The Michigan football team returns to action on Saturday night with a visit to Penn State. This will be the 16th meeting between the Nittany Lions and the Wolverines, all of them have taken place since Penn State started playing in the Big Ten Conference in 1993. We hold a 10-5 lead in the all-time series and have a 5-2 record at Beaver Stadium. They have won the last two games against us, including last years 35-10 beat down in Michigan Stadium. The game will be televised nationally by ESPN with former Penn State QB Todd Blackledge in the booth as the color analyst.History: Penn State originally started out as a high school. It was founded in 1855 under the name Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania. The original charter of the school was to teach the scientific methods and improve the business of farming. When the 1862 version of the Land Grant/Morrill Act was passed, the school took the money designated for Pennsylvania and changed the name of the high school to The Agricultural College of Pennsylvania.
Like many of the original Land Grant schools, the internal struggle for the mission of the school spawned controversy. As the curriculum drifted between the purely agricultural and the more profitable classical, public support and enrolled students diminished. By 1875 there were only 64 undergraduates attending classes. Eventually they righted the ship, renamed themselves again to Pennsylvania State College, and grew to the largest non-governmental economic engine in the state of Pennsylvania. The school now annually generates more than $8 billion in direct economic impact to the Commonwealth and supports more than 60,000 total jobs.
Location: The area the school is located is commonly referred to as Happy Valley although, that is not an official name. The main campus is located in State College, Pennsylvania, though the mailing address is actually University Park, Pennsylvania. If you are confused, join the club.One of my favorite things about Penn State is the ice cream factory on campus called the Berkey Creamery. PSU’s Department of Food Science runs what is the largest university creamery in the United States, using about 4.5 million pounds of milk annually. About half of this milk comes from a 225-cow herd at the University's Dairy Production Research Center. They offer over 100 flavors and sell 750,000 hand-dipped ice cream cones per year.
In 2008, State College was ranked as the second safest metropolitan area in the United States by the CQ Press. They moved up the top spot in 2009. However, don't let that "safe place" stuff fool you if you plan on showing up wearing maize and blue and making a lot of noise on Saturday night. There is no love for the Michigan Wolverines in Happy Valley. A decade long losing streak will make anyone a bit cranky.
Nickname: They call themselves the Nittany Lions. The name is derived from the mountain lions that used to roam around the area for thousands of years. That was before they were all killed by local citizens in the 1880s.Penn State claims to be the first university to choose a Lion as their mascot. Legend has it one of their baseball players went to a game at Princeton in 1904. He was jealous of the Tiger moniker used by Princeton and somehow convinced everyone to adopt “Lions” in 1907 without a vote or contest. The origin of the word "Nittany" is a little more obscure. The most commonly accepted explanation traces its derivation to Indian words meaning either "single mountain" or "protective barrier against the elements”.
Mascot: In the 1920s, a pair of stuffed mountain lions was placed in the Recreation Building to watch over athletic events. About that same time, the tradition began of having a student dressed in a furry lion costume clown around on the sidelines at football games.It appears that that costume from the 1940 is still in use today. It looks like it has been on the sidelines longer that Joe Paterno himself. Between you and me, the Penn State Lion costume sucks and is embarrassing for a traditional football power like Penn State. I would rather not have a costumed mascot than have that mangy looking thing running around.
In direct contrast to the middle school quality costumed mascot -- Penn State has an awesome statue in the place they call “Lion Shrine” on campus. The Class of 1940 gave their alma mater $5,430 to pay for the construction of the shrine located between the Recreation Building and Beaver Field. German sculptor Heinze Warnecke carved the lion on site in the summer of 1942, from a thirteen-ton block of limestone.
Colors/Logo/Helmet: Penn State wears blue and white, but that hasn’t always been the case. In 1887 a student committee was appointed to develop color options from which the student body would select the school's official colors. Dark pink and black was the unanimous choice of the student body after considering the color combinations presented by the committee.The baseball team was the first to sport pink and black. However, the pink faded to white after a couple of weeks and the students then opted for blue, rather than black, and white rather than pink.
As you would expect, Penn State has a very iconic primary logo. This is the second time around for this stylized mountain lion head icon. You may not remember, but it was replaced in 2001 with more modern logo designed by a professional branding company. This change was met with almost universal disdain from fans and alumni and lasted three years before they went back to the old logo.
Penn Staters are as proud of their plain white headgear as we are of our beautiful winged masterpieces. Combined with the plain white pants and white or blue jerseys they wear the most ordinary, and yet at the same time most recognizable, uniforms in all levels of football. Most of the time, Penn State doesn’t even put bowl game patches on their jerseys. But rest assured, they do have that omni-present Nike logo. There really isn’t any history to their helmets, except for a 5 year period (1968-74) where they put numbers on their sides (like Alabama). Just like the new logo, they went back.
Fight Song: Just in case you have not gotten the primary theme of this place, you need to listen to their fight song... Boring. The one interesting aspect about their fight song is how it is presented during a game. Specifically after a touchdown, it is played through once and then slows down and stops. The band then resumes after the extra point is kicked by the team and plays it again.
When they are not playing at a football game, the band will play "New Fight On, State", known simply as "NFOS", which is a shortened version of the song without the slowdown and pause and replay.
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