How Michigan nearly hired Joe Paterno — not Bo Schembechler — as Wolverines' coach in 1969

Michigan and Penn State are two football programs linked by more than just their shared Big Ten affiliation.

The Wolverines and Nittany Lions are two of the 10 winningest programs in FBS history, with the former at No. 1 and the latter at No. 7. Both have won a national championship in the past 40 years. Though it has little to do with football itself, each is known for its clean, classic and distinctive uniforms.

Perhaps more than anything else, Michigan and Penn State are closely associated with a singular coaching figure that looms large in the decorated histories of the respective programs, each of whom brought gridiron glory to the school while in recent years leaving behind a complex, much-debated legacy.

At Michigan, there’s Bo Schembechler and at Penn State, there’s Joe Paterno.

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Thanks to a single, fateful decision after the 1968 season, that very nearly wasn’t the case. Rather than winning 409 games over 46 years at Penn State, Paterno came close to accepting the Michigan job in the late 1960s, a move that would have closed the proverbial door to Ann Arbor for Schembechler and fundamentally changed the trajectory of his coaching career.

As the No. 3 Wolverines and No. 9 Nittany Lions prepare to play Saturday in what should be one of the most consequential games of the 2023 college football season, let’s take a look back at a crucial-yet-often-overlooked moment in college football history involving two of the sport’s most accomplished programs:

Joe Paterno turned down Michigan football coaching job

At just 42 years old, Paterno wasted little time making a name for himself in the college football world.

After graduating from Brown, Paterno bypassed the opportunity to attend law school at Boston University to accept an assistant coaching position at Penn State in 1950. It proved to be a wise choice. When his longtime boss, Nittany Lions coach Rip Engle, retired in February 1966, Paterno was immediately named his successor.

Paterno got off to a solid start, going 5-5 in his debut season before improving to 8-2-1 in 1967. In 1968, he and the program experienced a breakthrough. Penn State went undefeated, winning a school-record 11 games and capping off the season with a win against Kansas in the Orange Bowl. Though the Nittany Lions finished No. 3 in the final coaches poll, narrowly missing out on a national championship, their future was clearly and undeniably bright under their third-year leader.

That success attracted attention far beyond central Pennsylvania.

After finishing 8-2 in 1968, a season punctuated by a 50-14 loss to Ohio State in which Woody Hayes famously (and unsuccessfully) went for a 2-point conversion up 36 points in the final two minutes, Michigan coach Bump Elliott resigned. The Wolverines were one of the sport’s top programs historically, but had slipped in recent years, finishing with a losing record four times over a stretch of six seasons from 1962-67.

Michigan athletic director Don Canham had a notable replacement in mind — Paterno, whom he had known for years going back to Canham’s days as the Wolverines’ track coach.

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In early December that year, the two met at a Pittsburgh hotel while Canham was on his way to a function in New York. Paterno, for all of his early accomplishments, wasn’t as well-known as some of the other candidates Canham spoke to, but the gifted young coach appealed to him. Eventually, Canham offered him the job.

Paterno asked Canham for some time to mull his options. A few days later, Paterno got back to him.

“Joe called me and said, ‘Don, I can’t make a decision until after the bowl,’ and I told him I couldn’t wait until January to hire a football coach for Michigan,” Canham said in 2004 in an interview with The Michigan Daily.

There were reasons beyond the Nittany Lions’ upcoming Orange Bowl appearance for Paterno to stay in Happy Valley. His kids were just starting school and his wife, Sue, enjoyed living in State College. From a purely football standpoint, Penn State was returning most of its roster from that undefeated 1968 squad (and, sure enough, they went on to go undefeated and win another Orange Bowl during the 1969 season).

In the years that followed, Paterno occasionally discussed the decision. In 1993, in advance of Penn State’s first-ever meeting with Michigan, Paterno lauded the Wolverines' program while noting that it was “one of the few schools I would have left Penn State for.”

Thankfully for Canham, he had another strong candidate in mind.

"A couple of days after I turned it down, Don called and asked what I knew about a guy named Schembechler," Paterno said in 1993.

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Michigan hires Bo Schembechler

As he was in New York awaiting a response from Paterno, a name kept coming up in Canham’s conversations with others at a dinner he was attending: Bo Schembechler.

At the time, Schembechler was coming off a 1968 season at Miami (Ohio) in which his team finished 7-3. Over his six years at the school, the 39-year-old Ohio native had compiled an impressive record of 40-17-3. In addition to those on-field achievements, Schembechler possessed the kind of background Canham desired: someone from the region who had previous experience in the Big Ten as an assistant coach at Ohio State and Northwestern.

“His personality just struck me right away,” Canham said to The Michigan Daily. “I hired him 15 minutes after we began to talk. That was the turning point in my career as athletic director. That’s because he started winning right away. We didn’t have to wait four or five years — the reason was that Bump Elliot had left him a lot of good material.”

Indeed, Schembechler was an immediate winner in Ann Arbor, leading the Wolverines to the Rose Bowl in two of his first three seasons at the helm. Over the course of his 21 years as Michigan’s coach, Schembechler went 194-48-5, had 16 top-10 finishes and won at least a share of the Big Ten championship 13 times. Thirty-four years after his final game, he remains the program’s career wins leader.

Paterno once said Canham would write him a thank you letter once a year for making the decision he did.

After not accepting the Wolverines’ offer, Paterno remained at Penn State for 43 more years, racking up a 409-136-3 record that included a pair of national championships in 1982 and 1986. Michigan wouldn’t be the only coaching opportunity he chose not to pursue, as he turned down offers from the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots. His 409 wins are the most by any coach in FBS history.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How Joe Paterno nearly became the Michigan football coach in 1969