Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

by Bacon, John U.

  • • •

  In the eye of this storm sits the Big Ten.

  The Big Ten might be the nation’s oldest, biggest, and richest conference, but could it catch up to the Southeastern Conference on the field, where the Big Ten had fallen woefully behind? Or had the locus of football power, like the Midwest’s economy and population, moved to the South and West, where academic research and NCAA rules didn’t seem to be such high priorities?

  Given the Big Ten’s unique place in the pantheon of college football—the exemplar that has combined academic power, athletic prowess, and commercial popularity, with a minimum of miscues before 2010—the conference, its twelve-hundred-plus football players, and 17.5 million fans aren’t merely canaries in the coal mine. They’re the coal miners.

  The Big Ten has four distinct models to face the future: the pure passion of Penn State’s players; the no-nonsense professionalism of Ohio State’s coaching staff; the corporate-style control of Michigan’s money-focused athletic department; and the old-school, presidential-driven approach of the Big Ten’s only private school, Northwestern.

  If the Big Ten can’t compete while keeping its programs clean and complementing the academic mission of its schools, then no conference can. The entire enterprise will have to be deemed a failure.

  The world’s first academically based athletic conference now stands as the last, best hope for nationally competitive, reasonably clean college football to make its stand.

  When Urban Meyer declared that “the stakes couldn’t be higher,” he was discussing the Ohio State Buckeyes season ahead, but he could have just as easily been discussing the entire sport.

  CHAPTER 2

  PATERNO’S LEGACY

  Mark Emmert, in his press conference announcing Penn State’s sanctions, promised that football would never again come ahead of education. While critics questioned his sincerity, few questioned his logic.

  They should have. In yet another cruel twist of irony, Joe Paterno’s career makes the point.

  • • •

  A few weeks after Paterno led the Lions to victory in the January 1, 1983, Sugar Bowl, earning the program’s first national title, Penn State’s thirty-two-member Board of Trustees invited him to speak. If they expected him to give a friendly recap of the team’s historic achievement and thank them for their support, they were in for a surprise.

  “We have never been more united, more proud,” he told them, “and maybe it’s unfortunate it takes a number one football team to do that.”

  Then he abruptly shifted his focus from the football team to the faculty: “It bothers me to see Penn State football number one, then, a few weeks later, to pick up a newspaper and find a report that many of our academic departments do not rate up there with the leading institutions in the country.”

  He didn’t stop there, laying out a direct approach to elevating the entire school: recruit better teachers. “We have some. We don’t have enough of them.” Next, he said, Penn State had to recruit “the star students that star professors get excited about.” The way to do all that, he said, was to raise more money to pay for endowed chairs, scholarships, better labs and libraries. “Without a great library, we can’t be a great university.”

  According to Joe Posnanski’s book Paterno, the coach told the trustees they needed to raise $7 million to $10 million over the next few months—a staggering sum at the time—while Penn Staters were still flush with their feelings over the football team’s triumph, and the iron was hot.

  “I think we can be more than we are,” Paterno said, “and make students better than they think they are.”

  His challenge was simple: to make the university as good as the football team, a strategy employed to great effect at the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and Michigan State, among others.

  And they needed to start doing it now.

  • • •

  Without Penn State’s elevated academic ambitions, it is less likely that seven years later the school would have reached out to join the Big Ten, or vice versa. Yes, the Big Ten offered geographical proximity and athletic excellence, but also a better academic reputation than other athletically competitive conferences. The Big Ten gives all members access to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which fosters collaboration among researchers and graduate students of the Big Ten, a conference that generates $8 billion in research annually and produces 16 percent of the nation’s PhD graduates. Until Nebraska lost its accreditation just before joining the league in 2011, the Big Ten was also the nation’s only athletic conference whose every school was a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, which requires world-class levels of broad-based research—something not even the Ivy League can claim.

