With such a storied history, it’s a shame that the Penn State-Pitt football rivalry (also known as the Pennsylvania Classic) has been dormant since 2000.  There have been talks about renewing the rivalry, but the schools have not been able to compromise on an out-of-conference contact in the last decade.

One way to restore the Pennsylvania Classic that people haven’t discussed enough would plucking the Panthers from the Big East.

Paterno believes the fact the Big Ten does not have a championship game after the regular season is hurting the conference. Under NCAA rules, a league must have 12 members before it can play such a game. The Big Ten has 11.

I’m going out on a limb and saying Nittany Lions fans wouldn’t mind seeing a twelfth game.

“Let’s get a 12^th team — Syracuse, Rutgers, Pitt — we could have a little bit of a playoff.’’

This would be a win-win situation for Penn State. Fans of both schools (assuming Pitt would be the 12th team) would love to see their teams clash once again, and Paterno is right in assuming selection committees think less of conferences that have one less game to play. While the article goes on to speculate the that Big Ten is holding out for Notre Dame, it’s good to see that the conference’s legendary coach is bringing the issue up in press conferences.

[Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

UPDATED:

Kevin over at Nittany White Out had this to say,

Paterno always wants to do what is best for college football it seems, but he is always trying to sell his ideas to the wrong group.  Paterno once tried to build an all eastern football conference from scratch but was shunned by some of the current Big East schools who believed that they could not compete in a conference with Penn State (guess what – they would have been right) and now Penn State finds themselves in a conference that probably still uses typewriters in their offices and cranks their cars to get to work.