Professional Career
After college, Austin was selected in the 12th round (312th overall) of the 1986 NFL Draft by the St. Louis Cardinals. He played two seasons in the NFL as the team's third-string quarterback, attempting a single pass.
In 1988, the Cardinals chose not to resign Austin, and he instead jumped to the CFL and joined the Roughriders, initially as their back-up quarterback. On November 26, 1989 in Toronto, Austin was at the helm of the Roughriders when they won the 1989 Grey Cup versus the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, winning the MVP trophy for his 474 yards passing in the game. One of the Top 10 quarterbacks in CFL history, with 36,030 career passing yards on 4,700 pass attempts, having completed 2709 passes (57.6%), Austin is a Roughriders legend for leading the team to its second league championship (Grey Cup). He also threw 198 touchdown passes and 191 interceptions in his 10 CFL seasons with 4 teams.
Austin started at quarterback for the Roughriders, British Columbia Lions, and Toronto Argonauts (the second Ole Miss star to play quarterback for Toronto, the first being Eagle Day in 1967), as well as serving as a backup for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He is one of only four CFL quarterbacks to pass for more than 6,000 yards in a single season (6,225 in 1992 with Saskatchewan). Austin won his second Grey Cup in 1994 with the British Columbia Lions, starting the 82nd Grey Cup but being replaced at halftime by Danny McManus due to an injury. McManus would lead the Lions to a win on a last-second field goal.
In the Columbo episode A Bird in the Hand... (air date November 22, 1992), footage from a Saskatchewan Roughriders versus Edmonton Eskimos game was used to portray a fictional game played by a football team called "The Stallions". As the footage showed Kent Austin playing and wearing the No. 5 jersey, the actor playing the quarterback wore a jersey bearing that number throughout the television episode. When a scene required seeing the quarterback in play, they used footage of Kent Austin.
Read more about this topic: Kent Austin
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or career:
“Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather than achievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)