Quote Originally Posted by Lehigh Football Nation View Post

The Ivy League had some schools in the AP/Coaches' Top 25 and had some great individual talent, but they were never title contenders and Penn State almost never played Ivies (my general feeling, uncorroborated by documentary evidence, is that Joe Paterno hated the Ivies' guts). I would have put the Ivy's top teams at the level of Army and Navy, perhaps, at the time, with occasional AP presence.
Joe Paterno was a Brown grad and got his start there. It's probably less that he hated the Ivies but that was he was such a competitor that he hated any Eastern school that threatened his program-- he certainly scheduled that way.

This was not unique, of course. Knute Rockne famously avoided scheduling Catholic teams in the East (Fordham, Georgetown, Detroit, Holy Cross). When asked why, Rockne basically said he didn't want to share the spotlight with any other Catholic program.