“It is safe to say that the teams will never meet again.” – Columbus Sunday Dispatch (November 17, 1912)
The first gridiron encounter between Penn State and Ohio State on November 16, 1912 was an unmitigated fiasco that devolved into something more akin to an MTV Celebrity Deathmatch than a genteel college football contest.
The game was played on Ohio Field and the official final score was 1-0 in favor of the Nittany Lions. The rare tally was the result ofa decision by Ohio State’s coach John R. Richards to “[withdraw] his men from the field” so that he could “protect them from unnecessary injury and roughness.