One Champion After All

By Tom Callahan

The national championship is far from the only thing in college football that is mythical. Outrageous excesses and recruiting crimes are so common that honest successes and true champions would be difficult to identify even if the sport were not unwieldy by nature. On the first day of every new year, the country caucuses at a number of 70,000-seat fruit and flower stands in the hope of an ultimate result that is both tidy and moral. As in any morality play, the characters are wildly oversimplified and the ending can still be confusing.

This year Good was portrayed by Penn State, coached by Joe Paterno, 59, who might rightfully call himself Joe Paternal and is actually nicknamed Joe Pa. His Nittany Lions, who won the national championship in 1982, have long been counted among the purest football players in the land. In the plainest uniforms, down to the bare calves and black shoes, they even dress the part. Quoting a predecessor, Junior Quarterback John Shaffer recalls, "Chuck Fusina once said that if Coach Paterno could get away with it, he'd remove the numbers from the jerseys." Before marching unbeaten into Miami's Orange Bowl last week, the players of the No. 1 team in the nation voted to eschew the traditional orange ornament on their epaulets. Co-Captain Todd Moules explained it would "violate the dignity" of the Penn State uniform. "That made me proud," said Joe Pa.

The Bad was 10-1 Oklahoma, though more rascal than scoundrel, as personified by boyish Coach Barry Switzer, 48, who might answer to Barry Spritzer. "I'm getting too old to have a good time," he worried. "I didn't make All-Hospitality Room this year." As mussed and professorial as Paterno looks, that's how slick and worldly Switzer appears. His teams are frequently referred to as "loose," a code word for undisciplined. Paterno has accomplished one of the rarest feats in sports: replacing a legendary coach, Rip Engle (whom he served as an assistant for 16 years), and becoming a larger legend. Switzer, after 13 head-coaching seasons, has not begun to displace Bud Wilkinson in the mind's image of an Oklahoma coach. Yet for 154 games, Switzer's and Wilkinson's charts--126 victories, 24 losses, four ties, three national championships--are identical.

In a struggle for the national championship, a third presence usually constitutes an intrusion, but the 10-1 University of Miami Hurricanes represented just a small complication. While the local team was away in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, its activities were so well chronicled in the Herald and News that the triangle seemed joined in Miami. Oklahoma and Miami stood 2-4 in the wire-service poll of the coaches, 3-2 in the competing view of the sporting press. Having already beaten Oklahoma, 27-14, the Hurricanes were poised to be affronted by only half a title should the Sooners defeat Penn State. Miami had to beat Tennessee, naturally, but the pregame talk dealt mostly with whether the 'Canes would run up the score to solidify their claim. They would. In a newspaper diary that could have been titled "What I Did on My French-Quarter Vacation," Defensive Tackle Jerome Brown yawned, "I don't think Tennessee's offensive line can stand a chance against us. They can't block us one-on-one. No way."

Penn State quickly scored the first touchdown against Oklahoma, showing roughly what Switzer meant when he called State "a physical, smash-mouth type of ball club" that "splatters you." The wishbone running of Freshman Quarterback Jamelle Holieway was well splattered, but then Holieway blithely dropped back and threw a 71-yd. touchdown pass to a wonderful tight end named Keith Jackson. Oklahoma's most splendid players are on the defense: Nose Guard Tony Casillas, Linebacker Brian Bosworth and Safety Sonny Brown. Penn State could not match them, and in fact had to do heroic work just to keep the Sooners kicking field goals. Resolutely, Oklahoma ground out an unlovely victory, 25-10. The Nittany Lions had, after all, won a clutch of 2-point games this season, and as their suspected fallibility was plainly confirmed, the most exposed party was the quarterback Shaffer.

Paterno had warned, "John's not a beauty to watch," but the coach understated it. How Shaffer could have started 54 straight victories became the question of the moment, but an answer was suggested following the game by the brave way he stood up to his first loss since seventh grade. Of three interceptions, one at the goal line, Shaffer said straightforwardly, "The pattern was good, the protection was good, the throw was short. They were all bad throws. They killed us. It's just too bad that the performance of one person can have so much to do with the outcome of the game. Oklahoma was awfully good too." He paused. "When I came off the field after each interception, there were still 120 guys around me. That's what's so neat about this team."

Though Switzer must have out-coached Joe Pa, if only in the area of sideline composure, Oklahoma's good-times coach was as graceful and considerate later as Shaffer. "In the '50s, coaches may have made the difference," he said, "but you don't outcoach anymore. Players win now." With a sigh not a bellow, Switzer proclaimed, "We survived Bowl Day. That gives us the national championship." As for next year, he advised pretenders, "You've got to be good, got to be lucky and got to have other people help you." Oklahoma's aid came from New Orleans, where Miami had the good taste to run up only seven points, and poor Tennessee scored 35. --By Tom Callahan