From The Archives

A service called Newspapers.com is allowing access to its archives for four days and I suspect I'm going to be wasting a lot of time digging up old stories of various kinds. Here are a couple I dug up that you may find interesting. I guess you'll have to zoom in on your browser to enlarge them.

First is the original story about Penn State coach Joe Paterno challenging Dartmouth to a postseason game in 1970 to settle which team was the Beast of the East. Read the story and it's pretty clear it was a Paterno stunt. Big Green coach Bob Blackman zinged the coach of the 7-2 Nittany Lions with this famous quote in the sidebar below:

"With the type of personnel we have on our team we'd like to play a post-season game. But if we did, we would want to play a better team than Penn State."

Editor's note: Talk about a sign of the times. How about boxer Oscar Bonavena being suspended before a fight with "Cassius Clay" for "refusing to get a haircut."

Another clipping from the 1970 Boston Globe as the Big Green's undefeated season wound down:

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This is headline on a 247Sports story is a bit of a shocker:

LSU football: L.A. Rams request to interview Tigers passing game coordinator Cortez Hankton, per report

Hankton, hugely popular in his first stop as a collegiate coach in Hanover, just moved from Georgia to LSU after the national championship game. Find the story HERE.

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The USFL draft is Tuesday and Wednesday. The draft for the new/old eight-team league will run 35 rounds in a unique format explained on the FoxSports site this way (LINK):

Teams will each have two minutes per selection on Day 1, and the selection order will use an analytical modified snake system between positional rounds so that each team has two No. 1 picks at two positions — the first time such a draft order has been used in a major professional sports draft.

Got that? 

Also from the story . . .

USFL teams are drafting from a pool of 450-500 players who have already signed contracts to play in the league. Only players who have signed contracts are eligible for selection.

Green Alert Take: It will be interesting to see, when the dust clears, if any Ivy Leaguers end up in the spring league.

By the way, in case you are interested, the USFL has debuted its uniforms HERE.

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EXTRA POINT
If you'd like to dig through the Newspapers.com archives – which includes 20,284 newspapers – CLICK HERE but don't delay. The free access ends Monday night.

In case you are wondering how far-reaching the search can be, while the local Valley News is unfortunately not included, there are 2,208 pages of the newspaper Aurora of the Valley that was published in our little town of Newbury, Vt., between 1848 and 1872 available! 

Per the home page of the website, there are 725.5 million "newspaper pages to explore."