Northern Stars: Looking Back at Penn State's Canadian Connections

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Pete Giftopoulos, who will always be remembered for his goal-line interception that clinched Penn State’s historic victory over Miami in the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, is not the most famous Canadian to play football for the Nittany Lions.

Mathematical genius John Urschel is.

The dramatic photo of the Giftopoulos interception is seared into the memory of Penn State fans and is displayed prominently in the homes of many alumni. Yet, Giftopoulos and the photo aren’t well-known except to Penn State sports fans and college football aficionados.

Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Lions from 2009-2013, is recognized around the world in the rarified mathematical community. In 2017, Forbes Magazine selected him for its “30 under 30” list of outstanding young scientists. He also won the prestigious Sullivan Award in 2013 as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete. The media spread his fame further with stories about his mathematical career while playing for the Baltimore Ravens from 2014-16 and then quitting pro football to work on a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at MIT. More recently, Urschel was back in the news when he was named to the College Football Playoff selection committee, whose members determine the four teams that play for the national championship.

Giftopoulos may not have achieved Urschel’s fame, but he might just hold the distinction of being the first Canadian to play football for Penn State. Research by this writer didn’t turn up any Canadian players prior to Giftopoulos’s arrival in the mid-1980s. Given the sheer number of athletes who had passed through the program over the decades, it would be hard to say definitively that Gifto was the first. But this much is certain: In the years since he starred at linebacker for PSU, the team’s Canadian connection has yielded a number of key players.

Several of those Canadian players have arrived in recent years, and two more are members of the Class of 2020. When spring practice begins in March, redshirt junior safety Jonathan Sutherland is projected as a possible starter and junior linebacker Jesse Luketa is seen as a key backup. Both are originally from Ottawa. Two new recruits are Canadians: tight end Theo Johnson of Windsor and wide receiver Malick Meiga of Montreal. Another Canadian player – senior defensive end Daniel Joseph of Brampton – is in the transfer portal and is expected to leave Penn State.

What’s most unusual about two of the Canadians now on the roster, and three others in the past decade, is that they left their respective hometowns to play high school football in the United States. They believed that was necessary in order to attract the attention of major colleges and to adapt to the radically dissimilar rules and smaller playing field of American football. Sutherland played for Episcopal High in Alexandria, Va., and Luketa for Mercyhurst Prep in Erie, Pa.

It’s a different path than the one taken by Giftopoulos and the Yeboah-Kodie brothers, Phil and Frank, who followed Gifto in the early 1990s. They stayed home. Giftopoulos played for Cathedral High in Hamilton, about 50 miles south of Toronto, and the Yeboah-Kodie brothers matriculated at Vanier College Prep School in Montreal.

For a variety of reasons, including the rule differences between the American and Canadian versions of the game, many major-college programs apparently haven’t found it to be worth the time and effort to pursue Canadian high school players. But the Lions have, on occasion, ventured north of the border. How Giftopoulos and some other Canadians wound up at Penn State can be traced to a former graduate assistant unknown to fans and the media named Jamie Barres.

In April 1983, Barres was just a Penn State student from Hamilton, Ontario, working on a graduate degree in exercise science with no ties to the Nittany Lion football team. One of his classmates was Paul Alexander, a journalism student, who would go on to a long career in sports broadcasting. They became friends, and Barres figured Alexander’s connections with coaches and others on the football team could help him. Barres had been impressed with Giftopoulos at Cathedral and thought Penn State should recruit him.

“I had a video of Giftopoulos that I gave to Paul, and I told Paul, ‘You need to look at this kid,’” Barres recalled in a telephone conversation. “I don’t know what the hesitation was, but it really wasn’t until I was back in Canada a couple of months later when Paul called me and said they were very interested in Gifto. By that time, other schools like Michigan, Notre Dame and Syracuse got involved as well.

“[Assistant coach] Randy Crowder went up to see him, but he was very nervous about Randy Crowder only because he wanted to be a linebacker and Randy was coaching the defensive line. Peter was telling me this stuff and I was telling Paul. It got down to the final week of the recruiting process and [head coaches like Bo] Schembechler, [Gerry] Faust and [Dick] MacPherson had been in his house [but not Joe Paterno]. I was in Ottawa watching a basketball game and I get a call from Paul saying Peter doesn’t want any more recruiters in his home. I was six hours away and it was snowing but I got on a bus, got to Peter’s house and listened to everything he had to say. I got back to Paul and they were allowed one more phone call.”

What clinched it all was Paterno acceding to Gifto’s insistence that he would play linebacker and not defensive end and agreeing to speak at the annual banquet at Giftopoulos’s high school. Before Gifto’s freshman year, Barres was added to the football staff as a graduate assistant.

Philadelphia sportscaster Mike Missanelli had additional insight into the recruiting of Giftopoulos in his 2010 book about Penn State’s 1986 championship year, “The Perfect Season.”

