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CONTENTS
1: “The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher”
2: Paterno’s Legacy
3: Urban’s Story
4: The Outsider
5: Four Teams, Four Goals
6: Night of the Lettermen
7: We Know Who We Are
8: “It All Starts Saturday”
9: Pain at the Pleasure Dome
10: The Brainiac Bowl
11: “If We Could Just Win One”
12: The Richest Rivalry
13: A Toast to Open Hearts
14: Inferno at the Horseshoe
15: Sing to the Colors
16: It Matters to Us
17: “All The Things We Admire”
18: The Battle for the Brown Jug
19: The Mudbowl and the Big House
20: “You Can’t Manufacture Tradition”
21: “Twenty Years from Now, This Is What We’ll be Talking About”
Epilogue: “How Much Money Do They Need?”
Acknowledgments
About John U. Bacon
To Terry McDonald, Maris Vinovskis, David Rubin, Sharon Dilworth, and Nicholas Delbanco, my mentors at the University of Michigan, who taught me how to do this
CHAPTER 1
“THE STAKES COULDN’T BE HIGHER”
PENN STATE
Mike Mauti grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. Mike Zordich grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, on the Pennsylvania border, equidistance from Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
Their fathers both played football for Penn State and went on to play in the NFL. Their dads revered Joe Paterno, as most of Paterno’s players did. When Mike Mauti was born, in 1990, his dad, Rich, wrote a letter to Paterno, saying his only regret was that his son would never get the chance to play for the legendary coach.
Seventeen years later, in 2007, Mike Mauti made his official recruiting visit to the office of Penn State’s head coach. But minutes before he did, he met another recruit outside the indoor practice facility: Mike Zordich, who’d already committed.
“I’ll never forget it,” Mauti said. “The first words out of his mouth are ‘So are you coming or what?’ I’m thinking, ‘You know what? He’s right.’ But I didn’t say anything to him or my dad. I wasn’t planning to commit on that trip.”
Of course, Mauti came to Penn State, and the two became inseparable.
That friendship would be tested—and not by each other, but by the extraordinary circumstances they would face during their years at Penn State. For these two, the moment of truth would arrive in late July 2012.
• • •
By 10:00 a.m. Monday morning, July 23, Penn State’s football players had finished their workout, showered, and gathered in the players’ lounge to watch NCAA president Mark Emmert’s press conference, which was covered by virtually every news outlet in the country.
In a statement the players would long remember, Emmert said, “No price the NCAA can levy will repair the grievous damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky on his victims. However, we can make clear that the culture, actions, and inactions that allowed them to be victimized will not be tolerated in collegiate athletics.”
Emmert then laid out a series of penalties. One erased a wide swath of Penn State’s rich history, vacating all victories from 1998 through 2011—thereby dropping Coach Paterno from the perch of his profession, with 409 wins, down to fifth, with 298. The sanctions also threatened Penn State’s future: a $60 million fine, a four-year postseason ban, and a drastic reduction in the number of scholarships the football coaches could offer recruits, from twenty-five down to fifteen a year, with a maximum of sixty-five—twenty fewer than Penn State’s rivals could give out.
Emmert declared Penn State’s penalties might be considered “greater than any other seen in NCAA history.” Most experts believed they were second only to the infamous “death penalty” delivered to Southern Methodist University, from which the Mustangs had still not fully recovered twenty-six years later.
“Football,” Emmert concluded, “will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people.”
Eight months earlier, on November 5, 2011, prosecutors had arrested Penn State’s former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on forty criminal counts, including the sexual assault of eight boys over a fifteen-year period, one of them in the showers of Penn State’s football building. That put in motion a series of events that few could have imagined: it exposed the worst scandal in the history of modern sports; it led to the midseason firing of the iconic Joe Paterno; it prompted the hiring of little-known New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien; it resulted in Penn State’s commissioning the Freeh Report, which concluded university leaders knew enough about what Sandusky had done, but cared more about protecting the university’s image than his young victims; and it surely accelerated Paterno’s decline and death—all within three months of Sandusky’s arrest.
• • •
Those facts you probably know. What happened behind those headlines, you probably don’t.
The players, coaches, and staffers in Penn State’s players’ lounge that Monday morning understood immediately that another provision of the NCAA’s sanctions, which got far less attention outside that room at the time, threatened Penn State’s season opener, just six weeks away: the one that allowed other schools to recruit Penn State’s current players, who would be permitted to play for another team that fall without having to sit out a season for transferring. In practice, Emmert had declared open season for opposing coaches to cannibalize Penn State’s roster, and all but encouraged Penn State’s players to jump.
Just minutes after news of the sanctions broke, recalled Mauti, who had already defied the odds by reclaiming his starting position after missing the 2009 season when he tore the ACL in his right knee, and most of the 2011 season when he tore the ACL in his left knee, “Our phones were ringing—blowing up—with ten or twenty coaches calling right off. My high school coach had to turn his phone off because he got forty calls that day asking if I wanted to jump.”
