Black Blue and White and Read All Over

A Digital Trip Down Ink-Stained Memory Lane Unearths Nittany Nation’s Collective Mindset During Blue-White Weekends That Preceded Unforgettable Seasons.

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One of my favorite “Penn State holidays” – Blue-White Weekend – is nearly upon us. After a long and lonely Winter spent away from the company of your old college pals, extended tailgating family, and 108,000 friendly acquaintances, we get to squeeze in this brief, but welcome reminder of what we miss so much from five months ago and eagerly await five months hence (and if you actually end up going into the game, get a mostly useless and often confusing “preview” of future Nittany Lions you hope won’t enter the transfer portal before August). The event has grown substantially over the years, becoming a rallying point for any number of campus and local groups, alumni reunions, and student revelry (as if they need the excuse). For me, the most memorable moment at a Blue-White game came in 2007, shortly after the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, when some enterprising Penn State students organized fans wearing Tech’s colors into the game, clad in t-shirts sold to raise money for the victims.

Of course, the festivities are probably most valued as a satisfying football oasis in a desert of disposable late-season NBA and NHL games and (perhaps even worse) early-season baseball. Since my pregame columns in the Fall examine the in-season narrative, I thought it would be fun to go back in time and see what Penn Staters were thinking and saying about the football team prior to the Spring games held before some of its most memorable seasons.

A quick digression: An interesting facet of this exercise is the degree to which our era’s fractured media marketplace makes this task much more challenging for examining recent seasons. If you want to provide a snapshot of the conversation surrounding Penn State football from any point in the 20^th century, as I do below, you can turn to The Daily Collegian, the campus “paper of record” throughout that time period, and then expand to a few of the big dailies from across the commonwealth if needs be. Starting around 2008, a year in which Penn State won the Big Ten and Onward State was founded, some of the most important discussions were happening on blogs and, eventually, social media. It becomes a lot more difficult to pin down an answer to the question, “what were people talking about?” Say what you will about the pros and cons of the democratization of media, I don’t envy the task of future historians charged with piecing together what we were all thinking, saying, and doing throughout this era.

Anyway, come along for a Blue-White Eve journey into the past and revisit the post-Spring scuttlebutt around three championship-caliber Penn State teams: one that lost a title on the field (1978), another that won it (1982), and a third that was criminally denied the opportunity (1994)…

1978

The greatness of the 1978 Nittany Lions has probably been lost to time, perhaps in part because the team followed up its undefeated regular season, a campaign that saw Penn State achieve its first-ever number one national ranking, with a deflating 14-7 Sugar Bowl loss to the Alabama Crimson Tide. With the championship on the line, the Nittany Lions faltered in the shadow of the goal posts, stopped from scoring on four consecutive tries (supposedly, you can watch Matt Suhey on third down and judge for yourself) in a fourth-quarter goal line stand would go down in ‘Bama lore and Penn State infamy. Yet the Fall of ’78 was one of the finest in program history, and the team featured some of its very best players, guys like the mercurial Matt Millen, a future three-time Super Bowl champion, Suhey, the hometown hero and another future Super Bowl champ with the legendary ’85 Bears, and quarterback Chuck Fusina, whose second-place Heisman finish ties Richie Lucas (’59) and Ki-jana Carter (’94) for the best in Penn State history short of 1973 winner John Cappelletti.

What were the storylines and questions marks surrounding a team destined to set program milestones and come tantalizingly close to winning it all as Spring practice wrapped up? Here are some observations from The Daily Collegian’s pre- and post-game coverage, which you’ll find linked below.

• Easily the most remarkable aspect of the ’78 Blue-White Game was its location. For the only time in its long history, the game was transplanted from the welcoming environs of Happy Valley and instead played at Hersheypark Stadium while Beaver Stadium underwent a 16,000-seat expansion (RIP to the running track that once encircled the field). The game was also late in the year compared to its now-normal April time frame, played on May 6, 1978.

• The glut of previews, lists, primers, and other speculative #content we have come to expect leading up to Blue-White Weekend were absent in the simpler days of the late Seventies. In fact, The Collegian devoted only one story to the game across the 24 (!!) pages of its Friday, May 5 edition, and the result didn’t even make the following Monday edition’s front page (or even the front page of the Sports section!). It’s quite possible that once upon a time we all kept things in a healthier perspective.

• On the field, the team’s 11-1 finish in 1977 set expectations appropriately high, especially with most of the top offensive talent returning minus star wide receiver Jimmy Cefalo (who was chosen to represent the decade of the 1970s at Joe Paterno’s memorial). Concerns surrounded a defense that graduated many of its starters from the previous season, especially in the defense backfield. As linebacker Rick Donaldson put it, in a strikingly candid musing: “Our secondary is kind of weak.” Spoiler alert: The defense turned out okay.

• Several star players sat out the game, including Suhey, Millen, and Mike Guman (Lions fans closer to my age may remember watching Mike’s son Andrew in the mid-2000s), and the defense, led by all-time great Bruce Clark, allayed some of the concerns about its ability to stack up. JoePa seemed mostly unimpressed, telling the campus paper, “I think this is an awfully good team, but it didn’t have that good a spring practice.”

The Daily Collegian – 1978 Blue-White Preview

The Daily Collegian – 1978 Blue-White Coverage

1982

Joe Paterno was already a legendary coach heading into the 1982 college football season, but one crucial, final validation eluded him – a championship. Spurned by voters in the late 60’s and early 70’s, despite a string of undefeated squads, and agonizingly stonewalled by that Alabama goal line defense in ’79, the man who would go on to rewrite his profession’s record books still sought the cache of winning the national title. With that backdrop, let’s take a look at what they were saying about the Lions back in the Spring of ’82, only months away from the elation and relief of finishing number one at last.

