Forty-Eight Years After First Facing Gators, Paterno Still Stolls Penn State Sideline
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 | Football, Men's Swimming & Diving, Scott Carter
The 1962 Gator Bowl was billed as North vs. South. The game was also the first meeting between Penn State and Florida.
Click here for more details on the game from the UF's George A. Smathers Libraries, which owns a 24-minute 16-mm highlight film of the game.
The teams didn't meet again for more than 35 years, squaring off in the Citrus Bowl on New Year's Day in 1998.
Penn State coach Joe Paterno was on the sideline for both games. Paterno was an assistant on Rip Engle's staff in 1962 and recalled the ninth-ranked Nittany Lions' 17-7 loss to an unranked Florida team that day coached by Ray Graves and captained by Lindy Infante, who later coached the Green Bay Packers.
"I have a lot of memories. It was a ball game where Florida played really well,'' Paterno said Monday on the Outback Bowl's conference call. "They stopped us on the goal line one time and dominated the line of scrimmage.
"The score should have been worse than it was. We felt fortunate that we came out of that thing as close as we did because Florida played very well; they were a good football team.''
Amazingly, Paterno will be on the sidleline once again on New Year's Day in Tampa when the Nittany Lions play the Gators in the Outback Bowl, which will conclude Paterno's 45th season as Penn State's head coach.
The coach that keeps on coaching is 0-2 all-time vs. Florida, losing 21-6 to the Gators in the '98 Citrus Bowl.
The Outback Bowl will be Paterno's first head-to-head meeting against Gators coach Urban Meyer. In six seasons, Meyer has won two national titles. Paterno also has two national titles and five undefeated seasons.
"We're playing against one of the great programs in the country,'' Paterno said.
