EDITOR'S NOTE The following article has
been adapted by Lou Prato from his book
The Penn State Football Encyclopedia.
T
here's never been a spring practice at
Penn State or elsewhere in college
football like the one in 1950 when Rip
Engle became head coach of the Nittany
Lions.
This one started late because of the un-
expected resignation of the previous head
coach. One of the spring practice seg-
ments lasted six weeks and was overseen
by the freshman coach, who had never
been on campus in the fall despite having
been hired four years earlier. That coach
and all his freshman players had spent the
previous four seasons as the varsity team
for a small state teachers college 150 miles
away near Pittsburgh. Next came another
two weeks of practice that Penn State's
upperclassmen attended voluntarily so
that they could learn a radically innova-
tive oer
World War II were freewheeling, with
loose regulations.
Engle was still at Brown University with
nary a thought about Penn State on March
4, 1950, when Joe Bedenk suddenly re-
signed as the Lions' head coach a>er one
season. Bedenk, a longtime assistant
under Bob Higgins, had taken the job a>er
Higgins retired at the end of the 1948 sea-
son. However, Bedenk was never comfort-
able as the team's leader. He decided to
quit coaching football altogether and con-
centrate on his head coaching duties of his
beloved Penn State baseball team. Later,
Bedenk rejoined the football sta< for an-
other two years.
The timing of Bedenk's resignation –
just as spring practice was about to begin
–threw the Nittany Lions' athletic de-
partment into a tizzy. Athletic director
Carl P. Schott wanted to conduct a thor-
ough search for a new coach, partly be-
cause the hiring of Bedenk had been the
result of internal political :ghting that
had caused Higgins' designated successor
Earle Edwards, another longtime assis-
tant, to quit.
So, with spring practice needing to start
without a coach, Schott and his advisory
board brought Earl Bruce back from Cal-
ifornia State Teachers College, where he
had been coaching Penn State's fresh-
men. The unique arrangement with Cal-
ifornia had been set up in 1946 when
overcrowded conditions at the University
Park campus forced almost all Penn State
freshmen, men and women, to matricu-
late at Cal and other schools in the state
teachers college system. Under the agree-
ment with Cal, Penn State hired Bruce
from nearby Brownsville High School to
coach the freshmen, and California re-
sumed playing football a>er suspending
the program for four years during World
War II, with Bruce as its head coach.
On March 15, 1950, 80 candidates, not in-
cluding 24 freshmen from California State
Teachers College, reported to Bruce and his
four assistant coaches at Beaver Field for
the start of an expected eight-week spring
practice session. Three of the assistant
coaches were former Penn State players: Al
Michaels and Jim O'Hora who had been
hired by Higgins, and Tor Torretti, who had
been retained by Bedenk. The fourth assis-
tant, Frank Patrick, a Pitt grad also hired by
Bedenk, was the only one being considered
for the head coaching vacancy.
Engle was surprised when the Penn
State athletic director called asking if he
was interested in discussing the head
coaching position. He :gured he probably
wasn't Schott's :rst choice, since the
press had reported rumors that Pitts-
burgh Steelers coach John Michelosen
and veteran head coach Clark Shaugh-
nessy had been contacted.
Engle had plenty of sensible reasons to
dismiss Penn State's overtures. He already
had turned down opportunities to coach at
Yale, Wisconsin and Pitt, and those jobs
seemed to have much more potential for
immediate success than the one at Penn
State. He also was familiar with the inter-
nal politics that had forced the bungled
hiring of Bedenk and the departure of Ed-
wards. They were not unlike the backstab-
bing circumstances that had embittered
Engle's college coach at Western Mary-
land, Dick Harlow, to Penn State. Harlow
had played for the Lions and had been their
head coach, but when he returned to Penn
State a>er World War I, it was as an assis-
tant coach. He le> the school in 1920.
Despite his concerns, Engle decided to
listen. That the factionalism continued
was obvious by the stipulation from Penn
State o=cials that Engle retain all the
current assistant coaches, including Be-
denk. This was – and is – highly unusual,
because new coaches normally get to
choose their own sta>
A NEW BEGINNING
The spring of 1950 was a tumultuous time for Penn State's growing football program
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