Mar 13, 2023 4 min read

One of the great things about sports is that a competition can seem routine and easily forgettable when it is completed, yet, with the passing of time, can grow in significance for those participants and become a cherished memory.

One such event for two local residents was a college football game played in October of 1984.

For the record, the final score was Slippery Rock 21, Kutztown 6. Nothing about the score suggests anything remarkable until you dig deeper and find out who was playing in that PSAC game and how it played out.

On one side was Kutztown’s Andre Reed, at the time a very good wide receiver at the Division II level who would go on to play 16 years in the NFL, mostly with the Buffalo Bills, and be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014.

On Slippery Rock’s side of the field was Rich Cleveland, a sure-handed and possession-type wide receiver who is currently the Greene County Planning and Development Executive Director, and Bill Nicolella, a Washington native who was the Rock’s defensive coordinator, which gave him the job of devising a plan to prevent Reed from dominating the game.

A coach with experience at the Division I level – Tulsa and The Citadel – Nicolella knew that stopping the other 10 players on the offense would be easier than stopping Reed. And the task wasn’t impossible. After all, The Rock led the PSAC in total defense entering the game, which was the next-to-last on the schedule.

“Reed’s ability stood out on film,” Nicolella recalled. “He ran so well. You could see that he had the height, weight, speed and ability.”

But some other things stood out to Nicolella on the film. Kutztown’s quarterback, he recalled, wasn’t as good as some others The Rock had faced that year and the Golden Bears’ guards were the weak spot of the offense.

“We wanted to put pressure on the quarterback,” Nicolella explained. “We blitzed the gap between the center and the guards, especially when they would get in a particular formation. The game plan worked real well. We put the quarterback on his back and hurried his throws.”

“I didn’t get to see much of Kutztown’s offense because I was on the sideline with our offense,” Cleveland recalls, “but what I did see, Bill blitzed them on almost every down.”

Slippery Rock shut out Kutztown for 3½ quarters, building a 21-0 lead. One of the touchdowns came on a pass to Cleveland.

For Reed, it was a mostly forgettable day. He fumbled a punt, setting up one of the The Rock’s touchdowns.

It wasn’t until Slippery Rock head coach Don Ault ordered his team’s second-string defense into the game midway through the fourth quarter that Reed became a problem.

“I begged him not to put the second string in,” Nicolella recalled.

Kutztown drove 80 yards with Reed catching a touchdown pass, matching Cleveland’s total. The scoring drive did nothing to impact the outcome of the game, which Slippery Rock won 21-6, but its defense did take a hit in the statistics.

“It turned out, that if Kutztown didn’t go 80 yards and Reed didn’t catch that touchdown pass, Slippery Rock would have finished rated No. 1 in defense in the PSAC that year. Instead, we finished second,” Nicolella explained.

Still, decades later, Nicolella and Cleveland look back fondly on that game as the day they got the best of a future Hall of Famer.

“Rich outplayed Andre Reed,” Nicolella said. “Rich wasn’t the biggest guy, but he was very reliable and had ability and brains. He was tough.”

Nicollela compared Cleveland’s skillset to that of Steve Largent, another Hall of Fame wide receiver, who played at Tulsa when Nicolella was a coach there.

Cleveland wasn’t highly recruited out of high school in the Rochester, N.Y., area. He got on the radar of PSAC schools and visited Slippery Rock and Edinboro on recruiting trips.

“I was maybe 5-10 and 175 pounds,” Cleveland said. “But one of great things about playing in the PSAC was we played with and against a lot of guys who made it to the NFL. At Slippery Rock, I played with Chuck Sanders, a running back who played with the Steelers. We played against Andre Reed, Jon Gruden, who was a quarterback at Dayton, against David Meggett, who was running back at Towson and played in the Super Bowl with the New York Giants.

“It was a great experience. I wouldn’t change anything. The only regret is we didn’t win the PSAC. We couldn’t beat California.”