football in Kentucky, just as we all hoped it would be.”

Schnellenberger is absolutely the best football coach I’ve ever covered on a regular basis. He helped Paul “Bear” Bryant win national titles at Alabama and he helped Don Shula win Super Bowls with the Miami Dolphins. He was named head coach of the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in the late ’70s, but quit rather than take orders from a know-nothing owner.

As a college head coach, Schnellenberger has been a miracle worker. He took the University of Miami from the brink of extinction to the 1983 national title. He pushed and shoved U of L into the big time. After a brief one-year detour at Oklahoma and a couple of years out of coaching, he was hired in 1998 to build the Florida Atlantic program from scratch.

Florida Atlantic 42, Minnesota 39. Are you kidding me? The man is a genius. If I were the president of Notre Dame, I’d fire Charlie Weis immediately and give Schnellenberger anything he wanted to come to South Bend. I don’t care if he is in his 70s. He’s just one helluva football coach, and I, for one, would like to start a movement to get him inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

A native of St. Meinrad, Ind., Schnellenberger grew up in Louisville and became an All-State end under Coach Paulie Miller at Flaget High (he graduated a year ahead of Paul Hornung, who went on to win the 1956 Heisman Trophy at Notre Dame). Schnellenberger went to UK to play for Bryant, which he did as sophomore in 1953. After Bryant left for Texas A&M, Schnellenberger finished up his career under Blanton Collier, earning All-American honors.

His pedigree is so Louisville, so Kentucky, that it’s amazing our local newspaper didn’t even mention his name in the story of Florida Atlantic’s win over Minnesota. In case you missed it, as you easily could have, it was about four inches long and was buried in the middle of a roundup on page C15.

I wonder if Schnellenberger ever will get the respect he deserves in his home town. When he declared that U of L was on a “collision course with the national championship” and that the only variable was time, he was openly jeered in the local media. Even now, a local columnist treats him as if he’s a football version of Yogi Berra, a guy who never met a malapropism he didn’t like, and that’s just not the way it is.

I hope Howard got to watch the UK-U of L game. Throughout his career, he has worked with some outstanding quarterbacks — Babe Parilli, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Bob Griese, Bert Jones, Jim Kelly, Vinnie Testaverde, and Browning Nagle. He’s a connoisseur of QBs, so he would have throughly enjoyed the duel between UK’s Andre Woodson and Brian Brohm.

They played pretty much to a draw. After Brohm drove the Cards into the lead late in the game, Woodson came back and hit Steve Johnson with a 57-yard TD pass with 28 seconds remaining to give UK the lead, 40-34. But doggoned if Brohm didn’t almost pull of a “Hail Mary” on the last play of the game, just as LSU had done to the Wildcats five or six years ago.

Brohm didn’t lose as much as he just ran out of time and space.

When the final gun sounded, the crowd 70,857, which had been waiting to exhale, exploded in a fury of Big Blue excitement. The victory ended a four-game losing streak to the Cards and was only UK’s second in the last nine games against the Cards.

It was a terrific college football game, full of amazingly athletic plays and amazingly dumb mistakes. But let’s be clear about one thing: The fact that it was the third game of the season instead of the opener made absolutely no difference — except that had it been the opener, UK’s margin would have been bigger.

So while giving UK Coach Rich Brooks all the credit in the world for patiently building his program the right way, for doing it in the face of intense criticism and skepticism, and for selling good athletes on coming to UK despite the obstacles — despite all that, let’s not give him and Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart credit for peevishly demanding that the game be moved from its traditional slot as the opener.

All that decision accomplished, in fact, was to prevent most of the nation from seeing the wondrous Woodson, sensational multi-dimensional running back Rafael Little, and a Wildcat defense take did an outstanding job of creating turnovers and holding its own against the Cards’ potent offense. As the opener, you see, it would have been on the big ESPN instead of a subsidiary.

Regular readers of this blog — and I want to thank both of you — may recall that your humble servant picked a six-point Kentucky victory. I figured that all the “intangibles” were on UK’s side and that Brooks’ program had reached one of those critical junctures where it had to put up or shut up.

I also felt, after watching the Cards’ exhibition wins over Murray State and Middle Tennessee State, that the coaching transition from Bobby Petrino to Steve Kragthorpe had not gone as seamlessly as the press reports indicated. (Speaking of Petrino, wonder if he watched the game? Wonder what he thought?)

Now I’ll be interested to see if U of L fills Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium for Saturday’s home game against Syracuse. On Joe Elliott’s WHAS radio call-in show Friday night, I posed this question: When the Cards hit the inevitable down cycle, while their fans remain as steadfastly loyal as UK fans have through the years, through thick and thin and thinner?

That drew an immediate response from a defensive U of L fan, who ticked off a list of reasons why there were 2,000 or so empty seats when the Cards played host to Middle Tennessee. Hearing that, a UK guy called in and said, “Look, everybody knows that if UK were the defending Orange Bowl champ, as U of L is, they could schedule a telephone pole in Commonwealth and the fans would fill it up.”

He’s right. Kentucky fans have nothing to prove in the loyalty deparment, but the jury is still out on their Louisville counterparts. The Cards’ fan base has a lot of front-runners. That’s been proven repeatedly. They still haven’t developed that real hard core of loyalists who will show up no matter who the opponent or what the weather, simply because they couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

When Schenellenberger came to U of L in 1984, he immediately began lobbying for a new on-campus stadium so the Cards could move out of the old baseball park at the State Fairgrounds. But coming from Miami, where even his national championship team filled barely half of the Orange Bowl’s 80,000 seats, he cautioned that the stadium’s capacity should be no more than 45,000 (Papa John’s has a capacity of 42,000).

“You always want to be in a position where the demand exceeds the supply,” Schnellenberger says.

That will be something to remember as U of L’s 2007 season plays itself out.