How Penn State and SMU's 1948 game desegregated the Cotton Bowl
Saturday’s College Football Playoff matchup between Penn State and SMU is a long-awaited moment for both programs.
The Nittany Lions were a perennial bridesmaid in the old four-team playoff format, racking up double-digit-win seasons only to fall short (sometimes painfully so) of making it in the field. In their first season in the ACC, the Mustangs are one of 12 teams competing for a national championship and are doing so fewer than 40 years after they were infamously handed the “Death Penalty” by the NCAA for repeated recruiting violations.
Now, Penn State and SMU will meet with a berth in the national quarterfinals on the line, as a largely white-clad audience of more than 100,000 watch from the stands and millions of others tune in from across the country.
As high as the stakes will be for Saturday’s game, it won’t be the most important matchup ever between the two schools, regardless of the result.
In 1948, in the first-ever meeting between the Nittany Lions and Mustangs, Penn State competed with two Black players — Wally Triplett and Dennie Hoggard — against SMU in the Cotton Bowl, desegregating what has become one of college football’s most famous and prestigious bowl games.
As the two sides prepare to square off again, here’s a look back at the 1948 Cotton Bowl and why the game has so much significance:
Penn State-SMU 1948 Cotton Bowl, revisited
The stage for Penn State and SMU squaring off in the 1948 Cotton Bowl was set years before the game kicked off.
At a time when few colleges that make up what is now the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) recruited Black players, the Nittany Lions, under coach Bob Higgins, had two on its roster in Triplett and Hoggard. Triplett had even earned a scholarship offer from Miami, sight unseen, but had it rescinded when he informed the school’s staff that he was Black.
Those barriers didn’t end once they got to Penn State. Though they suited up for the Nittany Lions, which is more than could be said for most programs at the time, Triplett and Hoggard didn’t live with their Penn State teammates during their early years, instead residing off campus in Lincoln Hall, a Black boarding house. Restaurants, hotels and barbershops in State College largely prohibited Black customers.
The two, however, found a feeling of support where it mattered the most — from their teammates.
In 1946, Penn State was scheduled to play at Miami, then a segregated school in the Jim Crow South. Miami officials requested the Nittany Lions not bring Triplett and Hoggard, but Penn State’s players voted unanimously to not play in the game rather than leave behind their teammates.
The following year, they’d be faced with a similar choice.
After completing a 9-0 regular season, No. 4 Penn State received an invitation to the Cotton Bowl to face off against an undefeated, 9-0-1 SMU team featuring star running back Doak Walker, who would go on to win the Heisman Trophy the following season. Mustangs coach Matty Bell, a supporter of integration, convinced Cotton Bowl officials to invite the Nittany Lions.
"We have no objections ourselves" to playing against Black athletes, Bell said to The Dallas Morning News. "After all, we're supposed to live in a democracy."
Still, obstacles remained. At the time, nearly 20 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Dallas remained firmly segregated. Hotels in the city would not allow Triplett and Hoggard to stay there, prompting Penn State to prepare for the game at a Naval base 14 miles away.
When the possibility was raised that the Nittany Lions leave Triplett and Hoggard back in Pennsylvania, the response from Penn State’s players was swift and left no room for interpretation.
"We are Penn State,” team captain Steve Suhey said. “There will be no meetings.”
The answer was one of the inspirations for Penn State’s famous “We Are” moniker.
On a frigid day, and in front of a sold-out crowd at the Cotton Bowl, No. 3 SMU raced out to a 13-0 lead behind a pair of touchdowns from Walker: one passing and one rushing. A Triplett tackle that prevented a kickoff being returned for a touchdown just before halftime helped the game from getting even more out of hand.
The Nittany Lions mounted a comeback, though, with a Triplett touchdown catch in the third quarter tying the score in the third quarter. Neither team was able to score the rest of the way, though, and the game ended in a 13-13 tie.
The game itself, however, was more decisive and consequential than its final score. By merely playing for their team, Triplett and Hoggard desegregated the Cotton Bowl, which featured Black players for the first time.
"The history is significant,” Penn State coach James Franklin said in 2019. “And I think you can make the argument it's not just those two guys. It's how the whole team and how the whole community kind of rallied behind those guys."
Both Triplett and Hoggard had impacts that went beyond that fateful New Year’s Day.
Hoggard was politically active, becoming the first Black member of Penn State’s Lion’s Paw Senior Society and using his visibility as a football player to protest State College’s barbershop discrimination.
Triplett was selected by the Detroit Lions in the 19th round of the 1949 NFL draft and went on to play four seasons in the NFL with the Lions and Chicago Cardinals, though he took a two-year break to serve in the Korean War. During that time, he set the league’s single-game return yardage record with 294 yards on four kickoff returns against the Los Angeles Rams in October 1950, including a 97-yard touchdown. The record stood for 44 years.
Triplett died in November 2018 at 92 yards old. One year later, as Penn State played in the Cotton Bowl for the third time since its 1948 visit, it paid tribute to Triplett by wearing a decal with his initials on the back of their helmets in a 53-39 victory against Memphis.