This first of two articles from The Daily Collegian was published on April 30, 1982 (the Friday before the game). Some points that caught my eye:

• Joe Paterno was entering his 17th season as head coach. I bet it felt like he’d been around forever! I wonder how often he was asked about when he planned to retire (or answered, “I’ll go about four or five more years.”).

• The annual off-season hand-wringing that year revolved around the departure of two newly-minted, first-round NFL draft picks from the offensive line – Sean Farrell and Mike Munchak (a future NFL Hall of Famer and long-time NFL coach, including a heralded stint as Steelers offensive line coach).

• Love this quote from Joe: “If I had my way, we’d just go out there and practice without anybody around.” The old man’s infamous curmudgeonly nature persisted through the decades, and younger fans will never understand the total stranglehold coaches were able to maintain on access to their programs before the digital era breached every barricade. No media access to practice. No midweek press conferences. Little to no access to players or coaches. That short peek over the castle walls was the only glimpse we got at the team until kickoff in the Fall, and we were lucky to get that much.

• The crowd was expected at around 20,000 people (paltry by today’s standards), and you had to pay to get in!! Three bucks for adults, which I’m sure was a lot of money back then, and still better, perhaps, than what they’ll be getting for a virtual parking pass this weekend. But seriously, you had to pay an admission fee to get into the actual Blue-White Game (not exactly a tantalizing spectacle of entertainment)? Indeed, some traditions of the past are best left there.

The Daily Collegian – 1982 Blue-White Preview

The Daily Collegian – 1982 Blue-White Coverage

1994

In the Fall of 1994, the Nittany Lions would showcase one of the most potent offenses in the history of modern college football and earn a trip to the Rose Bowl. Penn State football stood on the cusp of a new era as it entered the season, having just completed its first year competing as a member of the Big Ten following decades as an independent Eastern powerhouse. Many analysts and fans (and perhaps more than a few rival athletic directors and coaches) thought it was simply a matter of time before the Lions overwhelmed their venerable brethren in pursuit of conference and national titles.

History records that things did not go exactly as planned on that score, but during PSU’s second year of league play, the era of Blue and White dominance appeared to be right on schedule. The ’94 Lions, still mentioned in reverent tones far beyond Happy Valley, unleashed a virtually unstoppable offense that featured over a dozen future NFL players, including multiple first-round selections in the 1995 Draft. The ’94 team triumphed in some of the program’s most memorable contests ever on the way to an unblemished record, yet was inexplicably denied a deserved share of the championship awarded to Tom Osborne’s undefeated Nebraska Cornhuskers. For the most part, it doesn’t feel like 30 years; although in some respects of course, it seems far longer.

A few points that stood out from The Daily Collegian‘s preview of the 1994 Spring Game:

• Unlike many special seasons, including the 1982 title run, fans seemed to have a strong sense of what might be in store. Most of the concern focused – appropriately – on the defense, a group that was understandably overshadowed by their counterparts and probably underappreciated as a result, but who also fell a few notches short of the units on other great Penn State teams. Meanwhile, the offensive forecast was downright optimistic, though I’m not sure anyone expected the juggernaut-level output to come. Kyle Brady openly dreams of an undefeated season and national championship!

• Speaking of Brady, the legendary tight end almost left school before the ’94 season – twice. As Ryan Jones, senior editor of The Penn Stater and then-Collegian sports writer, reports, Brady, a highly-touted recruit, flirted with the idea of transfer early in his career after an injury allowed former walk-on (and future NFLer) Troy Drayton to supplant him in the lineup. After choosing to stick it out, Brady came close to passing on his senior campaign to join the pros. While he pondered the wisdom of his choice at the time, we know now that it paved the way for his place in Penn State lore and rise to the ninth overall pick in the following year’s draft. Good thing there was no portal back then or history might have been very different for the legendary Lions of ’94.

The Daily Collegian – 1994 Blue-White Preview

The Daily Collegian – 1994 Blue-White Coverage

Read and enjoy these articles as you count down the hours before you pack up the car for the trip back “home” or open your door to returning friends and family. You’ll no doubt smile more than once, at those little details that are different today and the bigger things that are virtually unchanged. Looking back into Old State’s past fosters a special appreciation for ways in which the Nittany Valley is at once dynamic and timeless.

Three for the Road:

1. There is not much useful to be learned from the Blue-White Game, so don’t straining yourself searching for some buried truth. On the other hand, this weekend represents one of the best opportunities to enjoy many of the perks of the Penn State football experience with less chaos and stress. Especially for those with younger kids, the laid back nature of the weekend and game itself represent an ideal point of entry to the Greatest Show in College Football, so join us here in Happy Valley if you can.

2. If you’re going to insist on scouring for crumbs of worthwhile intel from Saturday, hope for a few hints of Andy Kotelnicki’s nifty new offense (don’t hold out for much given James Franklin’s notorious paranoia) and watch for the comfort level Drew Allar displays with his pass catchers. Allar’s struggles connecting with the receivers during last year’s exhibition (minus the rarely-utilized Omari Evans) did portend similar struggles in real-life scenarios this past Fall, so any sign of improvement would be welcome.

3.The snap counts for those receivers may also indicate who has the early inside track come August practices. The depth chart shows a lot of bodies and precious little production, and one or more guys, including new arrival Julian Fleming, must step up in order for State to chase a playoff spot. This is your standard disclaimer that transfer portal movement (in, out, or both) could render every flimsy post-Spring takeaway moot before Franklin reassembles his squad for another practice.