Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1480138
6 2 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M GAMES OF CHANCE Long before the playoff came along, PSU was pushing for a system that would give college football's top teams an opportunity to prove their worth on the field J ust as many predicted when it was launched eight years ago, the College Football Playoff is going to be getting bigger. In September, the CFP's board of managers announced that they had reached an agreement to expand the field from four to 12 teams beginning in 2026, and they left open the possibility that the new format could be in place as early as 2024. The move was cheered by many in col- lege football, including Penn State head coach James Franklin, albeit not without some reservations about the physical and academic toll that an extended season could take on players. "There are a lot of things that go into it, but I think in general it's a positive," Franklin said. "It's something that was needed. "I'm also a believer — not just in this, but in everything — that more isn't al- ways better. We've got to find the sweet spot for college football, for the fans, and most importantly for the student- athletes." Whether college football has found that sweet spot remains to be seen, but Penn State has long been at the forefront of the movement to institute a playoff at college football's highest level. Joe Paterno spent much of his career pushing for a playoff system. As he wrote in his autobiography, "Paterno by the Book," major-college football was unique in its insistence on using polls to deter- mine the national champion. "Throughout the world of sports — all sports, college, amateur, Olympic, pro- fessional, any other kind you can think of — champions are determined on the field of play," he wrote. "They rise by knock- ing off previous champions or knocking off challengers, until a champion comes out indisputably tops. "That's true in every sport I can think of — except one." UNBEATEN, UNCROWNED The roots of Paterno's disenchant- ment with the poll system were not hard to figure out. By the time he published his book in 1989, he had coached three teams that finished undefeated yet were deemed unworthy of the No. 1 ranking in the season-ending polls. Paterno's 1968 and '69 teams had both gone 11-0 with victories in the Orange Bowl (over Kansas and Missouri, respec- tively) and yet both finished second in the Associated Press rankings. In 1968, Penn State got just two first-place votes in the final poll, the same number as third-place Texas, which had lost a game and tied another. Ohio State ran away with the championship, collecting 44 first-place votes. A year later, Paterno's team had ex- tended its win streak to 22 games but it still finished well behind Texas in the final poll, collecting seven first-place votes to the Longhorns' 36. The main reason that Penn State was shut out of the top spot in the rankings was because of the dismissive attitude that many college football watchers of the era had toward the East. The Lions had claimed the Lambert Trophy, sym- bolizing regional supremacy, but without the national recognition that Paterno in- sisted his program was due, the achieve- ment felt hollow. "I couldn't help looking at that trophy as a kind of consolation prize for the sec- ond-class citizenship of Eastern teams," he admitted. In 1973, it happened again. The Nit- tany Lions went 12-0 against a schedule that featured games against opponents from the Big Ten (Iowa), Pac-10 (Stan- ford) and ACC (NC State), in addition to the usual array of Eastern independents. M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M "Playoffs will come. The more that televised bowl games succeed in making football fans out of more Americans, the more these fans will demand a clear and rational system for choosing a real champion." J O E P A T E R N O , I N H I S 1 9 8 9 A U T O B I O G R A P H Y After Joe Paterno's Nittany Lions defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl to conclude the 1982 season, they received 44 first-place votes in the AP poll to SMU's nine and Nebraska's two. PHOTO COURTESY PENN STATE ATHLETICS