“Because his hometown was also home to one of the country’s most popular football teams [the Hamilton Tiger-Cats], people with American football pedigrees surrounded him,” Missanelli wrote. “Back then a Canadian football roster was filled with players from the States, especially in the skill positions. Those players and many teams’ coaches had friends who coached at major college programs.

“Giftopoulos had already stood out for his ability. He was a 6’3”, 240-pound defensive lineman [and middle linebacker] who flew all over the vast Canadian football field tracking down ball carriers and receivers. If he could do that up there, where the field is wider and longer, he could sure do that down here. Besides that, he was a great athlete.

“Recruiting in big-time college football is a phenomenon not unlike a spreading of wildfire. Once a player gets on the radar of a big-time football school, others soon come running. Because Hamilton was not far from Buffalo, New York... Giftopoulos was on the recruiting lists of many schools in the Northeast corridor. But for Giftopoulos, recruiters also came from Georgia, Arizona, and Washington State... He had decided he would stay as close to home as possible and narrowed his final recruiting list to three: Penn State, Michigan and Syracuse. Then Giftopoulos studied hard to figure out which of those three programs had the best chance to win a national championship in the next few years.”

Penn State’s reputation as Linebacker U sealed his final decision. He wasn’t happy when Paterno switched him to tight end midway through his freshman year, but he was back at outside linebacker after that season and became a key backup. By the 1985 season opener, he was a starter.

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A little luck and a vanilla defense turned Giftopoulos into a legend at the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. Miami was on fire. It was fourth-and-goal at the Penn State 13-yard line with 18 seconds left and the Nittany Lions holding onto a shaky 14-10 lead. Quarterback Vinny Testaverde had driven the Hurricanes 64 yards in 12 plays from their own 23-yard line after getting the ball with 3 minutes, 7 seconds left.

Penn State had been using its basic 5-King defense with no frills, no blitzes and no stunts. The Lion players often refer to this scheme as their vanilla defense.

Testaverde called the signals on fourth down. Three receivers dashed across the line of scrimmage, and the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback looked to his left for Brett Perriman heading to the corner of the end zone. Testaverde threw the ball as four Lions converged on the receiver. Giftopoulos stepped in front of Perriman, caught the ball and ran to the 10-yard line before falling on his knees.

After the play, Giftopoulos got up and handed the ball to the closest official. Asked after the game why he didn’t keep it as a treasured souvenir, he said, “If you keep it, you’ve got to give the NCAA $50. That’s $75 Canadian.”

That interception was the second of the game for Giftopoulos. Early in the fourth quarter, his pick had set up a 49-yard field goal attempt that failed. It was the only time in his career that he would have more than one interception in an entire season. He scored a touchdown on his first career interception in 1985, and his final pick, as a senior in 1987, came in the last two minutes at Maryland, stopping a late Terrapins rally to preserve a 21-16 victory.

Undrafted by the NFL in 1988, Giftopoulos went back home and carved out an eight-year career with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, including two years playing on the offensive line.

The Canadians who followed Giftopoulos at Penn State were two obscure walk-ons, punter Rob Deluca of Hamilton and quarterback Chris Sutton of Niagara Falls, Ontario. As Jamie Barres was becoming a graduate assistant in the spring of 1984, Penn State was looking for a punter to succeed George Reynolds. Two sophomore walk-ons were competing for the job: Greg Montgomery, Reynolds’ backup in 1983, and redshirt sophomore John Bruno, who had been on the ’83 roster as a split end. They had potential, but the coaches weren’t sure if either one could meet their expectations. Barres told the coaches about Deluca.

“It was in June, and they invited Deluca to come to summer camp,” Barres said. “We had to do an evaluation. He came and we recruited him as a walk-on. He was only there for a year and I don’t think he ever got on the field.” That’s because Bruno won the job and eventually became one of the stars, on and off the field, of the 1987 Fiesta Bowl.

Sutton showed up in 1988 and was on the roster for two years. He was a 6-foot-1, 196-pounder who had played at the A.M. Meyer Secondary School in his hometown. Spider Caldwell, head manager of the 1986 team, remembers him from his time on Penn State’s scout team. “He was a nice kid who worked hard, giving us a good look at the opposition,” Caldwell recalled.

In Sutton’s last year on the roster, Penn State recruited Frank Yeboah-Kodie of Montreal as a cornerback and kickoff returner. Barres said former Pittsburgh Steelers assistant coach Dick Walker had been coaching the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes and called Penn State assistant coach Ron Dickerson about Frank and his younger brother Phil.

The Yeboah-Kodies were immigrants from Ghana who had moved to Montreal when Frank was 7 years old. Frank had attended Rosemont High, where he was Montreal’s Player of the Year in 1986 before transferring within the city to Vanier College Prep School. Phil later followed him to Vanier. Injuries derailed Frank at Penn State, sidelining him in his freshman and sophomore years. He never was more than a backup cornerback, but he lettered in 1993.

