The Perfect Season

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Foreword

I remember feeling like somebody had hit me over the head with a blunt object. My mouth was wide open. I was stunned into silence.

It was the night before the Fiesta Bowl, January 2, 1987. Hours before we went out to break heads in the game for the national championship, Penn State’s players and coaches broke bread with Miami’s players and coaches at a barbeque given by bowl organizers. College football, after all, is about sportsmanship.

Or so we thought.

John Bruno, our punter and team crack-up, had just finished what we thought was a hilarious parody of Miami coach Jimmy Johnson, and his stiff, sprayed-up hair. No one from Miami—whose players mostly wore battle fatigue clothing to the shindig—cracked a smile.

All of a sudden, Jerome Brown, the Hurricanes’ All-American defensive tackle, got up and made a loud statement.

“Did the Japanese sit down and eat with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them?!” Brown screamed. “We’re out of here!”

And with that, the entire Miami team got up and walked out.

I followed them with my eyes, all the way out the door, thinking that this was their comedy routine. I figured they would soon do an about-face, come back into the room, and say, “Just kidding.” When they didn’t, I looked at Bucky Conlin, one of our mammoth offensive linemen. Bucky had barely looked up from his plate, despite the mayhem that surrounded us, and continued cutting into a big steak.

“Let ’em go,” Conlin said. “That’s just more food for us.”

Conlin’s cavalier reaction spoke volumes. As a team, we were covered with this quiet confidence and Miami’s disrespect only heightened our intensity about three or four times what it already had been.

They have no idea what they just did, I remember thinking to myself.

We were a heavy underdog to Miami that night, but had come to Tempe on a mission. College football experts had called the 1986 Nittany Lions frauds—and that was the nicest word they called us—with no legitimate claim to a national championship. We came into the Fiesta Bowl undefeated. But our schedule was soft, they said, and we had a hard time even overcoming that during the season. Our quarterback, John Shaffer, was said to be a no-name and a no-talent—even though he had lost only one game since seventh grade as a starting quarterback

But we knew better.

The die had been cast for a Fiesta Bowl triumph the year before, almost to the day, after we took an undefeated record into the ’86 Orange Bowl and promptly got smoked by Oklahoma, 25–10. We were embarrassed that night by a team whose image was brashly similar to Miami’s. A freshman quarterback named Jamielle Holloway had said during the week leading up to that game that all Oklahoma had to do to beat us was “put seven points on the board.” The Sooners coach, Barry Switzer, was about as rebellious as our coach, Joe Paterno, was conservative. We knew Joe didn’t much like Switzer and liked a lot less losing to him. And after that loss, the part of the sporting public that derided the Penn State program for being “too squeaky clean” reveled in our misfortune. So we were determined not to let that happen again.

In the locker room after the Oklahoma loss, a collection of guys who would be fifth-year seniors said they were coming back for another year rather than leave for the NFL draft. We were already an experienced team because most of the juniors—guys like Shaffer, Tim Manoa, Steve Smith, Shane Conlan, Trey Bauer, and myself—had gotten playing time our freshman year. We didn’t have to start over after that Orange Bowl loss. We merely had to take it up one more notch.

Knowing that, we started our workouts for the next season, literally, on the next day—when we returned home to State College. A bunch of us decided to go out and take a jog through campus. All of a sudden, almost everybody on the team was running on a daily basis—despite the frozen snow that is Penn State University in the winter.

By the time the season began that September, we were fueled for something really special. Our goal was simple: another undefeated season, and this time, to win that final game and the national championship.

Through the eyes of several of the key players who helped make the ’86 championship season, this is the story of how we did it.

D.J. Dozier

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