David Klingler
American football player
David Ryan Klingler (born February 17, 1969) is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback for six years in the National Football League (NFL) and current Associate Professor of Bible Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary. He played college football for the Houston Cougars, earning third-team All-American honors in 1990. Klingler was selected in the first round of the 1992 NFL draft by the Cincinnati Bengals, but his career was cut short by an elbow injury.
College career
A 6-foot, 2-inch quarterback, Klingler rewrote numerous college passing records for the Houston Cougars from 1988 to 1991. On November 17, 1990, Klingler threw for an all-Divisions record 11 touchdown passes for a single quarterback against Eastern Washington at the Astrodome (since equaled at the NAIA level by Lee Kirkland of Pikeville in 2024), and on December 2 set the NCAA (Division I) record for most yards gained in a single game, 716 (since surpassed by Connor Halliday in 2014 and later Patrick Mahomes in 2016). In his four seasons at Houston, he completed 726 of 1,262 passes for 9,430 yards and 91 touchdowns, all of which were school records at the time. Klingler set the NCAA record for touchdown passes in a season with 54 in 1990. His single-season touchdown pass record stood for 16 years until it was broken in the 2006 Hawaii Bowl by University of Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan with 58, though Brennan needed three more games than Klingler to break the record. Klingler made a valiant push to win the Heisman Trophy (following in the footsteps of fellow Cougar Andre Ware) but was eventually beaten by Ty Detmer of BYU and Raghib Ismail (runner-up) of Notre Dame. Klingler remained a stand-out for the University of Houston and still ranks in the FBS top ten for career touchdown passes and yards.
The public source identifies “David Klingler” as american football player. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around David, Klingler and American.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5236071. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1990, 1992 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Klingler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.