  Joining the Big Ten also forced Penn State to raise its game by expanding the airport and highways needed to make Happy Valley—which Bob Knight famously called a “camping trip” when Penn State started Big Ten play in 1993—more accessible, and by building the 15,261-seat Bryce Jordan Center for basketball and concerts.

  Paterno’s team, however, showed it belonged in the Big Ten from the start. In just its second year, 1994, the Lions notched Paterno’s fifth undefeated season, took the Big Ten title outright, then beat Oregon in the Rose Bowl—but once again finished second in the polls, this time behind Tom Osborne’s Nebraska team.

  In the Big Ten, Penn State’s graduation rate has consistently ranked second only to Northwestern’s and ahead of the average for all Penn State students. Paterno’s African-American players—a demographic too often neglected in big-time college athletic programs, if not higher education itself—usually graduated at or above the team’s average, placing them far ahead of both the university’s and the nation’s average.

  By January 1, 1995—twenty-nine years after Paterno became Penn State’s head coach, and twelve years after his speech to the trustees—by any measure you wanted to pick, Paterno’s guidance of his football program, and the university itself, had to be considered an unqualified success.

  Which is why some of even Paterno’s staunchest supporters thought 1995 marked the perfect time for the sixty-eight-year-old coach to make the perfect exit. “Step down then? After 1994? Are you kidding me?” he told Posnanski. “Why? I never even thought about it.”

  In the spring of 2012, I accompanied new coach Bill O’Brien and a few other coaches on a bus tour of Penn State’s alumni clubs. At Pittsburgh’s classically opulent Omni William Penn Hotel, built in 1916, I talked with an older attorney, who told me about the last conversation he’d had with Paterno a few years earlier.

  When this lawyer told Paterno he was contemplating retiring, the coach grabbed his lapels, shook him, and shouted, “Do you wanna die?!”

  For Joe Paterno, the choices were that simple.

  • • •

  The following fall of 1995, Penn State introduced its next president, Nebraska’s Graham Spanier. Moving from Lincoln to State College might not have looked like a promotion in 1965, the year before Paterno became head coach, but it certainly did by 1995. Adding a little intrigue, the Cornhuskers were the very team that had just received a few more votes to nudge the undefeated Lions out of the way for the national championship—something Spanier had the presence of mind to make sport of at his first press conference, in addition to Nebraska’s contract with Coke, and Penn State’s with Pepsi.

  “What a difference a day makes!” he said with a grin, trading his red hat for a blue one, “because yesterday I thought Nebraska deserved the national championship. I used to drink Coke. But today it’s Pepsi, and maybe Penn State should have won it.”

  Everyone laughed, the Lions loved it, and the president and Penn State embarked on an unusually harmonious honeymoon. But Spanier, like Paterno, wasn’t bashful about his ambitions. Early in his tenure, Spanier told a gathering of faculty: We’re a Big Ten university. Let’s act like it!

  He wasn’t talking football, but research.

  “This is a standard
phrase around here,” said Michael Bérubé, an English professor. He was awarded the Paterno Family Professorship in 2001, which he felt compelled to abdicate in the fall of 2012, the same year he was named the president of the prestigious Modern Language Association, the first in Penn State’s history. “We could have competed with Notre Dame for T-shirt sales for the rest of our lives—until we joined the Big Ten. Once you do that, now your benchmark isn’t Notre Dame football, it’s Michigan’s and Indiana’s and Illinois’s graduate schools—and all of a sudden your libraries start to look pretty puny and your grants rather minuscule.

  “It’s really one of the main reasons I came here [from Illinois]. The graduate programs here were better funded. And not just in the sciences, but in the humanities as well.”

  They were soon better staffed. According to former assistant dean Ray Lombra, in the past ten years Penn State’s liberal arts faculty grew by 50 percent, from 240 to 360.

  Since Penn State joined the Big Ten, federal research grants have tripled, to $780 million.

