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The sudden departure of Tommy Stevens following the end of spring practice has brought back memories of other high-profile quarterback transfers at Penn State.

Stevens’ surprising decision came just a few days after the end of spring practice and followed head coach James Franklin’s public remarks about not naming a starting quarterback for 2019 until preseason practice is well under way. Aware that he would not be guaranteed the starting position, Stevens bolted.

Whatever the merits and reasons for his move, Stevens’ transfer doesn’t come close to comparing with the most memorable quarterback transfer in Penn State’s history. That occurred at the end of the 1980 season when true sophomore Jeff Hostetler transferred to West Virginia after losing the starting position to redshirt sophomore Todd Blackledge and serving as the backup for most of the season. The other quarterback at the time, Frank Rocco Jr., who had been competing for the starting position since 1979, continued as a backup through 1981.

The Hostetler transfer worked out in a big way for himself and Blackledge.

Although Hostetler’s transfer was not controversial, it had its own unique Penn State twist. A couple of years earlier, Jeff’s older brothers, Ron and Doug, had been Nittany Lion linebackers. Ron was a backup in 1975 before becoming a two-year starter. Doug was the second-team quarterback in 1976 before becoming a backup linebacker the following year, but a back injury prior to the ’78 season ended his Penn State career.

We now know that Blackledge went on to lead Penn State to its first national championship in 1982, winning the Davey O’Brien Award as the nation’s outstanding quarterback and finishing sixth in the Heisman Trophy vote. When he decided to forgo his final season to enter the NFL Draft, he held several school passing records. Until last season, Blackledge and Tony Sacca had the record for most wins by a starting Penn State quarterback with 29. Trace McSorley is now the record-holder with 31.

Curiously, during Blackledge’s three years at Penn State, he never was more than an honorable mention All-American. However, he remains one of the school’s finest scholar-athletes, a Phi Beta Kappa with a 3.80 GPA and the second Penn Stater inducted into the CoSIDA Academic Hall of Fame. He wasn’t able to replicate his collegiate success during a seven-year NFL career, but he has become one of the most respected college football analysts in television and is a loyal Penn Stater. In 2007, the NCAA tapped Blackledge for its prestigious Silver Anniversary Award, which honors former student-athletes for their collegiate and professional accomplishments 25 years after the end of their athletic eligibility. Only two other Nittany Lions have received the award: Mike Reid in 1995 and Dave Joyner in ’97.

As for Hostetler, his transfer to West Virginia dramatically changed his life. After sitting out the 1981 season in accordance with NCAA rules, he led the Mountaineers to two 9-3 seasons, winning one bowl game and losing another while finishing 19th (1982) and 16th (1983) in the final Associated Press polls. One has to dig deep to find his name in the WVU record books, but he is still 13th in passing yards and total offense.

Hostetler married the daughter of Mountaineers coach Don Nehlen and then enjoyed a productive 15-year NFL career that included a Super Bowl championship with the New York Giants in 1990.

Like Blackledge, Hostetler was no slouch in the classroom either. He was a first-team CoSIDA Academic All-American in 1983 and received an $18,000 postgraduate scholarship from the National Football Foundation/College Football Hall of Fame. Hostetler was so popular at the time that he inspired a record, “Old Hoss: The Ballad of West Virginia’s Jeff Hostetler,” sung to the tune of the “Bonanza” TV show theme song.

Old Hoss remains a popular figure in Morgantown, and not just because of his WVU and NFL success and his marriage. He lives in the area, running his contracting business building homes and developing property from a 40-acre horse farm not far from campus. He is still the family outlier when it comes to Penn State. His brothers’ Nittany Lion teammate, Steve Stupar, married their sister, Cher, and one of their three sons, Nate, was a standout linebacker for the Nittany Lions from 2008-11. With eight NFL season under his belt, Stupar signed in March with Hoss’s old New York Giants team.

Penn State has lost some other high-profile quarterbacks over the years, dating back to the 1971 season. Although Steve Joachim thrived at his new school, winning the 1974 Maxwell Award as the country’s outstanding player and leading the nation in total offense, neither he nor the other transfers ever had a song written about them.

