Long known as the “Beast in the East” among college football programs, Penn State marks its 30th anniversary as a Big Ten football member this fall.
In retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer for the Big Ten to welcome the Nittany Lions aboard. Penn State ranks among the Big Ten’s top four in overall and conference victories over that span and 15th nationally. The Nittany Lions have won four league titles and annually compete before many of the nation’s largest television audiences.
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But the contentious process lacked transparency and dragged out over several months. There was little communication among the stakeholders at different levels and only a late provision and vote reversal secured the invitation.
“Net-net, the actual decision to add Penn State was a home run,” former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said. “The way we did it, I probably would grade it as an ‘F.’ So you have an ‘A’ outcome with an ‘F’ execution.”
It was a self-inflicted disaster with the optimum outcome, and it sparked a wave of conference realignment around the country. Here’s how it happened.
‘A vote in principle’
Penn State regularly competed in high-profile games and frequently was in the national title hunt. Yet as an independent, it had little cover for the occasional down season.
In 1980, the Nittany Lions faced Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl. While traveling to the Rose Bowl, Big Ten commissioner Wayne
By 1989, Penn State president Bryce Jordan called Illinois president Stan Ikenberry to gauge interest in possible Big Ten membership.
“He basically said, ‘Stan, Joe Paterno is not going to be going on forever.’ Well, it turns out he did,’” said Ikenberry, now 88, with a laugh. “He said, ‘We need to look at Penn State’s affiliation with a conference to prepare us for that. We think the time has come for us to affiliate with a conference. And if we had our choice, we would like to affiliate with the Big Ten.’
“I told him I thought there would be a great deal of receptivity from the Big Ten.”
The Big Ten was a provincial Midwest conference. All 10 of its schools were members of the Association of American Universities, a prestigious research consortium. Any potential addition required elite academic and athletic credentials to merit Big Ten consideration.
Penn State joined the AAU in 1958 and was a football powerhouse with national titles in 1982 and 1986. In private conversations, Ikenberry brought up Penn State with his presidential peers, and the institution was viewed favorably.
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“I called Bryce back and I said, ‘I screened the presidents, and they all think that’s a great idea,’” Ikenberry said. “But we need to keep this confidential for the next week or so.”
Delany played basketball for Dean Smith at North Carolina, went to law school and worked as an NCAA investigator. In 1979, he became Ohio Valley Commissioner. On April 5, 1989, Big Ten leadership chose him to succeed
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The Big Ten’s Council of 10 met for a two-day retreat Dec. 9-10 in Chicago. It was the first time Delany had met with the on-campus leadership since becoming commissioner.
“One of my tasks was to make the old and the new come together,” Delany said. “In the old days, they said that the faculty were in charge, but really powerful individuals were in charge. Some were coaches, some were ADs. So I was working with them, but I was really working for the presidents.
“I wasn’t experienced in the Big Ten, but I had some experiences with governance. And the presidents were pretty sure that they wanted to do it the way they wanted to do it. I didn’t push super hard. I just suggested that was the best way to do it. But you have to understand it was my first meeting with them.”
The leadership took an informal poll. It came out 9-0 in favor of inviting Penn State, with one president absent.
“I would call it a vote in principle because there was neither an invitation nor an acceptance nor an application,” Delany said. “So it couldn’t be more than that. But it was clearly communicated to Penn State that things would happen.”
Ikenberry called Jordan to inform him of the vote. But the process was rushed and none of the athletics officials were aware of this monumental event. Plus, the Council of 10 asked for confidentiality until a formal invitation took place later in the week.
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“The pre-work wasn’t done,” Delany said. “The political work hadn’t been laid down. You always have financial integration, not a big deal. But then you have competitive integration, you have academic integration, you have governance integration — all these things should be known in detail. And they weren’t.
“And then all hell broke loose.”
Immediate backlash
Within four days of the confidential vote, word leaked beyond the Council of 10 and league office. The Chicago Tribune broke the story.
By Friday afternoon, Big Ten presidents finally informed their athletics directors and held a 6 p.m. ET teleconference with reporters. The athletic officials held nothing back.
“This confirms the worst fears I have of the presidents getting too much control in athletics,” said Bo Schembechler, then Michigan’s athletic director and football coach. “Making decisions like that without ever studying it is terrible. Not one athletic director was consulted on this matter.”
“It’s unfortunate that the presidents considered this in a vacuum without input from the athletic directors,” Minnesota athletic director Rick Bay told reporters. “But we’re famous for that in the Big Ten. The presidents and athletic directors don’t communicate.”
At that time, Big Ten athletics and university hierarchies rarely worked together. The league already pooled its NCAA Tournament shares, and in 1988, the presidents granted all television rights to the conference. Basketball became a surging revenue source, and every Big Ten school benefitted.
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Penn State generated little income from men’s basketball. But that issue and Penn State’s location became footnotes compared with the lack of communication.
