How the first Penn State-SMU game desegregated the Cotton Bowl

The Nittany Lions and Mustangs meet Saturday in the College Football Playoff first round. It won't be the most important game ever between the programs, though.

When Penn State and SMU face off Saturday in the second game of the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff, the dreams that so many of us had about the potential of on-campus postseason games will be on full display.

Millions of viewers from across the country will be treated to aerial shots of more than 100,000, largely white-clad spectators in central Pennsylvania crammed into one of the sport’s largest stadiums (the only bummer here is that Penn State’s “white out” will be taking place for a noon kickoff rather than a night game.) That crowd will be made up mostly of Penn State fans who have been desperately waiting for this moment, to watch their beloved Nittany Lions compete for a national championship after a decade of being the four-team playoff’s perennial bridesmaid. A southern team will have to head north to contend with the elements, with a projected high temperature of 27 degrees and snow on the ground. This scenery comes with stakes, too – the winner of the matchup will move on to the national quarterfinals.

After so many years of these types of games happening inside palatial, opulent and occasionally sanitized NFL stadiums, we’re about to get the real, uncut shit, the unbridled passion and pageantry that makes college football a product unlike any in American sports.

Adding to that anticipation is the relationship between the two schools. Penn State and SMU play in different conferences, are separated by nearly 1,500 miles and have just two all-time meetings, but the times their paths have crossed have been memorable.

In 1982, the Nittany Lions and Mustangs finished the season No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in the final Associated Press poll. More than 40 years later, players from an undefeated SMU team believe they, despite a tie against Arkansas, deserved the national title over a one-loss Penn State team they maintain was the beneficiary of the sport’s politics of the time – namely that the Nittany Lions, despite having several deserving teams, had never previously been voted national champion under Joe Paterno.

“Joe had cocktails with the voters in the northeast every Friday night,” Craig James, a star running back on that SMU team, told Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. “They gave it to Joe. Not that Penn State wasn’t a great team, but we had a first-year coach in Bobby Collins and were this little, private upstart in Dallas. We didn’t stand a chance.”

The first-ever matchup between Penn State and SMU came with a different kind of history, with the Nittany Lions bringing their two Black players with them down to Dallas at the end of the 1947 season to play the Mustangs in the Cotton Bowl and desegregating what is now one of the sport’s biggest, most prestigious bowl games.

Because of that, and regardless of who wins Saturday’s game in State College, it won’t be the most consequential meeting ever between the two programs.

How Penn State football made history

Long before the Cotton Bowl invitation was extended to Penn State, and even longer before toe met leather that fateful New Year’s Day in Dallas, the stage for that historic moment was being set.

In the mid-1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the end of World War II, college football, like parts of the country around it, was still largely segregated, even in places not under the oppressive grip of Jim Crow.

There were, of course, notable exceptions.