Blue White Illustrated

June 2019

Penn State Sports Magazine

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P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> record books, but he is still 13th in passing yards and total o?ense. Hostetler married the daughter of Mountaineers coach Don Nehlen and then enjoyed a productive 15-year NFL career that included a Super Bowl championship with the New York Giants in 1990. Like Blackledge, Hostetler was no slouch in the classroom either. He was a =rst-team CoSIDA Academic All-Amer- ican in 1983 and received an $18,000 postgraduate scholarship from the Na- tional Football Foundation/College Foot- ball Hall of Fame. Hostetler was so popular at the time that he inspired a record, "Old Hoss: The Ballad of West Virginia's Je? Hostetler," sung to the tune of the "Bonanza" TV show theme song. Old Hoss remains a popular =gure in Morgantown, and not just because of his WVU and NFL success and his marriage. He lives in the area, running his contract- ing business building homes and devel- oping property from a 40-acre horse farm not far from campus. He is still the family outlier when it comes to Penn State. His brothers' Nittany Lion teammate, Steve Stupar, married their sister, Cher, and one of their three sons, Nate, was a standout linebacker for the Nittany Lions from 2008-11. With eight NFL season under his belt, Stupar signed in March with Hoss's old New York Giants team. Penn State has lost some other high- pro=le quarterbacks over the years, dat- ing back to the 1971 season. Although Steve Joachim thrived at his new school, winning the 1974 Maxwell Award as the country's outstanding player and leading the nation in total o?ense, neither he nor the other transfers ever had a song writ- ten about them. 1971: John Hufnagel and Steve Joachim A@er Penn State's record 33-game un- defeated streak ended in the second game of the 1970 season and the team later slipped to 2-3 under starting quarterback Mike Cooper and his backup, Bob Par- sons, Paterno promoted Hufnagel, a true sophomore at the time. The Lions lost only three games over the next two and a half seasons. Cooper le@ the team before the 1971 season, Parsons became the starting tight end, and true sophomore Steve Joachim (pronounced Jo-ack-um) of Haverford, Pa., became Hufnagel's backup. Joachim played a bit in '71, pass- ing 41 times for seven touchdowns and scrambling for 47 yards and a TD, but it was Hufnagel's team. Like Stevens decades later, Joachim went through spring practice in 1972. A few days later, a@er what he described as an unsettling conversation with Paterno, he transferred to Temple. Before the 1972 season, Paterno praised Hufnagel as "the best college quarterback in the country, bar none." Hufnagel con- cluded his career by winning =rst-team All-America honors and =nishing sixth in the Heisman voting. Nowadays, he is re- garded as Penn State's best running quar- terback before the advent of the dual-threat QBs of the 2000s. Among quarterbacks, he's still ranked fourth in school history in career rushing yardage (667 yards) and rushing touchdowns (13), trailing three of those more-recent dual- threat starters. Hufnagel also ranks among the Nittany Lions' all-time career and single-season passing leaders and has the program's highest yards-per-completion average for a season (17.7). A@er three frustrating NFL seasons as a backup with the Denver Broncos, Huf- nagel achieved stardom in the Canadian Football League, =rst as a player for 12 years and then as a two-time Grey Cup- winning coach. Since 2016, he has been the president and general manager of the Calgary Stampeders. Joachim sat out the 1972 season and then led Temple to 9-1 and 8-2 seasons that were the Owls' best since 1931, but he never had the chance to play against his former team. From 2001-12, Jaochim was the analyst for Temple's radio network. He also was a businessman in the =nan- cial and health industries working out of his hometown in Delaware County and is now retired. 1993: Kerry Collins and John Sacca This transfer opus was the most bizarre, >aring up midway through the 1993 sea- son a@er originating in the summer of 1992 when Collins injured his right index =nger in a volleyball game at a family pic- nic. A few months before, following spring practice, Paterno had designated the redshirt sophomore Collins as the starter over Sacca, a redshirt junior. Sacca had not been happy, remembering that his older brother Tony had been Penn State's starting quarterback for three and a half years despite a strained relationship with Paterno. With Collins recovering slowly from his =nger injury, Sacca started the '92 season opener at Cincinnati, but he su?ered a shoulder injury that forced Paterno to use true freshman Wally Richardson. Sacca was back for the third game and started six more times until su?ering a season- ending knee sprain. Collins started the last four games of the 1992 season, but a separate fracture of his index =nger in the Blockbuster Bowl caused him to miss spring practice in 1993. Collins looked rusty as he continued to recover in pre- season practice, and the now-con=dent Sacca moved back into the starting posi- tion for '93, with Richardson as his backup until Collins was ready. Sacca was at the controls as Penn State won its =rst two games, but when he struggled at Iowa, Paterno sent in Collins even though the Lions were leading. The next week in practice, Sacca talked an- grily of transferring. Although he played brie>y in the next two games, he abruptly quit before the Michigan game. Collins needed a few more weeks to get up to speed. The season ended with a 10-2 record and a come-from-behind victory over Tennessee in the Citrus Bowl, setting the stage for an undefeated Big Ten championship season in 1994. Collins played his way into the College Football Hall of Fame and spent 17 years in the NFL, a pro tenure that ties him with kicker Matt Bahr for the longest by a Nit- tany Lion. Sacca wound up at Division I- AA Eastern Kentucky and a@er a short stint in the Arena Football League, he re- turned to his hometown of Delran, N.J., where he owns a painting company. 2009: Daryll Clark and Pat Devlin Devlin's transfer situation is similar in a signi=cant way to that of Stevens. Like

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