Desmond Howard: The Michigan Legend Who Became Football’s Most Unlikely Champion
On January 26, 1997, with the Green Bay Packers leading the New England Patriots by 12 points in the third quarter of Super Bowl XXXI, Desmond Howard caught a kickoff at his own one-yard line and ran 99 yards untouched into the end zone. The game was functionally over. Howard finished with 244 total return yards that night – a Super Bowl record – and became the first and, to this day, only special teams player ever named Super Bowl MVP. He beat out Brett Favre for the award. That’s the part people forget.
The strange thing about Howard’s career is that it almost didn’t go this way. He was the fourth overall pick in the 1992 NFL Draft – a receiver, supposedly. The Washington Redskins traded two first-rounders and a third to move up and take him. Head coach Joe Gibbs said, “This guy doesn’t have any flaws.” In his first two seasons in Washington, Howard caught 72 passes for 766 yards. Adequate. Not what you give up two first-rounders for. By 1995 he was in Jacksonville, then Green Bay, then Oakland, then Detroit. Five teams in 11 years. As a receiver, the career numbers are modest: 123 catches, 1,597 yards, seven touchdowns. But the receiving stats miss everything that actually mattered about Desmond Howard.
Cleveland, Michigan, and a Position Switch That Changed Everything
Howard grew up in Cleveland and played tailback at St. Joseph High School, where he rushed for 5,392 yards over his career and scored 18 touchdowns his senior season while picking off 10 passes on defense. He earned All-American and All-Ohio honors, collected three varsity letters in football and track, and one in basketball. Michigan recruited him as a running back. Three days into his first camp in Ann Arbor in 1988, the coaches moved him to wide receiver. He redshirted that year. In 1989, his first season of actual play, he caught nine passes.
He almost transferred. Instead, he found his way to Greg Harden, a counselor at Michigan who worked with athletes on confidence and mental performance. Howard told 60 Minutes in 2014: “If Greg Harden wasn’t at the University of Michigan… I don’t win the Heisman.” Harden died in 2024. Howard has talked about him publicly more than almost anyone else from his playing days, which tells you something about what that relationship meant.
His sophomore year, 1990, he broke out: 63 receptions, 1,025 yards, 11 touchdowns, and a kickoff return touchdown. His junior season, 1991, was something else entirely. He caught 62 passes for 985 yards, scored 23 total touchdowns, rushed for 180 yards, averaged 14.1 yards per punt return and 27.5 per kickoff return. He became the first receiver in Big Ten history to lead the conference in scoring, finishing with 138 points. He set or tied five NCAA records and 12 single-season Michigan records. The 19 receiving touchdowns that season still stand as the program record.
Against Ohio State that November, Howard caught a 25-yard touchdown pass from Elvis Grbac, landed in the end zone, and struck the Heisman pose – arm extended, head up, frozen. It wasn’t planned. Nobody had told him to do it. The image ran everywhere. Michigan won the Big Ten. Howard won the Heisman by capturing 85 percent of first-place votes, the second-largest margin in the award’s history at the time. He also took the Walter Camp Award and the Maxwell Award. He was a unanimous All-American. Then he declared for the draft and skipped his senior year.
The 1996 Season Nobody Talks About Enough
The Super Bowl return is the signature moment, but the full 1996 regular season deserves its own attention. Howard led the NFL in punt returns (58), punt return yards (875), punt return average (15.1 yards), and punt return touchdowns (3). His 875 punt return yards broke Fulton Walker’s record of 692 yards set in 1985 – by 183 yards. That’s not a modest improvement. He added 460 kickoff return yards and caught 13 passes for 95 yards as a receiver. In the NFC Championship Game against San Francisco, he returned a punt for a touchdown and had a 46-yarder that set up another score. By the time Super Bowl XXXI arrived, the Packers were already running the ball through him on special teams.