1971: John Hufnagel and Steve Joachim

After Penn State’s record 33-game undefeated streak ended in the second game of the 1970 season and the team later slipped to 2-3 under starting quarterback Mike Cooper and his backup, Bob Parsons, Paterno promoted Hufnagel, a true sophomore at the time. The Lions lost only three games over the next two and a half seasons. Cooper left the team before the 1971 season, Parsons became the starting tight end, and true sophomore Steve Joachim (pronounced Jo-ack-um) of Haverford, Pa., became Hufnagel’s backup. Joachim played a bit in ’71, passing 41 times for seven touchdowns and scrambling for 47 yards and a TD, but it was Hufnagel’s team.

Like Stevens decades later, Joachim went through spring practice in 1972. A few days later, after what he described as an unsettling conversation with Paterno, he transferred to Temple.

Before the 1972 season, Paterno praised Hufnagel as “the best college quarterback in the country, bar none.” Hufnagel concluded his career by winning first-team All-America honors and finishing sixth in the Heisman voting. Nowadays, he is regarded as Penn State’s best running quarterback before the advent of the dual-threat QBs of the 2000s. Among quarterbacks, he’s still ranked fourth in school history in career rushing yardage (667 yards) and rushing touchdowns (13), trailing three of those more-recent dual-threat starters. Hufnagel also ranks among the Nittany Lions’ all-time career and single-season passing leaders and has the program’s highest yards-per-completion average for a season (17.7).

After three frustrating NFL seasons as a backup with the Denver Broncos, Hufnagel achieved stardom in the Canadian Football League, first as a player for 12 years and then as a two-time Grey Cup-winning coach. Since 2016, he has been the president and general manager of the Calgary Stampeders.

Joachim sat out the 1972 season and then led Temple to 9-1 and 8-2 seasons that were the Owls’ best since 1931, but he never had the chance to play against his former team. From 2001-12, Jaochim was the analyst for Temple’s radio network. He also was a businessman in the financial and health industries working out of his hometown in Delaware County and is now retired.

1993: Kerry Collins and John Sacca

This transfer opus was the most bizarre, flaring up midway through the 1993 season after originating in the summer of 1992 when Collins injured his right index finger in a volleyball game at a family picnic. A few months before, following spring practice, Paterno had designated the redshirt sophomore Collins as the starter over Sacca, a redshirt junior. Sacca had not been happy, remembering that his older brother Tony had been Penn State’s starting quarterback for three and a half years despite a strained relationship with Paterno.

With Collins recovering slowly from his finger injury, Sacca started the ’92 season opener at Cincinnati, but he suffered a shoulder injury that forced Paterno to use true freshman Wally Richardson. Sacca was back for the third game and started six more times until suffering a season-ending knee sprain. Collins started the last four games of the 1992 season, but a separate fracture of his index finger in the Blockbuster Bowl caused him to miss spring practice in 1993. Collins looked rusty as he continued to recover in preseason practice, and the now-confident Sacca moved back into the starting position for ’93, with Richardson as his backup until Collins was ready.

Sacca was at the controls as Penn State won its first two games, but when he struggled at Iowa, Paterno sent in Collins even though the Lions were leading. The next week in practice, Sacca talked angrily of transferring. Although he played briefly in the next two games, he abruptly quit before the Michigan game. Collins needed a few more weeks to get up to speed. The season ended with a 10-2 record and a come-from-behind victory over Tennessee in the Citrus Bowl, setting the stage for an undefeated Big Ten championship season in 1994. Collins played his way into the College Football Hall of Fame and spent 17 years in the NFL, a pro tenure that ties him with kicker Matt Bahr for the longest by a Nittany Lion. Sacca wound up at Division I-AA Eastern Kentucky and after a short stint in the Arena Football League, he returned to his hometown of Delran, N.J., where he owns a painting company.

2009: Daryll Clark and Pat Devlin

Devlin’s transfer situation is similar in a significant way to that of Stevens. Like Stevens, Devlin had the misfortune of following a highly successful player by one year. With two years of experience as the prime backup to Anthony Morelli, Clark had a big advantage over the redshirt sophomore Devlin, who had played in only three games before the 2008 season.

