Linebacker U is not a school, it's a time warp---college football's very own' Brigadoon--a mythical place that regularly seeks to conquer the (once) mythical national championship. Since the 1960's the best linebackers in America have made their way to the hills of central Pennsylvania and transformed the campus of Penn State University (a very real place) into Linebacker U (a very unreal one, particularly if you happen to be a ballcarrier). There in Happy Valley, like Imperial Storm Trooper soldiers they plainly wear white helmets, nameless uniforms and  black cleats that make their feet appear to be perpetually muddy, as if they have just emerged from the primordial ooze. At other schools, in deference to glamour, the quarterback invariably gets the girl. At Penn State the linebacker does.  It is a place where everybody is 6' 3" tall, weighs 230 pounds and has eyes like the gun slits in a tank. The matriculants at Linebacker U have names like Onkotz, Laslavic, Parlavecchio, Goganious and Radecic--steel mill names--and they are all the big men on campus. To be fashionable there, you could wear a bolt in your neck, if you had a neck.

- Bruce Newman, Sports Illustrated