At a Rose Bowl news conference, Schembechler roasted the entire process.
“It illustrates what I’ve been saying about the mood of the presidents,” Schembechler said. “In the next five years, the presidents will completely confuse intercollegiate athletics. Then, they’ll dump it on the athletic directors.”
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Delany was caught in the middle.
“The coaches and ADs and others were very angry with me, but also with the presidents,” Delany said. “Tradition was clashing with presidential quote-unquote leadership or authority. So it became difficult.
“Bo didn’t like presidential leadership, and Stan didn’t like the coaches being in charge. So this was a lot about local politics and shifting of authority from coaches and ADs to presidents.”
In his final salvo, Schembechler said, “I see Northwestern under pressure. They’d deny it, but that’s how I see it.”
That scared everyone in Evanston, starting with president Arnie Weber.
Contentious vote
It wasn’t just athletics officials that struggled with the potential expansion. Newspaper columnists also blasted the move.
“Penn State would bring a fine academic institution to the league,” wrote Mark Dukes of the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette. “But it also may mean athletes will lose more class time. Iowa’s Hunter Rawlings III and his presidential colleagues apparently weren’t concerned enough with these issues to ask. Instead, for reasons that escape most of us, the Council has rammed this down everyone’s throat.”
“I’ll admit more than anything, it’s the provincial side of me that resists the addition of Penn State to the Big Ten,” wrote Bill Benner of the Indianapolis Star. “The Big Ten belongs to the Midwest and Midwesterners. It is part of our fabric and heritage … let the Easterners fend for themselves.”
While an agreement was reached, the Council of 10 still needed to confirm the vote with at least seven affirmatives. Penn State had allies at Illinois, Iowa, Ohio State, Purdue and Wisconsin. Minnesota was solid at the presidential level. But four universities were lined up against Penn State: Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana and Northwestern.
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Schembechler and Indiana men’s basketball coach Bob Knight talked their administrators into opposing expansion. Knight famously told the IU Athletic Committee that spring: “I’ve been to Penn State, and Penn State’s a camping trip. There’s nothing for about 100 miles.”
“It was very messy that day because we did not anticipate both Michigan and Michigan State (opposing it),” said Donna Shalala, who was chancellor at Wisconsin. “We thought we had the votes for Penn State to come in.”
Shalala said her board left the vote up to her. She checked with football coach Barry Alvarez — a Pennsylvania native — who told her he was all for adding Penn State.
“We would’ve had egg on our face (after the agreement in principle), but more importantly, we really wanted Penn State,” Shalala said. “We wanted the kind of institution that it was. We wanted its location. I mean, for Bobby Knight to say it’s in the middle of nowhere, have you ever been to Bloomington, Indiana?”
Indiana president Thomas Ehrlich listened to Knight, the faculty and other campus leaders. After initially voting for Penn State, Ehrlich flipped.
“When I went back and talked to our athletic director and our coaches, they underscored what had been a concern to me, is that Penn State is very difficult to get to from Bloomington,” said Ehrlich, now 89 years old and living in Palo Alto, Calif. “It would mean that our athletes would be spending, as I concluded, a disproportionate amount of time traveling to get to Penn State. And while it’s a great school and fine teams, it simply wasn’t fair to our athletes to do that.
“I understood the arguments for East Coast coverage for television. But it seemed to me a mistake, because our first priority should be the student-athletes and their well-being.”
The situation left Ikenberry frustrated.
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“Several university presidents from the Big Ten went home to their athletic directors or other power forces on their campuses and got a totally different message,” Ikenberry said. “So Indiana, all of a sudden, wasn’t quite as sure where it stood, because Bobby Knight didn’t like the idea.
“I love Tom Ehrlich, but Bob Knight had him totally in his pocket. … Michigan was completely under Schembechler’s thumb.”
With Michigan, Michigan State and Indiana solidly against Penn State, the most pivotal vote belonged to Northwestern.
At that point, the
“We had no intention of throwing them out, but they were very nervous,” Shalala said.
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The Council of 10 scheduled its spring meeting for June 4 at Iowa. The Penn State debate seemingly was the only topic on the agenda. Leadership arrived in Iowa City on June 3 and informal conversations intensified that evening.
“There was still a lot of hand-wringing around the room from Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State,” Ikenberry said. “We convened the next morning and had an extended discussion. A majority of the Big Ten presidents were supportive, but I still did not have the one vote that I needed to meet our requirements.
“We talked for too long, and we weren’t quite there. We took a bit of a recess and were chatting around, having a cup of coffee. Donna Shalala apparently read my body language and saw that I was discouraged by all of this. She said, ‘Don’t give up, Stan. We can do this.’ And I said, ‘Well, what’s your idea?’ And she says, ‘Let’s talk to Arnie.’”