Many Penn State fans were rooting for Devlin because his family was pure blue and white. His mother, father and sister were Penn State graduates, and his maternal grandfather was a season-ticket holder who routinely attended the Quarterback Club’s weekly in-season luncheons. Paterno named Clark the starting quarterback on Aug. 26, 2008. Clark left Devlin in his wake, leading the Lions to an 11-2 Rose Bowl season and No. 8 ranking while setting or closing in on several quarterback passing and running records.

Devlin was relegated to mop-up duty, passing for 459 yards and four touchdowns with no interceptions. His big break seemed to come in the ninth game of the season under the lights at Ohio State when a third-quarter hit to the head sent Clark to the sideline for the rest of the night. The Lions were trailing, 6-3, with 10 minutes, 13 seconds left in the fourth quarter following a Buckeye fumble at the Penn State 38-yard line. Devlin drove Penn State 62 yards and scored the winning touchdown on a 1-yard run. A field goal made the final score 13-6.

The next week at Iowa, Devlin never played despite a terrible performance by Clark. The Hawkeyes trailed by nine points at the start of the fourth quarter but earned a 24-23 upset victory with a last-second 31-yard field goal. Devlin hardly played in the last two regular-season games and left the team before the Rose Bowl, transferring to Division I-AA Delaware so that he could play in 2009. Clark continued changing the record book in 2009 and was co-winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Silver Football award. Devlin became one of Delaware’s all-time leading passers. Neither one had much success in the pros.

2011: Matt McGloin, Kevin Newsome, Rob Bolden and Paul Jones

This competition turned into a wild four-ring circus without the cotton candy, and the winner was an invited walk-on who was virtually disregarded by the Penn State coaching staff for three years.

After a redshirt year in 2008, McGloin found himself as the third-stringer in 2009 behind incumbent Daryll Clark and Newsome, a four-star freshman out of Virginia who had received more than 40 scholarship offers. A hint of things to come occurred in the third game of the season when McGloin made his first appearance of the year in relief of Newsome. It happened again four weeks later, but with McGloin on the bench the rest of the year, Newsome played enough in eight games to finish fifth on the team in rushing and fourth in total offense.

In 2010, another four-star recruit, Bolden, was in the mix as a freshman. A few days before the season opener against Youngtown State, Paterno named him the starter, making him the first true freshman to start the season at quarterback for the Nittany Lions since 1913, with Newsome again serving as the backup. Over the team’s first six games, three of which ended in losses, Bolden’s inexperience showed. At Minnesota on Oct. 23, he left the game with a concussion and McGloin went in instead of Newsome, who had missed practice that week because of the flu. McGloin started the next week at Michigan, leading the Lions to a 41-31 win. Bolden regained his starting position for Northwestern but played only two series before McGloin replaced him. After they spotted the Wildcats a 21-point lead, McGloin brought the Nittany Lions roaring back for a 35-21 victory, prompting an on-field postgame celebration honoring Paterno for his 400th career win. McGloin started the rest of the season, and Bolden considered transferring but changed his mind in January after talking with Paterno.

In late July, redshirt freshman Paul Jones, who had participated in two spring practices, was declared ineligible for the 2011 season because of academics. A week later, Newsome announced he was transferring. Bolden and McGloin shared starts that year, as the Lions lost three of their last four games, but McGloin didn’t play in the Ticket City Bowl after being hurt in a locker room fight.

The following spring, new head coach Bill O’Brien listed McGloin as the starter, with Jones behind him and Bolden playing on the third team. On July 29, Bolden transferred to LSU, where he received immediate eligibility due to the NCAA sanctions arising from the child abuse scandal. Two weeks into the 2012 season, O’Brien moved Jones to tight end, and less than two weeks later he transferred. None of the three transfers had much success after leaving the Nittany Lions. Newsome went to Temple and Jones to Robert Morris, while Bolden ended up leaving LSU for Eastern Michigan.

Back at Penn State, McGloin helped the 2012 team shock the country with an 8-4 record despite the draconian NCAA and Big Ten sanctions, earning them the Maxwell Club’s Thomas Brookshire Spirit Award for commitment. McGloin won the Burlsworth Trophy, which goes to an outstanding player who began his career as a walk-on. Later, McGloin enjoyed a six-year NFL career.

With James Franklin looking to sign one quarterback at minimum in each recruiting class and the NCAA having made it easier for players to leave via the transfer portal, one can expect more transfers in the future.