Blue White Illustrated

For Lions, bowl game is an appropriate reward O nce upon a time, bowl games were rewards for college football teams that had been outstanding or dis- tinctive in some way for what they ac- complished during the regular season. Nowadays, most of the bowls are merely an extension of that season, with far too many games that are more representa- tive of the greed, mediocrity and self- serving mores that are all too prevalent in college football today. Once upon a time… It's a familiar phrase that has been used in storytelling since the 14th century, and it fits per- fectly with the radical evolution of the bowl season over the past few decades. To those aging college football fans like myself who grew up in the post-World War II era of the late 1940s and '50s – and stretching into the next three decades – the bowl environment of 2015 is as unrealistic and bizarre as some of those "once upon a time" fairy tales. Now, I'm not a cranky old codger living in the past, yearning for the good old days and bemoaning the 24/7 TV, Inter- net, Twitter culture of today. College football, like life, is constantly changing. I am happy this year's Penn State foot- ball team is going to a bowl game. De- spite how poorly the team played in four of its five losses, the players deserve it because of all the crap most of them have put up with on and off the field in the past few years. In my mind, and I am sure many fans will agree, the players are giving a sharp rebuke to the NCAA, the Freeh report and some of the school's myopic trustees who betrayed them. And I'm happy the game is in Jack- sonville, Fla., and on Saturday, Jan. 2, a location and date that should allow more Nittany Lion fans to be there in person and watch on television than if the team had ended up in one of those other weekday Big Ten-aligned bowls in Cali- fornia or Nashville. My wife, Carole, and I, fans since the 1950s, intend to be inside EverBank Sta- dium, cheering especially for the six of 19 seniors who are the last to have played for coach Joe Paterno. All the players de- serve the support and thanks of the Nit- tany Nation, win or lose, but it's partic- ularly those loyal seniors who have lived through the opprobrium and public hu- miliation thrust upon Penn State by the child abuse scandal. Penn State has a special bond with this particular bowl game, going back to the early 1960s, back when it was called the Gator Bowl. Two of those games were historic – one involving racial integra- tion and the other burnishing the repu- tation of Paterno, a fledgling coach at the time. (See adjacent sidebar.) In that nostalgic era, the Gator Bowl was con- sidered the most prestigious bowl after the four traditional New Year's Day games – the Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar – with just three other second- tier bowls drawing major-college teams: the Liberty, Bluebonnet and Sun. Think about that. In December 1967, when Penn State played in its third Gator Bowl, only eight postseason games were available for the 118 teams then compet- ing at the highest level, with the Tanger- ine Bowl the sole game for the West Chesters and Morgan States of the col- lege football world. Nine years later, when the Lions were in their last Gator Bowl, the Tangerine Bowl moved into the second tier and bigwigs in Shreve- port, La., created the Independence Bowl, for the second-level teams. You've never heard of the Tangerine Bowl? We senior citizens from western Pennsylvania do because in 1950, St. Vincent College of Latrobe – yes, now the famous preseason training camp of the Pittsburgh Steelers – beat Emery and Henry (located in southwestern Vir- ginia), 7-6. In 1993 the name was changed to the Citrus Bowl under the sponsorship of Florida's Department of Citrus. For decades, getting to a bowl game was truly a reward. As the years passed, more bowls were created, cheapening the reward with each new one added, leading to the saturation of 40 postsea- son games for the 2015 season. Until about 1990, most teams with 7-5 records like the 2015 Nittany Lions would be watching bowl games on tele- vision instead of playing in them. What's more absurd this season is that three teams with 5-7 records, including Big Ten rivals Nebraska and Minnesota, and a dozen 6-6 teams, are playing in the postseason. What's next? Two win- less teams competing in the Cheesesteak Booby Prize Bowl? It all started in 1902 when the ladies and gents of hoity-toity Pasadena, Calif., decided to add a collegiate foot- ball game to their 13-year-old New Year's Day Tournament of Roses event that showcased the mild winter weather, beauty and bountiful flowers of the Pasadena area. So, the organizers invited one of the best teams in the eastern half of the country, Michigan, to play a Cali- fornia team, Stanford. That the game didn't go well is an un- derstatement. As a disorderly overflow mob of 8,000 watched in a 1,000-seat facility known as Tournament Park, un- defeated Michigan, which had scored 555 points during the 1901 season, beat up a mediocre 3-2-1 Stanford team, 49-0. In fact, Stanford was so battered that it quit playing with eight minutes left. Fearing that unruly football crowds

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