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 >> 2 0 1 9 S E A S O N the championship, with Nebraska at 5-1 odds and Penn State at 75-1. He later told Town & Gown's 1995 Penn State Football Annual magazine that the pre- season rankings were at the root of Penn State's denial of at least a share of the title. Going into any season, no team is in complete control of its own destiny. There are upsets that cause the polls to shuffle from week to week, and what a team does on the field can be positive or negative. Frequently, the poll voters cast their ballots on perception, not reality, and bias cannot be ruled out. As the 1994 season progressed, Penn State moved up in the rankings with five impressive high-scoring victories. After beating then-No. 5 Michigan in a show- down at Ann Arbor the same day that Auburn had upset No. 1 Florida, Penn State moved up to No. 1 in both polls, jumping over Nebraska, with Colorado also in the top three. What happened the next week flab- bergasted Penn State fans. The Nittany Lions destroyed Ohio State at Beaver Stadium, 63-14. On that same day, then-No. 3 Nebraska beat No. 2 Col- orado, 24-7, and the writers and broad- casters who vote in the AP poll shifted their allegiance. Nebraska was now No. 1 by a narrow margin of six total points, 1,520 to 1,514, but with 33 first-place votes compared to 28 for the Lions. Penn State had reached the zenith of its total points and first-place votes in the AP poll and it would be downhill from here. None of the players could believe that they lost the No. 1 ranking after clobber- ing one of their biggest rivals, which had been ranked No. 21 going into the game. "To beat a [good] team 63-14 and drop," quarterback Kerry Collins told Scott Brown for the book "The Lion Kings," "what else can you do?" What has galled Penn State fans to this day was the revelation that two of the AP first-place votes for Nebraska came from Ohio State beat writers who cov- ered the Lions' overwhelming victory. Tom Lucci, the college football writer for The Newark Star Ledger, questioned those motivations, wondering whether their vote was "either out of revenge, stubbornness or ignorance." The Nittany Lions were still No. 1 in the coaches' poll by a razor-thin margin of two points and two first-place votes. A week later at Indiana, the offense looked a bit sluggish. With mostly de- fensive reserves in the lineup late in the fourth quarter, the Lions allowed 15 points in the last two minutes, including a 40-yard touchdown pass and two- point conversion on the final play. The Hoosiers' late surge cut Penn State's margin of victory to six points, 35-29, and to those who hadn't seen it, the game appeared closer than it really had been. Meanwhile, Nebraska easily beat a poor Kansas team, 45-7. Malcolm Moran, who covered that game and five other Penn State games that year for The New York Times, still remembers walking past the celebrating Indiana players and fans after the game, thinking, "I just saw a team lose the na- tional championship, and their starters were watching from the sideline." Twelve coaches switched their first- place votes to Nebraska, pushing the Cornhuskers ahead of Penn State, and the Lions also lost more first-place votes in the AP poll. One coach even dropped PSU to No. 6. The Nittany Lions came close to ruin- ing their entire season the next week when they had to rally back from a 21-0 first-quarter deficit to beat unranked Illinois in the nighttime cold and dreary rain of Champaign. In one of the great- est series of plays in Penn State football history, Collins led a thrilling 14-play, 96-yard drive in the fourth quarter to give the Lions their first lead, but it took an end zone interception by All-Ameri- can Kim Herring to clinch the 35-31 vic- tory, the Big Ten championship and a Rose Bowl berth. The close win had no impact on the polls. The vote totals and first-place votes for Penn State and Nebraska, which defeated Iowa State, 26-12, hardly changed. Now, there were six other teams in the running for the Bowl Coalition's matchup. It all crystalized in the last three weeks of the regular season. Ne- braska beat Oklahoma, 13-3, in Norman, while Penn State crushed Northwestern, 45-17, and Michigan State, 59-31, at Beaver Stadium. On Dec. 3, No. 3 Ala- bama blew its chance to play the Corn- huskers by losing to Florida, 24-23, in the Southeastern Conference title game. When the final regular-season polls came out, once-beaten Miami was No. 3 in the AP and Bowl Coalition rankings. Osborne was happy that Nebraska was the No. 1 team but he wanted a show- down with Penn State to truly prove which team was best. Shortly after the Bowl Coalition ranking were released, he called his friend Paterno. He kept that phone call secret for 16 years, revealing it for the first time on June 1, 2010, dur- ing his radio show on the Husker Sports Network. "I thought, 'Well, if Joe kicked up a fuss and said, 'We deserve to play Ne- braska,' somebody would have relented," Osborne said on his show, as reported in a blog by Lincoln Journal Star sports- writer Steve Sipple. "But [Paterno] said we were bound to this [Bowl Coalition] contract, and that's the way it was." The conversation is virtually unknown even by some of Nebraska's loyal fans. On New Year's night, Nebraska beat Miami, 24-17, in the Orange Bowl, and the next day Penn State defeated Ore- gon, 38-20, in the Rose Bowl. Here is how Nebraska and Penn State finished in the final polls: AP COACHES 1ST 1ST PTS PLACE PTS PLACE Nebraska 1,529.5 51.5 1,542 54 Penn State 1,497.5 10.5 1,296 8 Moran, who never voted in the AP poll during the 32 years he covered college football for four major newspapers, wrote a story for The New York Times about the individual AP votes in the final poll. "I discovered that the votes within the geographical footprint of the con- ference favored Nebraska," said Moran, M E D I A C O A C H E S