I should point out Penn State's sorry-ass attitude about Nebraska's based upon two things: a guilty conscience and the national championship of 1994--not to mention their usual eastern establishment elitism.
In 1982, both Nebraska and Penn State were highly ranked (Nebraska number two, Penn State something like number six or eight) when they met. Near the end of the game, a referee (from Penn State) made perhaps the grossest, most erroneous, call in the history of college football, saying a Penn State player was still in bounds when he caught the football, when he had at one foot about 2' out of bounds.
Everybody caught that; television cameras, reporters, fans, television viewers.
Everybody caught that.
Penn State won the game because of that out-of-bounds catch, and went on to win the national championship that year.
So there's that Freudian subconscious guilty conscience with Penn State; they know they cheated.
And then twelve years later--I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants at the time, far removed from any news--apparently Nebraska and Penn State were running neck-and-neck in the polls for number one. Nebraska was willing to settle the matter by playing Penn State in a bowl game, but Penn State was too enamoured of the Rose Bowl.
Nebraska couldn't play in the Rose Bowl; Penn State, the then-Big 10 champion, could "buy" its way out of the Rose Bowl, if they wanted.
So both teams played two other teams in two different bowl games.
I dunno who Nebraska beat, or who Penn State beat, but they both won.
The national championship was given to Nebraska.
Oh my, how the Penn State fans bitched and whined and moaned, alleging "favoritism" in the voting.
Bullshit.
Nebraska has zero, zilch, influence in the polls, while Penn State has always been the darling of the television talking faces.
It's not our fault we ended up being number one, although Penn State fans think it was.
As I said, I don't know the whole story. The bowl games were played, I assume, on January 1, 1995. It was not until May 12, 1995, when I was way out in the empty steppes of southern Russia that I learned that (a) the Republicans had taken, for the first time in my life up to then, the House of Representatives the preceding November and (b) Nebraska had won the national championship in college football.
I still rank May 12, 1995, as the happiest day of my life, for those two reasons.
Believe it or not, franksolich actually did cart-wheels across the Russian steppes, causing the local workers and peasants to think he'd gone mad.