Lu Gambino - College Career

College Career

Gambino was selected in the 1945 NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears in the 26th round as the 271st overall pick. In 1946, he was discharged from the Army and enrolled at the University of Maryland. He considered Indiana to be a far superior football program and called Maryland a "cow school," but it was located relatively close to his mother, who was widowed and living alone in Baltimore. During the 1946 season, Gambino saw limited playing time for a mediocre Terrapins football team directed by head coach Clark Shaughnessy. The following year, head coach Jim Tatum was hired, and he engineered a reversal of the team's fortunes. Tatum took the mentorship of Gambino as a personal project and aimed to develop him into the team's featured back.

As a senior in 1947, Gambino set the NCAA season scoring high with 16 touchdowns for 96 points. In the fifth meeting against rival West Virginia, Gambino scored three touchdowns to help Maryland take away its first victory of the series, 27–0. He also scored three touchdowns against Delaware and Duquesne, and two against Vanderbilt where he also passed for a third. During the season, Gambino rushed for a total of 904 yards on 125 attempts, and as of 2009, he was Maryland's third-leading rusher in terms of single-season yards per carry (7.23). He was also Maryland's season kickoff return leader, and returned seven kicks for 174 yards, an average of 24.85 yards.

Maryland finished the regular season 7–2–1 and secured the school's first-ever bowl game appearance. In the 1948 Gator Bowl against Georgia, he was honored as the Most Valuable Player. During the 20–20 tie, Gambino rushed to score all three of the Terrapins' touchdowns on one-, 24-, and 35-yard runs. He compiled 165 rushing yards, a school bowl rushing record that stood for 60 years until finally broken by Da'Rel Scott in the 2008 Humanitarian Bowl. In 1992, for his achievement as the bowl game's "first superb running back," Gambino was inducted into the Gator Bowl Hall of Fame.

At season's end, he was named a first-team All-Southern Conference player, an All-America Catholic player, and an Associated Press honorable mention All-American. The Touchdown Club awarded Gambino the Arch McDonald Trophy as the best player in the Washington, D.C. area. Prior to the start of the 1948 season, the Southern Conference ruled that his college eligibility was exhausted and that he would be unable to play another year of college football. Gambino called the decision "crooked" and asserted that the standing rules did not count returning veterans' pre-war playing career against their eligibility. Geary Eppley, a Maryland athletics official and member of the Southern Conference executive committee, filed a request for a special session to consider a rule change, but it failed to garner support from the two-thirds of the member schools required to call such a meeting.