Just a couple hours later, while Mauti met with rookie head coach Bill O’Brien to address Mauti’s fear that the program was on the verge of collapse, University of Southern California assistant coach Ed Orgeron called Mauti. “His kid went to my high school, so I picked up,” Mauti recalled. “He asks me, ‘What kind of guy is your tailback?’ The coach didn’t even know Silas Redd’s name. Are you serious?”
Apparently serious enough to fly Redd—who ran for over a thousand yards in his sophomore year—out to LA, where USC had Snoop Dogg pick him up at the airport in a limousine. Everyone in Penn State’s players’ lounge assumed if the popular and talented Redd left State College, the floodgates would open.
That fear was well-founded. That same day, recalled starting senior defensive end Pete Massaro, an Academic All-American econ major, “One kid was telling me he was going and started listing a ton of guys in the freshmen and sophomore classes who were going to leave, too. I was freaking out. Next thing he said to me was ‘Penn State football is dead.’
“I thought it was the end of Penn State football.”
So did Mauti and Zordich. As was often the case, they had the same reaction at the same
time: this will not happen on my watch.
After barely sleeping that night, they got up the next morning, Tuesday, July 24, at six. They immediately headed for strength coach Craig Fitzgerald’s office to meet with him and Coach O’Brien, who didn’t need to be persuaded about the gravity of their situation.
The seniors compiled a list of people they’d heard were planning to leave, and together they concocted a plan they hoped would stop the exodus before it started.
Before they split up that Tuesday morning, however, O’Brien moved to make a major decision.
“Coach was saying, ‘We need to make a hard deadline,’ ” Zordich recalled. “ ‘This can’t go on forever. So I’m going to tell them, by August first, you’re either with us or you’re not.’ ”
It made perfect sense. Not knowing which players would still be on the team for the first game, just six weeks away, would make it almost impossible to conduct an effective practice and could be enough to make an already fragile team fall apart, piece by piece.
“I’m thinking, August first?” Zordich recalled. “That’s one week. This dude’s got balls.” Zordich soon proved he had some, too. After initially agreeing, the more they talked about it, the more compelled he felt to speak up.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he finally said. “The players here don’t know you well enough yet.”
As soon as Zordich said it, Mauti decided he was right, and they explained why. Their reasons were both positive and negative: they believed the more the players got to know O’Brien and his program—which they viewed as a long-overdue step into the future, instead of relying endlessly on Penn State’s glorious past—the more likely the players would be to stay; and second, if O’Brien threatened them with a deadline, it might create a panicked rush to the doors.
“You say, ‘Now or never,’ ” Zordich said, “you’re going to lose a lot of guys. They’ll get scared.”
“And make an irrational decision,” Mauti added, finishing his best friend’s sentence once again. “If we’ve got a deadline, word’s going to get out to the coaches, and their phones are gonna blow up all over again the night before the deadline.”
At that moment, Zordich and Mauti might have been the only college football players in the country with the temerity to question the decision of their head coach—a coach they already respected greatly—to his face.
At the next moment, O’Brien might have been the only college football coach in the country willing to listen.
O’Brien looked at Zordich, Mauti, and Fitzgerald, and then back to Zordich, thinking and weighing the options.
No one in that office had time to ponder the irony.
The NCAA sanctions were encouraging “student-athletes” to behave like athlete-students. They were putting the lie to the NCAA’s own propaganda, which officially discouraged transfers because “student-athletes” are supposed to pick their schools for the education, not the athletic opportunities. But there Emmert was, inviting Penn State’s student-athletes to jettison the university that graduated 91 percent of its student-athletes—a big reason many of them chose Penn State in the first place—to transfer penalty-free for bowl-eligible football programs.
Not only did it suddenly fall to O’Brien, Mauti, Zordich, and every Penn State player who stayed to protect their storied program from disintegrating, they could only do so by upholding the very values the NCAA itself could apparently no longer proclaim with a straight face.
OHIO STATE
In the early-morning hours of December 6, 2009, just a few hours after his undefeated Florida Gators lost the Southeastern Conference title game to eventual national champion Alabama, head coach Urban Meyer woke up, grabbed his chest, and collapsed.
His wife, Shelley, who’d been concerned about his health since he took the Florida job in 2005, didn’t need to be convinced to call 911. An ambulance rushed to take Meyer to the hospital. Doctors determined it wasn’t a heart attack he’d suffered, but they still couldn’t pinpoint the problem.
The day after Christmas that year, Meyer announced he had “ignored my health for years” and would retire as Florida’s coach after their Sugar Bowl game against his alma mater, Cincinnati.
The Ohio native ultimately decided to take a leave of absence for a few months, before returning to lead the Gators the next season to a disappointing 8-5 record. After Florida beat Penn State, 37–24, in the January 1, 2011, Outback Bowl, Meyer again announced his retirement, citing the same reasons he had the year before.
