USC and Penn State are two proud college football programs which expect to compete for championships. They have both achieved a lot on the gridiron. USC has thrived for a much longer period of time, but over the past 45 years, Penn State has had more success.
These programs have forged so many achievements that one would think they have intersected a lot. However, they haven’t. They met in the 1982 Fiesta Bowl, a moderately meaningful bowl at the time but not a game with national championship implications. The 2009 and 2017 Rose Bowls similarly did not affect the national title picture for either team. These teams should have a bigger, more important shared history, but they don’t.
Ask yourself this question: What if Penn State had moved to the Big Ten Conference in 1973, not 1993 (when it actually did join the Big Ten)?
How different would the history of college football have become?
John McKay of USC left the Trojans after the 1975 season to pursue an NFL career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Paterno remained at Penn State for over 40 years as head coach. If Penn State had joined the Big Ten two decades earlier, Paterno and McKay might have met in a Rose Bowl. It’s something which never happened, all while Paterno became one of the few coaches in college football history to make the Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Fiesta Bowls (due to Penn State having independent status at the time).
One can come up with more follow-up questions to the hypothetical of Penn State joining the Big Ten in the early 1970s. One such follow-up: Would Penn State have busted up the monopoly Ohio State and Michigan had on Rose Bowl berths in the Big Ten at the time? From the 1968 season (1969 Rose Bowl) through the 1980 season (1981 Rose Bowl), the Buckeyes and Wolverines were the only Big Ten teams to make the Rose Bowl. Penn State could have dramatically reshaped that story if it ever had a chance to compete in the Big Ten back then.
USC and Penn State never playing in the Rose Bowl during the McKay-John Robinson era at Heritage Hall is one of the great “missed connections” in college football history.
At least next year, USC and Penn State will be able to play regularly, something they weren’t able to do in past decades. A new era of this underplayed series can begin.
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