Blue White Illustrated

uarterback Christian Hackenberg won't be the last Penn State player to wear jersey No. 14, but it's a number with a legacy that stretches back to 1908 and a game against one- time bitter rival Pitt. Over the decades, dozens of Nittany Lions have worn jersey No. 14 and two of them were quarterbacks who led the team to national championships. A third quarterback was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. One No. 14 went on to become a Hall of Fame coach, and an- other was a star running back on the great unbeaten Cotton Bowl team in 1947. Some of the players who have donned the No. 14 jersey were starters, and oth- ers were little-used reserves. No one is more obscure than William Mordecai Riddle, the ;rst player to have worn the number. Riddle is not listed among the dozens of Nittany Lion lettermen whose names are preserved on a wall in the Lasch football building and printed every fall in the Penn State Football Yearbook. Yet, based on information in the stu- dent newspaper and school yearbook, LaVie, he played four years from 1907- 10 as a guard and tackle, usually as the prime backup and an occasional starter. Unfortunately for Riddle, the policies for earning a varsity letter in his era were strict, based on an inordinate amount of playing time that Riddle ap- parently never accrued. What we do know is that Riddle was from the Pittsburgh suburb of Coraopo- lis and attended Slippery Rock Normal before enrolling at Penn State to study electrical engineering. Perhaps Riddle can best be summed up by this com- ment in the LaVie biographical sketches of his 1911 senior class: "An unassuming modest man." It was on Thanksgiving Day of 1908 before 9,000 fans at Pittsburgh's Expo- sition Park when W. Mordecai Riddle began the generational link to Christian Hackenberg. That was the ;rst time Penn State players wore jerseys with numbers. Washington & Je

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