Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1488968
J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 3 6 1 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M Once Upon A Time In The West Penn State helped make Rose Bowl history a century ago when it traveled to Pasadena to face USC S ometimes the jokes just write themselves. People have been making snarky comments about Sean Clifford's supposedly advanced age ever since he decided to come back in 2022 for his sixth season of eligibility and fourth season as Penn State's starting quarterback. When the Nittany Lions learned that their upcoming bowl trip would be to Pasadena, the place where the team's post- season history began in January 1923, coach James Franklin couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a good-natured jab at his super senior signal-caller. "I'm going to check the picture of that Rose Bowl played 100 years ago and make sure Sean isn't in it," Franklin said. "He's been playing football at Penn State for a long time." Well … yes. But an exhaustive search of the relevant records indicates that Clifford was not on the Penn State sideline that day. Nor, for that matter, was Joe Paterno, whose birth was still nearly three years away when Penn State made its very first bowl appearance. The starting quarterback in that long-ago battle with USC was Myron "Mike" Palm, a junior from Carlisle, Pa., who also served as the team's placekicker, punter and punt returner. The coach was Hugo Bezdek, a fiery taskmaster who, in a previous career stop at Arkansas, had inadvertently changed the face of the school's athletics program when he told reporters after a win over LSU that his team had played like "a wild band of razorback hogs." Bezdek was beloved at Penn State, while Palm had some de- tractors. A sportswriter (and former national champion football coach at Yale) named Walter Camp noted in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin that Palm "seems to lack the punch necessary" and that his passing was "hardly up to the mark." At the time, though, quarterbacks were not the offensive centerpieces they would later become, and having a lackluster passer in your backfield wasn't necessarily a liability. When it opened its 1922 season, Penn State was coming off a three-year stretch in which it went 22-1-4. That was good M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M Rose Bowl Stadium is one of the most historic venues in college football, but it was only a few months old when Penn State first met USC there on Jan. 1, 1923. The Trojans defeated the Nittany Lions 14-3. BWI FILE PHOTO