The 1982 Western Michigan Broncos football team was an

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

team that represented

Western Michigan University Western Michigan University (Western Michigan, Western or WMU) is a public research university in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was initially established as Western State Normal School in 1903 by Governor Aaron T. Bliss for the training of teachers ...

during the

1982 NCAA Division I-A football season The 1982 NCAA Division I-A football season was the last for Paul "Bear" Bryant as head coach at Alabama, retiring with in The Penn State Nittany Lions won their first consensus national championship, closing out an season by defeating Georgia ...

. In their first season under head coach

Jack Harbaugh Jack Avon Harbaughhttp://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/%7Ebattle/celeb/harbaugh.htm (born June 28, 1939) is a former American football player and coach. He is known for being the longtime head coach at Western Kentucky Hilltoppers fo ...

, the Broncos compiled a 7–2–2 record and finished in second place in the

Mid-American Conference The Mid-American Conference (MAC) is a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I collegiate athletic conference with a membership base in the Great Lakes region that stretches from Western New York to Illinois. Nine of the twel ...

(MAC). The team's statistical leaders were Chris Conklin with 853 passing yards, Shawn Faulkner with 910 rushing yards, and Bob Phillips with 39 catches for 577 receiving yards. Linebacker Les Garrett, defensive tackle/middle guard Dave Knapp, and tackle Duane Wilson were the team captains. Defensive back Mark Kujacznski received the team's most outstanding player award. On December 10, 1981, Jack Harbaugh was hired as Western's head football coach. Harbaugh was 42 years old at the time and had been defensive coordinator at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

since 1980. He had played college football at Bowling Green and served as an assistant football coach at

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

from 1973 to 1979.

Schedule

References

Western Michigan West Michigan and Western Michigan are terms for an arbitrary region in the U.S. state of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Most narrowly it refers to the Grand Rapids- Muskegon-Holland area, and more broadly to most of the region along the Lower Pen ...

Western Michigan Broncos football seasons

Western Michigan Broncos football The Western Michigan Broncos football program represents Western Michigan University in the Football Bowl Subdivision of Division I and the Mid-American Conference (MAC). Western Michigan has competed in football since 1906, when they played th ...

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