Cote: How Cleveland Browns fan’s tragedy gave Bernie Kosar second chance at life
It is difficult to imagine anyone feeling much more gratitude than Bernie Kosar this Thanksgiving Week.
He was discharged Monday from University Hospital in northeast Ohio after a week’s stay. He left a different man, one given a second chance at life thanks to a liver transplant. Tuesday he turned 62, following a couple of tough years of medical challenges that made you wonder if he would make it that far.
“I’m feeling super blessed with the happiness I’m getting with my birthday coming, Thanksgiving and the awesome gift of a liver,” Kosar told the Miami Herald on Friday. “It’s been an emotional roller coaster, to be prepared but not prepared for the emotional severity of it. I’m trying to fight back tears.”
[For the Herald’s full Kosar interview listen to the latest Greg Cote Show podcast Episode 298 out now, with link below.]
Kosar’s name should be familiar of course to most football fans, especially those in Miami and Cleveland. He led the Miami Hurricanes to the school’s first of five national championships in 1983, and in a long NFL career in Cleveland led the Browns to three AFC Championship Games. He later won a Super Bowl with Dallas before ending is career as Dan Marino’s backup with the Dolphins from 1994 to 1996. Kosar passed for 124 touchdowns and more than 23,000 yards in his pro career.
He had been diagnosed in 2024 with advanced cirrhosis of the liver and early Parkinson’s disease. He says he also has early-stage dementia. A previous prospective donor was disqualified late in the process by an infected liver, crushing news that had extended Kosar’s wait and battle against time. He had been on the transplant waiting list for two years before the life-changing call finally came.
Kosar still found ways to maintain his sense of humor even in the lowest of days. After the transplant surgery, he joked that the pattern of the stitches across his chest was his “Mercedes-Benz scar.”
Roughly 30% of liver-transplant patients reject the new organ. But of those who leaving the operating room alive, 80% have survival rate of at least five years.
Kosar credits Mike Crowley of The Crowley Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics for stem-cell treatments that he says have helped curb his cognitive decline and improved his overall health enough to make him transplant-eligible. “Mike’s the one who actually did save my life,” Kosar said.
Someone else did, too. The liver donor, his guardian angel, is who he was thinking of when he referred to “the emotional severity” of the past week.
Bryce P. Dunlap of North Olmsted, Ohio, a lifelong Browns fan, was 21 when he died suddenly of a medical emergency Kosat said was a brain aneurysm. He happened to be taken off life support a week ago Sunday, during a Browns game.
“Bryce will now live on in the hearts of so many through his generous donation of life to those in need,” read part of his memorial.
The Dunlaps did not have any relatives in need of a liver, so the family, aware of Kosar’s ongoing situation, suggested him through a directed donation, and doctors determined the liver to be a medical match for a transplant.
So, yes: The tragic ending of a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan in turn saved the life of Bernie Kosar, a forever hero in Cleveland.
“Bernie Kosar does wonderful things,” Bryce’s mother Kim Kane told Cleveland news station WKBN. “Bryce couldn’t be the celebrity that Bernie Kosar was, but he’s going to live vicariously through him so Bernie can continue to do wonderful things.”
His mom said that when her son recently renewed his driver’s license, he asked about being an organ donor and she said he should.
“He wanted to help others, so he decided to become an organ donor,” she said. “He has now helped others live.”
The young man’s funeral service was going on as we spoke to Kosar from his hospital bed.
“For him to give me a chance of life right now on Thanksgiving Week...,” said Kosar of his donor, emotion not allowing him to finish the thought. ”It’s a tragedy. It’s not something I take lightly. To think of the spirit of someone like Bryce inside of me...”
Kosar recalled his former Hurricanes football coach, the late Howard Schnellenberger, coining the phrase, ‘To Believe Is To Be Strong,’ for his ‘83 championship team. Forty years later, the former player applied that to his own challenges.
“I believed,” he said. “I knew I would make it.”
This story was originally published November 24, 2025 at 5:46 PM.
