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P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> POWER BEHIND THE THRONE Lineman Bill Contz played a key role in PSU's 1982 national title. In his new book, he gives readers fresh insight into what made that team one of the best in college football history riting a book about Penn State's first national cham- pionship team was far from Bill Contz's mind in 1982, when he was the starting long tackle on that historic squad. In fact, he never envisioned being a writer of any kind, even though he had a knack for penning witty, smart-alecky letters to his family, friends and business associates. Then one day in the early 1990s, while visiting the library near his home in Cranberry Township, just outside of Pittsburgh, Contz curiously picked up an NCAA Record Book to see what was written inside about his championship team. He was surprised to learn that the 1982 Nittany Lions were officially rated No. 1 in strength of schedule. That was the germination that resulted in Contz's book, "When the Lions Roared: Joe Pa- terno and One of College Football's Greatest Teams," published in early Sep- tember by Triumph. Being a bibliophile was part of his her- itage. Contz remembers his mother tak- ing her three children to the library just about every Saturday from the time he was 6 or 7 years old. As he grew into manhood, he still loved to read and spend free time browsing in a library, like that day he first read about strength of schedule. "I would periodically revisit the topic by checking other random data sources, fully expecting to see other schools post 10-win seasons or secure national titles while playing one of the nation's tough- est schedules," he writes in his book. "To my surprise, very few ever did." Contz's initial discovery was con- firmed in another book he found, the USA Today College Football Encyclope- dia. The NCAA "basically started keep- ing track of this in 1977, and Penn State was ranked right up there" he explained in a recent interview. "The difference was, Penn State had these 9-2 and 10-1 winning seasons and they did it against the toughest schedules in the country." Actually, the Official 2016 NCAA Football Record Book for the Bowl Sub- division says Penn State played the na- tion's toughest schedule in 1981 (9-2), '82 (10-1) and '84 (6-5) and the second- toughest in '77, a season in which the Nittany Lions finished 10-1. Miami played the nation's best schedule that year, but it was only a fraction of a per- centage point ahead of Penn State's, and the Hurricanes won only three games. Furthermore, bowl games were not in- cluded in the NCAA's statistics until after 2001. "Then I found the Dunkel Index," Contz said. "A guy named Dick Dunkel created this complex statistical formula, as he explained it, to measure one team's schedule against another. He began pub- lishing his Dunkel Index in 1929, six years before the AP poll, and at the end of the season he declared a national champion. Dunkel rated both our 1981 and 1982 teams as national champions, and the NCAA continues to use the Dunkel Index in its annual summary of the various na- tional championship polls." Later on in his research, Contz discov- ered another mathematical source that gave further credence to his theory. A website frequently used by the sports media called sports-reference.com had devised a rating system to determine strength of schedule for several sports and applied it to every college team going back to 1872. As Contz writes in his book, "The 1981 Nittany Lions' SoS (11.86) was not only the highest in the country by a wide margin but is the third highest ever among teams that managed to win at least 10 games while playing the nation's most difficult schedule." While Contz was preparing to retire from his full-time job in the winter of 2014-15, he began spending much of his free time tracking down additional facts and figures to support his theory that Penn State's 1982 team is one of the greatest in college football history. "I started thinking that I had sat on W

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