Kerry Collins
Penn State University
Quarterback, 1991-94

• 1994 consensus First Team All-American who claimed Maxwell and Davey O'Brien awards.
• Led Penn State to perfect 12-0 season, first-ever Big Ten title and No. 2 final ranking as a senior.
• Broke nine single-season school records and led team to four-straight bowl games.
• Played for College Football Hall of Fame coach Joe Paterno.
• Becomes the 18th Nittany Lion player to enter the Hall.

Penn State's inaugural year in the Big Ten was good but not great. The Nittany Lions went 10-2, finished ranked 7th nationally and won their last five games, but they lost to conference heavyweights Michigan and Ohio State, so they were not exactly on the national radar come 1994. A preseason top-10 ranking (No. 9)? Sure. But a record-setting offense and perfect season? Not quite.

"Going into the year, we finished up the year before pretty well, but no one was really giving us our due," Kerry Collins said. "Nobody was talking about us to contend for a national championship. But we had kind of a quiet assuredness about ourselves, but at the same time we had a bunch of guys that were not afraid to work and work hard."

That they did. Collins quarterbacked the Lions to an undefeated season and Rose Bowl win in 1994. And he did it in style: Penn State set a Big Ten-record for scoring, averaging 47 points per game en route to dominating the league and finishing with a No. 2 ranking in the national polls. The team accomplishments, along with Collins' individual accolades — Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year, fourth-place in the Heisman voting, nine single-season school records — have catapulted him to the College Football Hall of Fame, where he is the 18th Penn State player to be enshrined.

"Just from a macro perspective of things, the opportunity to go to play for Joe (Paterno) was instrumental," Collins said of his influences. "The amount of talent that I had assembled around me was just phenomenal. And so any success I had in college or any accolades or awards that I've gotten from my college days were directly attributed to the people I had around me. There's just no question about it. If I had gone somewhere else under different circumstances, I know that this never would've happened."

Collins was not the biggest recruit coming out of West Lawn (Pa.), but he left college among the most decorated players of a loaded roster that placed three players in the top 10 picks of the following spring's NFL Draft.

The Rose Bowl and the Big Ten title may speak for themselves, but for Collins, a Week 7 beatdown of the nation's 21st-ranked team is what really stands out all these years later.

"If we're getting really specific, the Ohio State game when we crushed them 63-14," he said of his best memory. "It was homecoming. It was a beautiful fall afternoon. It was everything college football was all about to me. And everything just went our way. We played great, beat a good football team and it's just kind of one of those perfect days, and that to me was as special as any moment we had that year."

The legacy of that '94 team lives on in many ways. One of the most remarkable stats comes from Collins: He is the Big Ten's last quarterback to be drafted in the first round.

"Even though Joe liked to call us the 'fatheads,' we never took the pedal off the gas," Collins said. "(With) our tempo, you couldn't tell the difference between Saturday afternoon in the game or Tuesday in practice. That's just how we were. It was like that all the time. When you have guys you see doing that day in and out, you develop that trust and you really feel like that carried us through some tough moments throughout the year."

Collins will be honored this Saturday, Sept. 29, with an NFF Hall of Fame On-Campus Salute, presented by Fidelity Investments, during Penn State's game against Ohio State. He will officially be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame during the 61st NFF Annual Awards Dinner on Dec. 4 in New York City.