Bill Kelly

William C. "Wild Bill" Kelly (June 24, 1905 – November 14, 1931) was an American football player who played collegiately at the University of Montana and for several teams in the National Football League (NFL). A star in four sports during his high school days, Kelly was regarded as one of the greatest Montana athletes of the 1920s and among the best passers in the NFL during the late 1920s.

He was posthumously inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1969.

Biography Early life

Bill Kelly was born in Denver, Colorado, on June 24, 1905, the son of James and Annie Kelly. His father had been a farmer in South Dakota before moving to Denver to enter the wholesale liquor business.

The win made Kelly a local hero, and he was recruited to play for the hometown college, the University of Montana. It was rumored that Notre Dame University sought Kelly's services, but the financial support of a local booster — an automobile dealer named H.O. Bell, who paid Kelly $75 a month to perform a job for which he "didn't perform much work" — was successful in keeping the gridiron star at home. The recruiting mission was successful and Kelly was signed as a member of the 1927 New York Yankees.

In an era in which running the unaerodynamic football dominated the game, Kelly was regarded as a gifted passer. "The Montana star throws amazing forward passes on a straight line as if it was a baseball," one journalist marveled in 1927. The National Football League did not maintain passing records until 1934, however, so Kelly's relative gifts and failures as a passer are regrettably lost to the mists of time.

Kelly would later play for the Frankford Yellow Jackets and Brooklyn Dodgers from 1927 through 1930.

Kelly was regarded as one of the best passers of his era in the NFL. His 1929 teammate George Wilson recalled: "he would go to the left or right, leap into the air and throw a pass, could do it better than anyone other than Benny Friedman of Michigan and later the New York Giants, who was the best in my opinion."

Death and legacy

Kelly collapsed suddenly and died while watching a football game in New York at the age of 26.

The College Football Hall of Fame inducted Kelly in 1969, the same year he was voted the greatest football player in Montana history in a poll by the Billings Gazette.

In 1971, he was named as the quarterback of the East-West Shrine Game's all-time team.