Phil became a first-rate inside linebacker. He started every game in his redshirt sophomore season of 1992 and led the team in tackles with 73. In 1993, he was beaten out by senior Brian Monaghan, starting just two games and seeing action mostly as a reserve. He regained his starting role in his last season and finished third on the team with 70 tackles. Denver chose him in the fifth round of the 1995 NFL Draft, but in three years he never made it past the practice squads of the Broncos, Washington, Carolina and Indianapolis.

Barres was not at Penn State when the next three Canadians joined the team. Tight end Francis Claude, a 6-4, 220-pounder from Laval, Quebec, was recruited in 2005. He attended and played for Champlain College Prep in Lennoxville. Claude was on the Penn State roster for three years but was hampered by injuries and may not have played in a game. He returned home in 2008. Urschel arrived in 2009, as did fellow offensive lineman Alex Mateas of Ottawa. The 6-3, 310-pound Mateas was on the scout team as a freshman and was expected to be a reserve right guard in 2010 but was not listed on the fall roster. Mateas also was reportedly set back by injuries but went on to play for the University of Connecticut (2012-14) and has played for the CFL’s Ottawa Redblacks since 2015.

Urschel could have gone to Princeton or Cornell, and after he committed to Penn State in 2009, Stanford’s then-coach, Jim Harbaugh, tried to convince him to decommit. Urschel described his recruitment in his recent autobiography, “Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football,” co-written by his wife, journalist Louisa Thomas.

Urschel had wanted to play football since age 5, when he saw a photo of his father playing for the University of Alberta. The family had moved from Winnipeg, where Urschel was born, to Buffalo. But his parents divorced when he was 3 and he was raised by his mother, who stressed academics over sports. He went to the all-boys Jesuit Canisius High on an academic scholarship. By the time he was ready for college, he was one of the best scholastic linemen in western New York and an exceptional student who was planning to study aeronautical engineering.

Princeton was one of several schools that were seriously recruiting him to play football, but for a while, Penn State was the only major college that was in pursuit. Urschel’s mother, Venita, pushed him toward Princeton, but Urschel “didn’t feel [it was] a place where it would be fun to play football, and that was what I really cared about.” He made his official visit to Penn State in January 2009 and told Paterno he was committing to the Lions.

“Later that week I was in the car with my mom when the phone rang,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It was Jim Harbaugh... saying they’d let the ball drop and wanted to offer me a scholarship. Stanford, I mouthed to my mom. She started shaking her head vigorously and mouthing, Yes! Yes!

“I had to tell Harbaugh that I had already committed to Penn State. Harbaugh asked how he could change my mind. I already gave my word, I said. I thanked him and got off the phone.”

And that is why, five years later, Urschel left Penn State with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, a perfect 4.0 GPA, first-team All-Big Ten and third-team All-America honors, and the National Football Foundation’s 2013 Campbell Trophy, which goes to college football’s top scholar-athlete.

Penn State’s sixth Canadian was running back Akeel Lynch, who was a freshman when Urschel was a redshirt junior in 2012. Lynch was born and raised in Toronto but crossed the border to play at St. Frances, a private Catholic high school in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg, where he was New York’s Gatorade Player of the Year in 2011. Despite starting just two games in his redshirt sophomore season of 2014, he led the team in rushing with 152 more yards than starter Bill Belton. Lynch was expected to exceed that performance as the starter in 2015, but by midseason he was playing behind true freshman sensation Saquon Barkley and had only 55 carries for 282 yards. Lynch transferred to Nevada for the 2016 season and hardly played, getting the ball just eight times for 29 yards.

Quarterback Michael O’Connor of Ottawa was in the same 2014 recruiting class as Trace McSorley. O’Connor had played high school football for Ottawa’s Ashbury College, a private high school for boys and girls. He transferred to Baylor Prep School in Chattanooga, Tenn., and then to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. O’Connor returned to Canada in 2015, enrolling at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and he did so well that the Toronto Argonauts took him in the third round of the 2019 draft with the 20th pick overall. He saw practically no action as one of three reserve quarterbacks until the Argos’ last two games.

Daniel Joseph never developed into a starter at Penn State after arriving as a Rivals.com three-star prospect. He was born and raised in the Toronto suburb of Brampton but made his name as a three-time letterman and senior captain at Lake Forest Academy, north of Chicago. After redshirting in 2016, Joseph was a backup for three years, making 29 tackles and five sacks.

As for Jamie Barres, after leaving Penn State he served as an assistant coach at Wake Forest and UCF and also for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. For the past seven years, he has been the head coach at his alma mater, the University of Ottawa. He still keeps in contact with Spider Caldwell, as well as former player turned assistant coach Terry Smith and others in Penn State’s athletic department. Barres returns to campus occasionally, and as Giftopoulos said after the Fiesta Bowl, that’s not cheap.

It’s $$$ Canadian.

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