Manny Fernandez, the lanky, tenacious anchor of the Miami Dolphins’ “No Name Defense” who helped carry the team to an undefeated season in 1972 that culminated in a Super Bowl VII victory, died Sunday at his home in Ellaville, Ga., at 79.
His daughter Christina Dailey confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.
Fernandez, who stood 6-foot-4 and weighed about 250 pounds, joined the Dolphins as a free agent in 1968 and played defensive tackle for Miami for his entire career. The team began its growth into one of the best franchises in the National League when Don Shula took over as coach in 1970 and then rolled around during the 1972 season.
In the third quarter of the Week 6 game against the Buffalo Bills, Fernandez made a remarkable play: he rushed into the Buffalo backfield so quickly that he stole the football from Bills rushing quarterback Dennis Shaw, who was trying to get his hands on running back Jim Braxton.
“I followed behind him, but I didn’t know he still had the ball until I saw him looking around while he was handing off to someone,” Fernandez told Florida Today after the game. “Then I just got excited and took it away from him. Maybe I could have scored, but I don’t usually handle the ball.”
Miami won, 24-23, by the narrowest margin of the season.
The dolphins won. They finished 14-0 in the regular season and defeated the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs before facing the Washington Redskins (now the Chiefs) in Super Bowl VII in Los Angeles.
About a week before the Super Bowl, Fernandez and Bill Stanfill, another defensive lineman and close friend, decided to ease the tension with the game: They caught a three-foot alligator on a fishing trip. The next day at practice Fernandez left Shula for a private shower; Shula shouted as he stepped into the shower and then rushed into the room opposite the players.
Shula recalled to The New York Times in a 2016 interview for his obituary: “They said, ‘Coach, can you lead a joke?’, and I said, ‘A joke? A live alligator?” They say, “We took a vote, and you only passed by one vote whether we should cut the alligator’s mouth off.”
Fernandez was a unique force in the Super Bowl, which Miami won, 14-7. He recorded six tackles and one sack, although some reported he had 17 tackles and he said he had 11. The Redskins often ran at Fernandez, while Fernandez focused on Len Hauss, Washington’s center. Unlike other teams that looked at Miami that year, the Redskins did not double-team Fernandez.
“I waited for him and I welcomed him and I beat him in every way,” he said after the game.
Dick Anderson, one of Miami’s safety, told reporters afterward that Fernandez was almost everywhere. “I looked at each other, and it was in their backfield,” he said. “One time he was knocking a man out of bounds, and another time downfield.”
Despite Fernandez’s dynamic performance, safety Jake Scott, who had two interceptions in the game, was voted the most valuable player.
“I might have shared the MVP with Manny,” Scott told the Dolphins website in 2019, “but he certainly gave me the keys to the pickup truck that I won from the award.”
Manuel Jose Fernandez, the oldest of three brothers, was born on July 3, 1946 in Hayward, Calif. His father, also named Manuel, was a brick mason, and his mother, Fernandez Dolores (Campos), ran a home.
In high school, he played football and was a state champion in wrestling. He went to the University of Utah, where he majored in English. He was undrafted in the 17th round of the 1968 NFL draft but signed with the Dolphins after convincing the team to give him a tryout.
He quickly became a critical member of the Dolphins’ defense and accumulated 19.5 of his 35 career sacks in 1971, 1972 and 1973; at the end of both, the Dolphins were playing in the Super Bowl – losing to the Dallas Cowboys, 24-3, beating Washington, and beating the Minnesota Vikings, 24-7. In this game, Fernandez had four tackles and one sack.
“Purple people don’t eat people, they don’t eat people,” Fernandez said after the game, referring to the Vikings’ pitching defensive line.
Fernandez retired after the 1976 season and worked extensively at First American Company, where he was president of sales.
Like other former players, he began to experience memory loss and feelings of hostility, symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease that is linked to repeated head trauma.
Fernandez said he spoke to learn that the quarterback of Earl Morrall, a member of the company in 1972, was discovered in 2016, two years after his death, with CTE.
“I’ve talked to half a dozen teammates over the past two years” about cognitive issues, he told The Miami Herald in 2016. “A few have been proven.”
(Other teammates — Stanfill, Scott, Bob Kuechenberg, Jim Kiick and Nick Buoniconti — have also been diagnosed with CTE.)
“No one hits anyone harder than I do,” he said. But, added his wife, Marcia (Schoonover) Fernandez, who died in 2015, “she had Alzheimer’s and never took a stroke. Where did she get that?”
In addition to her daughter, Fernandez is survived by her son James and four grandchildren.
Fernandez didn’t want to hear the word “perfect” during the Dolphins’ 17-0 season in 1972.
“We didn’t do it with smoke and mirrors,” he told NFL.com in 2022. “We did it with great players and coaches. Our worst players were better than the team’s best players. They had your back, and they had to have their back.”