Manny Fernandez, the brawny, tenacious anchor of the Miami Dolphins’ “No Name Defense,” which helped carry the team to an undefeated season in 1972 that culminated in a victory in Super Bowl VII, died on Sunday at his home in Ellaville, Ga. He was 79.
His daughter, Christina Dailey, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.
Fernandez, who stood 6-foot-2 and weighed about 250 pounds, joined the Dolphins as an undrafted free agent in 1968 and played defensive tackle for Miami for his entire career. The team began its growth into one of the National Football League’s best franchises when Don Shula took over as coach in 1970 and then rolled through the momentous 1972 season.
During the third quarter of a Week 6 game against the Buffalo Bills, Fernandez executed a remarkable play: He swept into the Buffalo backfield so quickly that he stole the football away from the startled Bills quarterback Dennis Shaw, who was attempting a handoff to the running back Jim Braxton.
“I went after him, but I didn’t know he still had the ball until I saw him turn around waiting to hand off to somebody,” Fernandez told Florida Today after the game. “Then I just moved in and took it away from him. Maybe I could have scored, but I’m not used to handling the ball much.”
Miami won, 24-23, by the narrowest margin of the season.
The Dolphins kept winning. They finished the regular season 14-0 and defeated the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs before facing the Washington Redskins (now the Commanders) in Super Bowl VII in Los Angeles.
About a week before the Super Bowl, Fernandez and Bill Stanfill, another defensive lineman and a close friend, decided to ease the pregame tension with a prank: They captured a three-foot-long alligator during a fishing trip. After practice the next day, Fernandez left it in Shula’s private shower; Shula screamed when he got into the shower and then rushed into the locker room to confront his players.
Shula recalled to The New York Times in an interview in 2016 for his obituary: “They said, ‘Coach, can’t you take a joke?,’ and I said, ‘A joke? A live alligator?’ They said, ‘We took a vote, and you only passed by one vote on whether we should tape up the mouth of the alligator.’”
Fernandez was a singular force during the Super Bowl, which Miami won, 14-7. He recorded six official tackles and one sack, although some reports say he had 17 tackles, and he said he had 11. The Redskins ran repeatedly at Fernandez, while Fernandez focused on Len Hauss, Washington’s center. Unlike other teams that faced Miami that year, the Redskins didn’t double-team Fernandez.
“I outmaneuvered him and outquicked him, and I beat him in every other way,” he said after the game.
Dick Anderson, one of Miami’s safeties, told reporters afterward that Fernandez had been nearly everywhere. “One second I’d look up, and he was in their backfield,” he said. “Another time, he was knocking a guy out of bounds, and another time he was downfield.”
Despite Fernandez’s dynamic performance, the safety Jake Scott, who had two interceptions during the game, was voted the most valuable player.
“Maybe I should have shared the M.V.P. with Manny,” Scott told the Dolphins website in 2019, “but at least I gave him a set of keys to my pickup truck that I got from winning the award.”
Manuel Jose Fernandez Jr., 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, Dolores (Campos) Fernandez, managed the house.
In high school, he played football and was a state champion in wrestling. At the University of Utah, where he majored in English, he played tackle. He was ignored during the 17 rounds of the 1968 N.F.L. draft but signed with the Dolphins after persuading the team to let him try out.
He quickly became a critical member of the Dolphins’ defense and accumulated 19.5 of his 35 career sacks in the 1971, 1972 and 1973 seasons; at the end of each, the Dolphins played in the Super Bowl — losing to the Dallas Cowboys, 24-3, beating Washington, and then defeating the Minnesota Vikings, 24-7. In the latter game, Fernandez had four tackles and one sack.
“The Purple People Eaters didn’t eat any people,” Fernandez said after the game, referring to the Vikings’ vaunted defensive line.
Fernandez retired after the 1976 season and worked mostly at First American Title Company, where he was vice president of sales.
Like other former players, he began to experience memory loss and feelings of aggression, symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease that is linked to repetitive head trauma.
Fernandez said that he was spooked to learn that quarterback Earl Morrall, a member of the 1972 team, was found in 2016, two years after his death, to have had advanced C.T.E.
“I’ve talked to a half dozen teammates over the last two years” about the cognitive issues, he told The Miami Herald in 2016. “Quite a few have been tested.”
(Other teammates — Stanfill, Scott, Bob Kuechenberg, Jim Kiick and Nick Buoniconti — have also been diagnosed with C.T.E.)
“Nobody hit anybody with their head harder than I did,” he said. But, he added, his wife, Marcia (Schoonover) Fernandez, who died in 2015, “had Alzheimer’s and never took a hit. Where did she get it?”
In addition to his daughter, Fernandez is survived by a son, James, and four grandchildren.
Fernandez didn’t like to hear the word “perfect” attached to 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 some team’s best players. They had your back, and you had to do your best to have their back.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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