Mark Carlson (quarterback)
American gridiron football player
Mark Carlson was an American football quarterback who played for the Minnesota Golden Gophers football team from 1976 to 1979, and later for the Chicago Fire of the now-defunct American Football Association. During his senior year in 1979, Carlson passed for 2188 yards and 11 touchdowns, which was good enough to earn him Team MVP honors on a squad that finished 4–6–1 under first-year head coach Joe Salem.
Biography
Carlson played high school football at Deerfield High School under noted coach Paul Adams.
During his tenure with the Gophers, Carlson competed with Wendell Avery for the starting quarterback position, both having varying success at different times during this period. Carlson first made a name for himself during his sophomore season in 1977, in one of the biggest wins in Gopher history. The Gophers were scheduled to face the Michigan Wolverine team in their annual Little Brown Jug game, which would be played at the Gopher's Memorial Stadium. Michigan was coming into the contest as the number one ranked team in the country with a 6–0 record. The Gophers – who were 4–2 at the time with wins over Washington and UCLA – still were considered major underdogs against the Wolverines and Bo Schembechler. What added to the Gopher's uncertainty was that they still didn't know who their starting quarterback was going to be. After having former Gopher hero Butch Nash give a rousing pep talk on the Friday night before the game, Minnesota's head coach Cal Stoll met with all three of his top quarterbacks to decide who would be the starter for the big game.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6767000. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1979 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mark Carlson (quarterback)” 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.