Thus, at the height of his powers, Urban Meyer did what few men in his profession would even consider: he left the game for the TV booth, where he spent the 2011 season critiquing other teams.
• • •
The same fall Meyer spent emerging from his living hell, the Ohio State Buckeyes spent entering theirs.
The Buckeyes’ troubles paled next to Penn State’s, but before the police arrested Sandusky, they were considered big news.
In December of 2010, a few weeks before Ohio State’s Sugar Bowl game, five Ohio State players were forced to admit they’d sold some jerseys, mementos, and trophies to a tattoo-parlor owner. Predictably, he put them on eBay, and there’s your scandal. Compared to the money USC boosters gave to Reggie Bush, and Mississippi State boosters gave to Cam Newton’s father—all in the six figures—“Tat-gate” seemed pretty petty to most people, but to Mark Emmert and his staff, it was serious business.
In fairness to the NCAA, as Bo Schembechler himself once said, “Every single one of those rules came up because some coach was finding a way around them.” This familiar cat-and-mouse game goes back to the inception of the NCAA itself—really, why it was founded—and even deeper, to one of the less appealing aspects of the American character.
“In his 1927 autobiography,” sportswriter John Kryk writes, “[Amos Alonzo] Stagg perhaps wrote more than he realized when he contrasted the difference between the British and Americans in the matter of rules compliance. ‘The British, in general, regard both the letter and the spirit,’ Stagg wrote. ‘We, in general, regard the letter only. Our prevailing viewpoint might be expressed something like this: Here are rules made and provided for. They affect each side alike. If we are smart enough to detect a joker or a loophole first, then we are entitled not only in law but in ethics to take advantage of it.’ ”
And that’s why the NCAA was born: to close those loopholes.
Ohio State had told the players the rules—although the players initially claimed the university hadn’t.
Yet, after Ohio State submitted its own report to the NCAA on December 19, 2010, the NCAA took all of four days to determine that five players would receive a five-game suspension—then allowed them to delay their punishment until the following fall, so they could play in the much-anticipated Sugar Bowl against eighth-ranked Arkansas on January 4, 2011.
The Buckeyes beat the Razorbacks, 31–26.
It soon surfaced, however, that star quarterback Terrelle Pryor had also traded a sportsmanship award from the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, a Big Ten title ring, and—most blasphemous to Buckeye backers—one of his gold pants charms, which Ohio State coaches and players have been given each time they beat the pants off Michigan, dating back to 1934. None of these discoveries increased the NCAA’s penalties, but they did cause Buckeye fans to shake their heads in wonder at such disregard for their vaunted tradition.
Still, the whole thing seemed like a hill of beans until the spring of 2011, when head coach Jim Tressel got dragged into the investigation.
• • •
Ohio State’s Jim Tressel era started on January 18, 2001, at a basketball game against Michigan. That night, when they introduced Tressel as Ohio State’s new football coach at halftime, the Ohio native knew exactly what the fans wanted to hear.
He was hired on the heels of John Cooper, whose record at Ohio State was second only to that of Woody Hayes. But Cooper’s teams lost to Michigan an inexcusable ten times in thirteen years—and in
Columbus, you simply cannot do that. And you can’t say the Michigan–Ohio State rivalry is “just another game,” either—which might have been a bigger sin.
Knowing all this, Tressel wisely told the crowd, “I can assure you that you will be proud of your young people in the classroom, in the community, and most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the football field.”
The place exploded. At last, somebody gets it!
Tressel got it—and he proved it, beating Michigan nine out of ten times, including a record seven in a row. He also set Ohio State records for winning percentage in the modern era at .810, tied Woody Hayes’s mark of six straight Big Ten titles, and won a national title in 2002—only the Big Ten’s second since 1968.
Jim Tressel was clearly one heck of a coach. He was also pleasantly professorial—famed for his sweater vest, not his temper—and a great ambassador for the school.
But smoke always seemed to billow up behind him. His previous team, Youngstown State, won three Division I-AA national titles, but one of his stars got in trouble for taking money from a wealthy booster. The school got in trouble, but not Tressel.
When Maurice Clarett played on Ohio State’s 2002 national title team, he later confessed, he took “golf, fishing, and softball as classes,” which is not against the rules, but taking at least $20,000 in benefits is. “I was living the NFL life in college,” he said. “I got paid more in college than I do now,” in the United Football League. But Clarett got in trouble, not Tressel.
When Tressel was being investigated in 2011, a student reporter asked Ohio State president Gordon Gee—whom Time magazine ranked the best in the nation in 2009, the same year he became the highest-paid college president in the country—if he might fire Tressel. President Gee replied, “I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me!”
Even after Pryor and company were caught selling trinkets, it was still chump change—until an e-mail from a former player-turned-attorney leaked to the press, indicating Tressel had lied to the NCAA about his ignorance of the violations—and not once, not twice, but three times. As usual, it was not the crime but the cover-up that did him in, giving even the supportive Gee little choice.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 1