Kerry Collins and his Penn State teammates knew going into the Rose Bowl against Oregon that their hopes to win the 1994 national championship were dim.

A night earlier 2,700 miles away, Nebraska turned back Miami (Fla.) 24-17 in the Orange Bowl to solidify its position at No. 1 in both major polls, one spot ahead of the Nittany Lions.

“With the way it played out, we knew we were out of the national championship hunt,” said Collins, the former Wilson star quarterback. “We wanted to end it the right way. It would have been a huge blemish on the season. It definitely wouldn’t have been near the same season if we wouldn’t have won the game.”

Reading Eagle readers made Collins’ Rose Bowl appearance the eighth greatest moment in Berks County sports history via online voting. He didn’t have his best performance, but Penn State beat the Ducks 38-20 before 102,247 fans to complete a 12-0 season.

The Lions did their best to celebrate, even though they were the first Big Ten team with an unblemished record not to win a national championship since Michigan in 1947.

Collins and fellow team captains Bucky Greeley and Brian Gelzheiser interrupted Paterno’s postgame press conference to present him the game ball.

“We’re going to crown ourselves national champions, how does that sound?” an ebullient Collins said that night. “We’re going to have a ring with a lot of diamonds and a big, fat 1 in the middle of it.”

Collins began the 1994 season without much attention, even though he led Penn State to five season-ending wins in 1993, a 10-2 record, a top 10 ranking and a decisive victory over Tennessee in the Citrus Bowl.

But after he passed for 508 yards and five touchdowns in blowout wins over Minnesota and Southern Cal in the Lions’ first two games, the nation began to notice. He threw a game-winning touchdown pass to Bobby Engram in the final minutes at Michigan; went 19-for-23 for 265 yards and two touchdowns in a 63-14 rout of Ohio State; and directed a memorable 96-yard drive in the fourth quarter at Illinois, a game in which Penn State trailed 21-0 before winning 35-31 and clinching its first Big Ten title.

“Kerry’s willing to take chances,” said Fran Ganter, then Penn State’s offensive coordinator. “You should see the look in his eyes sometimes when the offense goes out on the field. When Kerry looks at you and says, ‘We got this,’ you know we’re going to get it.”

That season, despite the first-team offense seeing limited second-half action, Penn State scored 47.0 points per game, which remains the highest average in the Big Ten since 1916, and averaged 512.7 total yards, which stands as a conference record.

Collins completed 66.7% of his passes for 2,679 yards and 21 touchdowns with seven interceptions in the regular season and led the nation in passing efficiency. He was selected a consensus first-team All-American; won the Maxwell Award as the nation’s outstanding player, the Davey O’Brien Award as the nation’s top quarterback and the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as the best player in the Big Ten; and finished fourth in voting for the Heisman Trophy.

Collins appeared on the cover of TV Guide with Paterno the week of the Rose Bowl.

“Kerry held it all together; he really did,” Ganter said in 2018. “I don’t want to say it was hard to hold it together because they were probably the greatest group of athletes put together at one time. It would have been so easy for them to be thinking about themselves and their stats. That never came up.”

Penn State went into the Rose Bowl against No. 12 Oregon as a 17-point favorite, but after Nebraska’s win over Miami the Lions’ edge wasn’t as sharp.

“It was a weird feeling,” Collins said. “It wasn’t the easiest game. We got up for it, but it lost a little bit obviously with the way it played out.”

The Ducks played a high-risk, high-reward defense. On Penn State’s very first play, Ki-Jana Carter broke through the line and into the open field for an 83-yard touchdown. But the Lions mustered very little against Oregon until late in the second quarter.

With Penn State trailing 14-7, Collins connected with Engram for gains of 18 and 12 yards before he found freshman Joe Jurevicius down the left sideline for a 44-yard completion to the Oregon 1. Brian Milne plowed into the end zone to tie it. The Lions never trailed again.

Collins’ only mistake, an interception, set up the Ducks’ game-tying touchdown in the third quarter. Following Ambrose Fletcher’s 72-yard kickoff return, Carter scored on a 17-yard run to give Penn State the lead for good.

With the Lions rushing effectively, Collins attempted just six passes the rest of the way. He finished 19-for-30 for 200 yards in his only game that season without a touchdown pass. Oregon pressured him as much as any team, frequently blitzing and knocking him down without a sack.

“They have a great defense,” Collins said then. “They’re a bunch of scrappy kids. We had our hands full. They had the linebackers up on the line. They gave us a lot of looks and blitzes we hadn’t seen.”

The following day, Nebraska was voted No. 1 and Penn State No. 2 in both major polls. Both teams went 12-0. It remains no solace to the Lions that the 1994 season paved the way for pairing the top two teams in the country in a title game and eventually a four-team playoff.

“I feel like we were totally deserving of a national championship or at least an opportunity to play for a national championship,” Collins said years later. “That’s the thing that sticks out the most. How can you say we’re not national champions when we never had the opportunity to play for it?”

Collins finished his career with 17 consecutive wins as Penn State’s starting quarterback. The Carolina Panthers made him the fifth pick in the 1995 NFL draft before he went on to play for six teams in 17 seasons, reach the Super Bowl with the New York Giants, make the Pro Bowl twice and pass for 40,922 yards, 19th in NFL history.

Two years ago, he became the first player from the 1994 Penn State team and the first from a Berks County high school to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

“I’m very honored,” Collins said upon his Hall of Fame election. “The truth is that had I not been on such a great team with such great players, there’s no way that what happened would have happened. I was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by some unbelievably talented, dedicated and hard-working individuals who were so selfless.

“We were all about being the best football team we could be. I just happened to be the guy who benefited from all of that.”