Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1507572
6 2 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 'A Powerful Conference' The proponent in question was Joe Pa- terno. He had long maintained that Penn State and its fellow Eastern football inde- pendents — Pitt, Syracuse, Boston Col- lege, West Virginia, Rutgers and Temple — would be better off in a conference. And not just in football, but in all sports. Paterno was motivated in part by the sneering attitude of the college football establishment toward his program when it was beginning its ascendance in the late 1960s. The Nittany Lions went unbeaten in 1968, '69 and '73, yet they finished no higher than second in the Associated Press poll in any of those seasons. In 1973, they were fifth in both the coaches' and AP rankings despite going 12-0. In his autobiography, "Paterno By the Book," the longtime Nittany Lion coach grumbled about the regional biases that he believed had kept those teams from receiving their due. "The sportswriters and sportscast- ers heaped all kinds of praise on us but couldn't quite bring themselves to credit us — or any team in the East — with hav- ing a great football team," he wrote. "The 'experts' couldn't get their eyes off the Big Ten, the Big Eight, the Southwest Confer- ence, the Southeastern Conference, the Pac-10." By the early 1980s, Paterno was in a po- sition to do something about that. He had been named Penn State's athletics direc- tor after Ed Czekaj stepped down in 1980, and his most ambitious goal was to spear- head the creation of an Eastern all-sports conference involving the Northeastern schools that PSU regularly played in foot- ball. In addition, as former West Virginia athletics director Ed Pastilong recently told The Times West Virginian, Paterno wanted Florida State and South Carolina, which were independents at the time. "It would have been a powerful confer- ence," Pastilong said. The problem was that Pitt had begun playing basketball in the Big East in 1982 and was quite happy with that arrange- ment. The Panthers didn't feel as though they needed to formalize their relation- ship with Penn State in football. The two schools had been playing each other on a near-annual basis since 1893. Penn State had also applied to the Big East, hoping that membership in the fledgling basketball league might be a way to create the all-sports conference that Paterno wanted. Commissioner Dave Gavitt and his assistant Mike Tranghese both favored the Nittany Lions' admis- sion, aware that football was inevitably going to figure into the Big East's future. Nevertheless, PSU's bid was rejected. "We will all rue [this] day," Tranghese told Gavitt after the vote. With Penn State and Pitt at odds, there was no hope of building an Eastern all- sports conference in any form. It was the end of Paterno's dream. But just because his idea hadn't come to fruition didn't mean that he was going to give up on league membership. With Paterno protégé Jim Tarman taking the lead as athletics director, PSU continued to explore its options. By the end of the decade, it had found a home. New Frontiers Penn State's decision to join the Big Ten left its Eastern rivals stunned. Pastilong told The Times that he found out about it when he picked up his newspaper one morning in 1989. Whatever slim hope may have re- mained for an Eastern all-sports confer- ence ended with that announcement. It was the start of the East's balkanization. Just as Gavitt and Tranghese had an- ticipated, the Big East began playing football — just not with the region's flag- ship program leading the way. Miami, Rutgers, West Virginia, Virginia Tech and Temple joined Pitt, Syracuse and Boston College in 1991. Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida later came aboard, but by 2013, the league had collapsed, with the football members carrying on as the American Athletic Conference. These days, the former Eastern in- dependents are split up between three Power Five conferences, none of which are based in the Northeast. Pitt, Syra- cuse and Boston College belong to the ACC, Penn State and Rutgers to the Big Ten and West Virginia to the Big 12. In the years that followed Penn State's entry into the Big Ten, Paterno became an advocate for further expansion in the East. Shortly after Pitt and Syracuse were accepted into the ACC in Septem- ber 2011, he said that he wanted to see the Big Ten go after other potentially interested parties. "Now that [Pitt and Syracuse] are out of it, why don't we take a look at Rut- gers, take a look at somebody that we can bring in from the East so that the Big Ten doesn't end in State College," he said. Three years later, the Scarlet Knights would become part of the Big Ten, along with Maryland. And since then, the league's frontiers have been pushed back even further in just about every direction. The Big Ten doesn't end in State College anymore, and with four West Coast schools set to join, it doesn't really end anywhere in the continental United States. Maybe that would have happened no matter what. TV is dictating what the conferences look like, and if the net- works say geography doesn't matter … it doesn't matter. But even if just as a thought experi- ment, it's interesting to consider how college football might have evolved if Paterno had gotten his Eastern confer- ence. Maybe it would make more geo- graphic sense. Indeed, with two schools from the Bay Area set to join the ACC, it could hardly make less. ■ "The sportswriters and sportscasters heaped all kinds of praise on us but couldn't quite bring themselves to credit us — or any team in the East — with having a great football team. The 'experts' couldn't get their eyes off the Big Ten, the Big Eight, the Southwest Conference, the Southeastern Conference, the Pac-10." P A T E R N O