Road to 1991 Perfection: Brunell Never Felt Quite Right During the Title Run

One of the drawbacks to the University of Washington's national championship season was the struggle that quarterback Mark Brunell went through. It wasn't fair.

The 1991 Washington-Arizona State football game was over by halftime.

That is, unless you were Mark Brunell or a big fan of the Husky quarterback.

People stuck around to watch the former starter and reigning Rose Bowl Most Valuable Player — coming back from knee surgery — draw his longest stint of the season, running the UW offense for most of the second half in a 44-16 blowout of the Sun Devils. 

Brunell made his season debut in game 3 against Kansas State, receiving thunderous applause. Against ASU and in front of a crowd of 72,405, he took over after the Huskies rolled out to a 31-0 advantage at intermission and kept the rout going. 

He might have made it look easy, by throwing a season-high 13 passes and leading the Huskies into the end zone a few more times, but the left-hander had to deal with a new reality. 

"I was different — I didn't feel comfortable," Brunell said. "I had this big old bulky knee brace on and I couldn't move the way I was used to moving. The ability to run and take off, and run the option and scramble, and get outside the pocket was pretty much gone."

This is another in series of vignettes about the UW 1991 national championship football team, supplementing the conversation for the pandemic-delayed season that begins soon. We're in week 8 now, which marked the Huskies' beatdown of Arizona State.

The season before, Brunell was the starter and led the UW to a 10-2 season and near-miss of another national championship. He was an explosive dual-threat QB, possibly the fastest player the UW still has ever had at that position.

All of that changed during spring practice when Husky defenders Steve Emtman and Donald Jones crashed into him and he was left with a torn-up knee and faced surgery.

Brunell admittedly felt a lot of pain and soreness after games and had to work his way through it, as he describes in the video. He could never stop thinking about his knee and just play the game.

"I was actually surprised when the doctors actually let me take the field when I could against Kansas State because I didn't have full range of motion on my knee," he said. "I didn't have the strength that I wished I had. They cleared me, but I pretty much played very cautiously. ... I was a different player."

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