We were all thinking the same thing:

The Domers beat Georgia on Thursday to claim their spot in the final four. They’ll play Penn State in the Orange Bowl next Thursday with a spot in the natty on the line. It’s the Happy Valley cultists vs. the Mayfair calf tattoos in a battle for Frankford and Cottman. Send in the National Guard!

On the surface, taking a side here is like picking between ISIS and Al Qaeda. But when you pause for a moment and think about it, there’s only only one choice between Penn State and Notre Dame, and it’s not Notre Dame. Only one team is stocked with local kids like Adbul Carter and Nick Singleton, who played at La Salle and Mifflin. Nick Dawkins is from the Allentown area and Drew Shelton is a Downingtown guy. They have a half-dozen freshmen and sophomores in the pipeline from Bonner and Imhotep and a bunch of New Jersey kids as well. Notre Dame recruits the entire country, but their PA/NJ contingent is much smaller than Penn State’s, so if you’re a neutral and don’t necessarily have a rooting interest, a win for Penn State is a win for high school football in this region, and it shows that our premier programs are just as good as anything in Texas, Florida, or SEC country.

The Domers have a little bit of that Dallas Cowboy and LA Lakers frontrunner/bandwagon in them, but it’s not an apples-for-apples comparison. Back in the day, the Irish were really good and they were always on television and the radio. That generated a lot of fans right there. Then you throw in the number of Irish Catholics in the country, especially on the East Coast, and it adds tremendously to the supporter base. For a lot of people who didn’t go to college, Notre Dame became their team. My grandfather is one of them, a Toledo native who didn’t go to college, but joined the Marines, and instead of Michigan and Ohio State he felt an attraction to ND. I’m sure there are a lot of similar stories, but his took place more than 70 years ago, and sports fandom has evolved quite a bit since then.

That’s not to say that the Penn State fanbase doesn’t have its share of posers, like people who went to Kutztown but walk around wearing Nitter gear. I don’t think there are a ton of those people out there, but I could be wrong. It seems like Penn State fandom is much more prevalent when you get up into Berks, Lancaster, and Schuylkill counties.


It’s a little more complicated in Philadelphia because we don’t have a premier D1 team. If Temple was worth a shit, maybe things would be different. But the result is a partially-filled vacuum that contains a hodge podge of Penn State, Notre Dame, and assorted fans, maybe some Rutgers people, then you’ve got a huge portion that are totally apathetic to college football in general. This is an NFL town, after all.

But again, if you don’t have a rooting interest and care about the local angle, Penn State is the choice.

WE ARE!