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teams that play for the national champi- onship. Giftopoulos may not have achieved Urschel's fame, but he might just hold the distinction of being the first Canadian to play football for Penn State. Research by this writer didn't turn up any Canadian players prior to Giftopoulos's arrival in the mid-1980s. Given the sheer number of athletes who had passed through the program over the decades, it would be hard to say definitively that Gifto was the first. But this much is certain: In the years since he starred at linebacker for PSU, the team's Canadian connection has yielded a number of key players. A Canadian pipeline Several of those Canadian players have arrived in recent years, and two more are members of the Class of 2020. When spring practice begins in March, redshirt junior safety Jonathan Suther- land is projected as a pos- sible starter and junior linebacker Jesse Luketa is seen as a key backup. Both are originally from Ottawa. Two new recruits are Canadians: tight end Theo Johnson of Windsor and wide receiver Malick Meiga of Montreal. Another Canadian player – senior defensive end Daniel Joseph of Brampton – is in the transfer portal and is expected to leave Penn State. What's most unusual about two of the Canadians now on the roster, and three others in the past decade, is that they left their respective hometowns to play high school football in the United States. They believed that was necessary in order to attract the attention of major colleges and to adapt to the radically dissimilar rules and smaller playing field of American football. Sutherland played for Episcopal High in Alexandria, Va., and Luketa for Mercyhurst Prep in Erie, Pa. It's a different path than the one taken by Giftopoulos and the Yeboah-Kodie brothers, Phil and Frank, who followed Gifto in the early 1990s. They stayed home. Giftopoulos played for Cathedral High in Hamilton, about 50 miles south of Toronto, and the Yeboah-Kodie brothers matriculated at Vanier College Prep School in Montreal. For a variety of reasons, including the rule differences between the American and Canadian versions of the game, many major-college programs apparently haven't found it to be worth the time and effort to pursue Canadian high school players. But the Lions have, on occasion, ventured north of the border. How Giftopoulos and some other Canadians wound up at Penn State can be traced to a former graduate assistant unknown to fans and the media named Jamie Barres. In April 1983, Barres was just a Penn State student from Hamilton, Ontario, working on a graduate degree in exercise science with no ties to the Nittany Lion football team. One of his classmates was Paul Alexander, a journalism student, who MAIN MAN Born in Winnipeg, Urschel became an All-Big Ten player and Aca- demic All-Amer- ican at Penn State before embarking on a pro career. Photo by Mark Selders T H E C L A S S O F 2 0 2 0 >>

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