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Shalala said she called for a break in the meeting with the sole purpose of negotiating with Weber.
“I was not going to lose that vote,” Shalala said. “We just had to maneuver.”
She knew in order to secure Weber’s vote she’d need to reassure him that Northwestern would not get kicked out of the conference — at least not for the duration of his tenure.
“She said, ‘Arnie, would it help you, before we considered the question of taking in Penn State, if we were to adopt a motion that there would be no additional change in the composition of the Big Ten for the next three years?’” Ikenberry recalled. “Arnie kind of looked at the ceiling for two or three seconds and came back and said, ‘Yes, that would be very helpful.’ What Donna had figured out is that Arnie had this problem of several of his trustees thinking that the move to bring Penn State in was also a move to take Northwestern out.
“Donna pointed out also that, in three years, Arnie’s contract is going to be up so he was out of there at that point, but he said that would be helpful. So Donna went back to the table and made the motion that even after taking a vote on Penn State, there would be no further consideration of the composition of the Big Ten for the next three years.
“Everybody was so sick of the Penn State prolonged debate that it sounded good to everybody. And so boom, boom, it was all done.”
Penn State was in with a 7-3 vote. Michigan, Michigan State and Indiana were opposed.
“We made the case as strongly as we could, and we lost,” Ehrlich said. “It has nothing to do with Penn State, which is really a great university and had a fine president. Players are not and should not be gladiators.”
Aftermath
Penn State, independent in football but affiliated with the Atlantic 10 in other sports, joined the Big Ten in waves. With rigid NCAA rules regarding round-robin in-conference basketball games, the Nittany Lions were stuck in limbo by the announcement. They were allowed to play in the Atlantic 10 for one more season — the men’s basketball team won the A-10 tournament championship on its way out — and then were evicted.
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Letters sent from Jordan and Penn State athletic director Jim Tarman to Atlantic 10 commissioner Ron Bertovich highlighted the contentious exit. In one letter shortly after the initial presidential vote, dated Dec. 20, 1989, Bertovich instructed Penn State to voluntarily withdraw from the Atlantic 10 by Dec. 31.
In another, Tarman outlined to Bertovich concerns about a lack of conference affiliation. The letter did little good. Penn State played basketball as an independent in 1991-92 before joining the Big Ten for the 1992-93 season.
“The opportunity to join the Big Ten, the kind of all-sports conference we had been attempting for years to establish in the East, arose suddenly and deprived us of the chance to orchestrate the more orderly transition everyone would have preferred,” Tarman wrote.
Penn State football joined the Big Ten in 1993 and finished 6-2 in its inaugural season. Its nonconference games that year were against Maryland, Rutgers and USC — all of whom will be Big Ten members by 2024.
Big Ten allegiance perhaps secured Penn State’s future but hampered its attempt to win the 1994 national title. As the Big Ten champion, the unbeaten No. 2 Nittany Lions were contracted to play in the Rose Bowl against No. 12 Oregon, which prevented them from facing top-ranked Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. The Cornhuskers, who went on to join the Big Ten in 2011, instead won the championship.
Penn State’s addition sparked a 1990 realignment wave that swept the college landscape. Within months, the SEC invited Arkansas and South Carolina, the ACC added Florida State and the Big East began a football conference with Miami. Four years later, the Big Eight and four members of the Southwest Conference joined forces as the Big 12.
For Delany, the experience sharpened his approach as a commissioner. In July 1990 at the conclusion of his first year on the job, Delany sent a letter to all of the conference’s presidents and head coaches. He wrote as a result of the “Penn State experience” he would establish a committee to improve communication between the conference’s presidents.
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It was clear Delany had to learn how to manage the different levels of campus leadership.
“What I really learned to do was to create a shared vision,” Delany said. “Who are we, what do we want to be and how do we want to amplify that and enhance that? So, I could talk their language; I knew what our DNA was. I knew what our history was. I was not committed to diminish that and if we were going to change it, I wanted to amplify it not to diminish it. And that resonated with them. But the other thing I learned after the Penn State debacle was this has to be a team effort.
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“I just came into an environment where there was a lot of bullyball being played, and we had to undo that.”
If Ehrlich and Ikenberry can agree to one aspect, it’s that neither saw future expansion as a positive, both in the 1990s and today.
“It’s just gotten worse,” Ehrlich said. “The concern I had then has just been exacerbated and I think will increasingly become more and more players are having less and less time and attention to academics, which should be primary, of course, because they’re spending so much time traveling and preparing for games.”
Said Ikenberry: “If I had been able to foresee it, I would have paused longer to think about the implications. But I was so naive and I really didn’t foresee the implications long term. And what I was not taking into account was the impact of television.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s Realignment Revisited series, digging into the past, present and future of conference realignment in college sports. Follow the series and find more conference realignment stories here.
(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Rick Stewart, Michael Hickey / Getty Images)