As a Temple fan, I can’t stand most things about Penn State be it their football team, basketball team, or most of their fans in general, but one thing I always respected and admired about Penn State was coach Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno was a class act in every sense of the word both on and off the field, and I can’t think of any opposing coach that I respected more as Joe Paterno was just genuinely a good guy. Even with the transgressions with Jerry Sandusky that went on earlier this season, it was hard not to feel bad for JoePa as he seemed to be an innocent old man in the situation. Even though I believe JoePa made some poor judgments about what went on, at the very least, he was man enough to say he should have done more. JoePa seemed genuinely devastated when he was fired back in November, but the only comments he would make on the situation was how he felt bad about the kids, and to me that shows the class JoePa had.
The longest active winning streak of one opponent over another in all of the FBS is Penn State’s dominance over my beloved Temple Owls (currently 29 games and 59 years and counting, Temple’s last win was in 1941, but the teams tied in 1950 so you could also say Temple hasn’t beaten Penn State in over 70 years). What is often lost in this one-sided domination was the respect Joe Paterno always had for the Temple program, as even when Temple was terrible and winless heading into their match-ups, JoePa would always say during his weekly news conference how tough Temple was, and how he didn’t want to underestimate the Owls football program. Even as a Temple fan, I can tell you until the last two years, Temple had virtually no shot against Penn State most years (short of the players getting involved a bus accident on the way to the field, and even then their second bus of players might have still given us trouble). Paterno did some of his best work against teams Penn State should have beaten, hence the 70 years without a victory against Penn State for my Owls.
What is sometimes lost in the score of a game, is who played and for how long. Even though Penn State won half of the games in the current streak by more than 30 points, Joe Paterno did not, I repeat did not, run the score up on the Owls. Penn State could have won most of these games by 60 or more if they wanted to, and there was many a game that the starters were not in the game when the second half kickoff happened, as running up the score is not something Joe Paterno generally did to teams. In many ways Joe Paterno was the polar opposite of coaches like Urban Meyer, Pete Carroll, and Chip Kelly as JoePa didn’t care about his ranking until the end of the season (which may have cost him a national championship or two). You generally wouldn’t see a lot of Penn State teams scores in the 60 plus realm, as he seemed genuinely embarrassed to win by a score that high, hence they were few and far between. In games where Penn State was winning by a large margin, JoePa would run the ball into the line by the middle of the third quarter, and even on third and long situations, he wouldn’t pass the ball as that just wasn’t his style.
It’s safe to say that now that Joe Paterno is no longer with us, that no college coach will ever have the same kind of career at one school as he did (at least not in my lifetime). The longest current tenured coach in all of Division I college football is Frank Beamer, who is heading into his 26th season at Virginia Tech, and at 65 years old would need to coach till he’s 85 to match Joe Paterno 46 seasons at Penn State. As I said before, even though I am not a fan of Penn State football in anyway, I’m a huge fan of college football and Joe Paterno will be missed as I always appreciated the heart in which he coached, and the gentlemanly way he went about his business. These other coaches who run the scores up to 60 and 70 points, will no longer have the ability to learn from JoePa what winning with class is all about and sportsmanship in college football might never be the same. While the final score might tell you who won or loss, the only difference between a one point victory and a 50 point victory is 49 points, because in the game of life, there really is no such thing as a bad win, and that is one thing that Joe Paterno never took for granted.
Sources:
http://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/schools/temple/
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/2011/FBS.pdf