Blue White Illustrated

P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> wenty-three years ago, Penn State took a mid- season trip to Michigan and came away with a rousing 31-24 victory over the Wolverines in a battle of top-five teams. Two weeks after that game, the Nittany Lions delighted a homecoming crowd by crushing Ohio State, 63-14, at Beaver Stadium. The Lions were two years into the Big Ten era, and some of us figured this was how it was going to be. Maybe they wouldn't be topping 60 points with regularity, but they would be winning their share of those games against the Big Ten's two traditional powers, probably more than their share. They had spent the 1970s and '80s competing on college football's biggest stages, while the Big Ten had settled into a malaise. Woody Hayes's championship years at Ohio State were behind him by the mid-70s, and Bo Schembechler's Michigan teams always seemed to find their way out of title contention sooner or later. By the late 1980s, the league had turned into a nostalgia revue, content to pretend that the Rose Bowl, not the national title, was what really mattered. The Nittany Lions were going to change all that. They were going to continue to openly strive for national championships in the hope of adding to the two they had won in the '80s. And they were probably going to win a few, especially if their new Midwestern rivals failed to adapt to the new competitive reality and in- stead treated them with the reflexive disdain that Schembechler had articulated when he said, upon learning of Penn State's admission during a conference call with commissioner Jim Delany, "You've gotta be sh-----g me." He was not. But Penn State's new rivals responded by doing something uncharacteristic for a conference that had become increasingly backward-looking: They elevated their game. Michigan and Ohio State hired a couple of highly competent technocrats as head coaches in Lloyd Carr and Jim Tressel, respectively, and within a decade of Penn State's arrival on the scene, they had both won national championships. Eddie George and Charles Woodson won Heisman trophies, and so did Ron Dayne at a newly revitalized Wisconsin. Even Purdue man- aged to turn things around thanks to an astute coaching hire that brought a whole new style of offense to the conference. And while those programs were ascending, Penn State was declining. Stability was starting to turn into calcification, and the gaps between championship sea- sons were getting longer, with the Lions claiming only two Big Ten titles (2005 and '08) during the last 17 years of Joe Paterno's coaching tenure. After beating both Ohio State and Michigan in their second year of conference membership, the Lions repeated that ac- complishment only once under Paterno, notching wins over the Wolverines and Buckeyes in consecutive weeks during the 2008 season. Why bring up all this history now? Because it helps lend some perspective to the Nittany Lions' 2017 sea- son. Once again, they have come up short in their bid to defeat both of the Big Ten's traditional powers in the REACHING FOR THE SKY T The Lions may have faltered in their attempt to make the College Football Playoff, but their showing this season has helped re-establish them as a team to be reckoned with

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