His Super Bowl numbers that night: four punt returns for 90 yards, six kickoff returns for 154 yards. The 99-yard kickoff return came in the third quarter, broke the game open, and made him the MVP. The four players in NFL history who have won both the Heisman Trophy and a Super Bowl MVP are Roger Staubach, Jim Plunkett, Marcus Allen, and Desmond Howard. That’s a short list. Howard is the only one who won the Super Bowl MVP on special teams rather than as a quarterback or running back.
His 870 punt return yards in a single season still stand as an NFL record – the 1996 number was later revised down slightly to 875 in some databases, but regardless of the exact figure, nobody has come close in the nearly three decades since. That record gets less attention than it should, probably because punt returners don’t dominate highlight reels the way quarterbacks do.
What He Built at ESPN
Howard retired after the 2002 season with the Detroit Lions, started at Fox Sports in 2003, and joined ESPN in 2005. He’s been on College GameDay every season since. In August 2025, ESPN signed him to a new multi-year extension, his 21st season on the show. Burke Magnus, ESPN’s President of Content, called him “one of college football’s all-time greats” in announcing the deal. Howard will be at the desk alongside Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Pat McAfee, and Nick Saban – the 2025 lineup after Lee Corso’s retirement from regular duties.
The preparation, Howard has said, mirrors what he did as a player. He watches film. He calls offensive coordinators, defensive coordinators, sports information directors. He makes tapes for the show during the week. “There’s just a lot of activity during the week that leads up to that show on Saturday,” he told Paige Kornblue in 2024. The Emmy Awards followed: he’s part of a College GameDay cast that has won the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Sports Personality – Studio Analyst multiple times. His broadcast career has now lasted longer than his playing career by a significant margin, and he shows no signs of slowing.
He contributes to SportsCenter, Get Up, and College Football Live beyond GameDay. He covered the NFL Draft for ABC and appears annually at the Heisman Trophy Presentation, which makes sense – he’s one of the award’s most recognizable winners. He was also the cover athlete for NCAA Football 06, the video game, which in 2006 was as close to mainstream celebrity as college football got.
The Hall of Fame Question
Howard is in the College Football Hall of Fame (inducted 2010). He’s in the University of Michigan Hall of Honor (2008), the State of Michigan Sports Hall of Fame (2007), the Gator Bowl Hall of Fame (2005), and the Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame (2005). Michigan retired his No. 21 jersey on November 28, 2015, in a ceremony before the Ohio State game. The other numbers retired that day: Gerald Ford’s 48, Tom Harmon’s 98, Ron Kramer’s 87, Bennie Osterbaan’s 47, and the Wistert brothers’ 11. Howard said afterward, “Any time you have your name mentioned along with Gerald Ford, you’ve done something right.”
He is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That’s not a controversy exactly, but it is a genuine tension. The receiving numbers are thin. The special teams record – NFL single-season punt return yards, Super Bowl MVP, the only special teamer ever to win it – is historically significant by any accounting. The Hall has inducted returners before: Deion Sanders and Brian Mitchell both went in partly on return work. Howard’s case is narrower but not obviously weaker than Mitchell’s. Whether voters will eventually revisit it is open. The case has been sitting there since his eligibility window opened.
Michigan, Miami, and What Drives Him Now
Howard has two sons, Desmond Howard Jr. and Dhamir Howard, and a daughter, Sydney. He lives in Miami. He practices meditation. He and his wife Rebkah established the Desmond and Rebkah Howard Scholarship Fund at the University of Michigan, supporting students through the program. He does corporate speaking through his official site at desmondhoward.com, and he’s available for private appearances through Mayfield Sports Marketing.
At a 2021 YMCA of South Palm Beach County breakfast where he was the keynote speaker, Howard spent his time not on football but on how people treat each other. “It doesn’t take much effort at all to be kind to people,” he said. “And people, they remember that.” It’s the kind of thing that sounds simple until you consider that a man who struck a trophy pose in a college end zone at 21 years old and won a Super Bowl MVP at 26 is spending his public appearances talking about basic human decency. Greg Harden told him to focus on becoming the best version of himself. By most evidence, Howard took that seriously in ways that went beyond football.
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