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The cover of the team’s media guide featured Hostetler dressed as a gun-toting cowboy beside a white stallion. Billboards along the interstate praised his intimidating play. And a record—entitled “Old Hoss, the Ballad of Jeff Hostetler” and set to the theme song from the television show Bonanza —was distributed to radio stations across the region. (One lyric, sung in a distinctive West Virginia twang, glorified that “Ole Hoss, Ole Hoss can really get those first downs. He’s got the arm, he has the range to be end zone bound.”)

The media blitz worked.

“He is more handsome than his pictures suggest. The nose, so prominent in the photographs, becomes part of a more attractive package when you see it in conjunction with the carved cheekbones and toothy grin,” wrote one Philadelphia reporter. “[His] strong arm has led the West Virginia University football team to a No. 4-ranking in both wire service polls and a No. 1-ranking in the hearts of the residents of this rugged little city. Hostetler’s biography is as all-American as his looks. He is a 4.0 finance student. He dates the coach’s daughter. He does not curse . . . he does not drink, either, not even beer.”

The victory in early October over Pitt helped the Mountaineers achieve their highest-ever ranking in the national polls and enabled Hostetler’s rise in the Heisman race. Defeating the Panthers snapped a seven-game losing streak with their rival, but to fully establish themselves as the best team in the region, they would have to exorcize a much bigger demon.

The Mountaineers’ seventh game of the 1983 season was against Penn State in Happy Valley. Every year since 1959, West Virginia had played against, and lost to, the Nittany Lions. The most recent loss fit the norm: a 24-0 shutout at home. Jeff Hostetler started that game, squandering the opportunity to show up the coach and quarterback that sparked his departure from State College. Adding insult to injury—he badly sprained his knee in the first quarter—three turnovers by Hostetler yielded three Todd Blackledge–led touchdown drives.

Paterno’s team went on to win the national title at the end of that season. A year later, the number-four ranked Mountaineers held similar aspirations. Like Jim Kelly—who twice toppled Penn State in critical, program-defining wins—Hostetler was desperate to craft a victory over Paterno’s Nittany Lions.

I still had friends at Penn State, and they told me the coaches had gone all out—at my expense—to fire up their team. The whole week before the game, they’d played that Heisman Trophy promo song (the one written to the “Bonanza” tune) over the PA system. They plastered the locker room with the West Virginia cover shot of me in the cowboy suit with the white horse. I cringed when I heard that. By the time the week was over, the Nittany Lions were chomping at the bit to play, if only because it meant they wouldn’t have to hear that song anymore. I’d always known that song would come back to haunt me—and it did.

Before a record crowd of 86,309, Hostetler completed his first seven passes, avoiding would-be tacklers all afternoon, and keeping the score tight.

“We had him pinned in a few times,” said defensive tackle Greg Gattuso. “But he kept getting away.”

Ahead just 21-17 in the third quarter, the Nittany Lions defense tightened up and kept West Virginia’s offense out of the end zone the rest of the game. A late touchdown by freshman D. J. Dozier sealed Penn State’s 41-23 win.

“Later my family came over,” he wrote. “I think it was hard for them, because they wanted that win even more than I did. My brothers especially—even Todd, who was playing baseball then at Penn State—had wanted to see a Hostetler beat the Lions and show Paterno the error of his ways.”

Two road defeats in the final four games cost West Virginia their shot at the best season in school history and an appearance in one of the big-stage bowl games. Still, an 8-3 record earned a spot in the Hall of Fame Bowl in late December.