I didn’t know that her parents were Penn State fans until I saw it. It was the summer before senior year of high school. A bunch of us went to hang out in a friend’s basement. The poster on the wall was an homage to Washington Crossing the Delaware. Instead of George Washington leading the Continental Army across the river, however, Joe Paterno stood in the prow of the boat with the Penn State Nittany Lions. Perhaps they were away at Rutgers that week.
It is possibly the kitschiest Penn State product I have ever seen. It was made by George La Vanish, a talented artist who worked for the school and still lives in the state, and is dated 1986. In my memory there was a lot of Penn State wall art in that basement, and that was not unusual. I knew plenty of people in Philadelphia with full Penn State rooms, some of whom hadn’t even attended the school. But they liked college football, and Penn State was the best team that could conceivably be considered local. There remain a lot of Penn State fans in Philadelphia.
I am a Penn State fan, nominally. I have a better reason than many: My dad went there, and we grew up watching their games. “C’mon, guys!” he’d say when Penn State screwed up. I still say this to sports teams I root for. My fandom was at its biggest when I was a kid, and in the 1990s, Penn State was frequently one of the best teams in the country. One year, I wore my Ki-Jana Carter jersey to every grade-school dance I attended.
Then I went to college, and Penn State was no longer any good. My friends who attended the school saw three losing seasons and no bowl wins in their four years. I visited sometimes, and the tradition I remember best was fans throwing their garbage around the student section after touchdowns. (I am told they don’t do this anymore.) That is about when my fandom pretty much ended: The team was bad, I was at a different school and my attention was elsewhere. I’d like to say I turned against Penn State when the child sex abuse scandal came to light in the early 2010s, but most warm feelings had been gone for a decade by then.
I still paid some attention. In recent years, it has been nice to talk football with my dad and complain about James Franklin’s coaching decisions. Penn State has had some decent years recently, but they would always lose the big game in the end, usually to Michigan or Ohio State, and I learned to not get any hopes up. When it became a 12-team playoff this season and Penn State opened the year ranked No. 8, I paid attention a little more. Some shaky wins to start the year—the Lions could’ve lost to Bowling Green—then made me think they did not actually have much of a chance. Somehow they will now play Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl on Thursday, with a trip to the national title game on the line. They still didn’t beat Ohio State. They lost the Big Ten title game. Yet they qualified for the playoff, and all they had to do was beat SMU and Boise State to get to this point. I am now trapped into drinking a 1986 Penn State-branded Coca-Cola on a Twitch stream.
Philadelphia is a Penn State town again. Or maybe it never stopped being one. These are the kinds of fans who have Paterno Crossing The Delaware on their walls, the people who own “If God isn’t a Penn State fan, then why is the sky blue and white?” bumper stickers, the people with garages they’ve turned into shrines. I know people with massive Penn State button collections, handed out at games by a bank over the years. My friend’s stepdad, when asked the time, will always open with “According to my 1995 Rose Bowl Penn State watch…” When I was a kid, my neighbor had a cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno. (Sometimes, it was in his window. A contractor once asked my dad why my neighbor was so weird—he’d been staring at him all day. “Oh, that’s just Joe Paterno,” my dad replied.)
But there are a lot of Notre Dame fans in Philadelphia, too. The Irish brand is national, maybe even as international as an American college football team can possibly be. The Fighting Irish have been this since the 1920s, when Knute Rockne took the team on road trips to play marquee opponents. Parents passed it along. People attached to their Irish heritage became Notre Dame families. Notre Dame beat Penn State 9-0 at Franklin Field in Philadelphia in 1928. They ripped Penn in Philly 60-20 in 1930, and 49-0 the next year. No one remembers these games. But who knows? They could have helped create the very real fandom that exists here for a college 700 miles away. Maybe.
A big part of proper Penn State fandom is hating Notre Dame, even though the teams don’t play each other much. A 1992 game remembered as the Snow Bowl, where the Irish beat the Nittany Lions on a two-point conversion in the final seconds, is one of my earliest memories of sports hatred. The Irish and PSU have only played twice since, though true enmity never dies. But, yeah, in my old age I’ve softened a bit. Some friends are Notre Dame fans, through osmosis, an actual connection to the school, or both. My friend Kelly Bloor had a whole family of Fighting Irish fans even before her brother attended the school, and I’ve been at bars with her where the whole crowd links arms and sings some awful fight song. I do not particularly enjoy this. But I like hanging out with her, and seeing her giddy after a win. I’m happy when Notre Dame loses still, of course; I am not a monster.
In addition to Penn State’s alums and general well-they’re-the-team-I-root-for fans, there are usually lots of Philly-area kids on the team. The connection runs deep. But Notre Dame’s does, too. By 1959, the Inquirer was reporting on fans’ annual pilgrimage to South Bend for a game. In 1991 the Daily News profiled Robert Sumner, a Notre Dame fan with a “very understanding” wife, daughter and son. His answering machine opened with “If you’re not a Notre Dame fan, hang up.”
Then there was Philadelphia’s Al Leonard, who began taking annual trips to see Notre Dame while working for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1940. He’d traveled 85,914 miles to attend 65 games by 1954, and was bringing along 25 coworkers when the Inquirer mentioned him that year. “He used to do it alone when necessary, but then he organized the ‘Enn Dee Club’ with the other 25, who annually take a rail tour of the West or South, pinpointing the stops so they’ll be in for one or two Notre Dame games en route,” the paper wrote. “This year’s game is at the tag end of a tour that includes the West Coast, Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon.” Nice work if you can get it.
Much of the state actually has a bit of a split fandom. Pottsville Area High School rescheduled its basketball game to avoid playing during the Orange Bowl in order to accommodate the fans of both Notre Dame and Penn State on the roster. (Some kids are now just picking sides. Letrel Montone, a senior for Pottsville, told WNEP-TV: “I'm a Bama fan, and we had a tough year, but I’m just rooting for Penn State. Now, you know, I’m a PA kid. Let’s go Penn State.”) Up in Scranton, a group of Penn State and Notre Dame fans are headed to the game in Miami together. Some more color from WNEP, which seems to have a whole team on this story:
Bill Fey from Wilkes-Barre is a bowl game veteran. He's followed the Lions to places including Pasadena, Phoenix, Tampa, and Miami. He expects to come home with some unhappy Notre Dame fans, “Well, they're going to be sad. They are going to be sad. There it is. I can't help it.” Dan Downs promises to make sure his wife realizes that the Irish are the superior team, “I’m going to say: ‘Honey girl, don't get mad at me. Notre Dame is kicking your butt.’”
A very nice story by Rich Scarcella in the Reading Eagle was about having to choose between going to Penn State to study journalism or going to Notre Dame, where his dad wanted him to attend. In the same paper, Tim DeSchriver wrote about No. 1 Penn State’s 36-6 triumph over Notre Dame in 1985, adding that growing up in the Poconos the two teams to root for were ND or PSU. The man who played the Notre Dame leprechaun mascot in the 1970s is in the news. “When you’re 5-foot-5 and love sports,” he told WOLF-TV, “you probably aren’t going to be a basketball player or the quarterback, but you can uniquely be part of it.”
My fandom is pretty secure. I will be traveling for the game, too—about a half-hour to my parents’ house to watch the game with my dad. I was at their place for the SMU game, and we texted throughout the win over Boise State. I will be wearing a 1990s Penn State sweatshirt that complains about the team’s undefeated seasons with no national titles. If things go the way I want them to, a two-loss Penn State team will be just one win away from making that shirt a little less obnoxious. But only a little. I’ll have to get some even more annoying gear if they win.