  When the Academic Ranking of World Universities released its list of the top one hundred research universities in 2012, Penn State ranked forty-ninth—one of five Big Ten schools in the top fifty—the kind of recognition Penn Staters could only have dreamed of when Paterno provoked the trustees back in 1983. The university had met his challenge, and had become the equal of the football team.

  “When I think of Penn State,” men’s volleyball coach Mark Pavlik said to alumni groups on the bus tour with Bill O’Brien in the spring of 2012, “I think of ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.”

  • • •

  It is not a crime to coach too long or to succumb to pride. But at Penn State, when the two biggest leaders’ blind spots overlapped, it led to tragedy.

  Sometime after Penn State’s sterling 1994 season, Paterno’s passion for the position began to wane. This is not surprising for a man in his seventies and then eighties who had spent his life pursuing a punishing profession. But the players noticed, and the effects were corrosive.

  I first met the players on the 2012 Penn State team on April 20, 2012, the day before their spring game, and started a dialogue that lasted past their season-ending banquet, seven months later. The notes from those conversations alone filled over eight hundred single-spaced, typed pages—enough to fill three books this size without a word from the author. They spoke with admirable candor on just about every topic that came up in our long, wide-ranging discussions.

  Except one.

  Almost every member of the 2012 Penn State football team had been recruited by Joe Paterno. Many had fathers or older brothers who had played for Paterno at the height of his powers. The players from Pennsylvania were raised on stories of the iconic coach and grew up believing in Paterno and the Penn State mystique.

  So whenever the conversation turned to their time playing for Paterno, they spoke slowly, and carefully. They knew the legend, and the power it still possessed with their classmates, the lettermen, the six hundred thousand Penn State alums, and over 2.5 million fans nationwide. They knew the avalanche of calls and e-mails they would receive if they ran afoul of the faithful, something many of them had already gotten a hint of during the Sandusky saga—and that was enough.

  But they also knew Paterno’s image, hammered out of steel long before they had arrived, did not match what they had experienced, and they had too much integrity to deny it.

  • • •

  Naturally, most of the players liked being recruited by Penn State. If they hadn’t, they would have gone somewhere else, where they would probably have had a much easier time of it, on and off the field, and perhaps even gotten illicit payment for their labors. But that’s not what they signed up for.

  “I was offered money,” Mike Mauti told me matter-of-factly, of his recruitment by other programs. “The schools that do it don’t come out and say they’re going to give you this or that, but their players tell you how it works.

  “I had all these coaches calling me, offering all this stuff, guys telling me to hold out until signing day. ‘You wait long enough, they’ll rate you five-stars.’ Do the hats on the table and all that. Never been my style. Never been about the flash.”

  Just about every elite prospect sooner or later gets offered some forbidden fruit. Unlike many, if not most of them, Mauti was unimpressed. He credits his father for keeping him “supergrounded.”

  And his father, Rich, gives all the credit to Paterno, who, in the mid-seventies, turned the all-American lacrosse player from Long Island into an NFL special-teams starter. It was Rich’s dream for his son to play for Paterno, but since Mike was born in 1990, that seemed impossible. But after Mike Zordich asked Mike if he was coming “or what?,” Mike Mauti found himself in Paterno’s spacious office, where he noticed the conversation was fundamentally different from the ones he’d had at other schools.

  “The other coaches were always telling me how good I was and showing me the flash, the rings and all that,” he recalled. “With Joe, we didn’t talk about me. He never once said anything about how good I was.”

  Paterno was transparent, offering the young phenom nothing more than a chance. “You have a great opportunity here” was all he promised. “After that, it’s up to you what you make of it.” That was it, Paterno’s entire pitch. “All right, kid, what are you thinking?”

  Before Mike answered, he thought back to Zordich asking if he was coming. “So I just kind of blurted it out: ‘Coach, I want to come here!’ ”

  Rich Mauti’s head whipped around. “What a minute, Mike, are you sure about that?”

  Paterno walked around his desk and put his hand on Rich’s shoulder. “Aw, shut up, Mauti! You heard the kid’s coming!”

  “And that was it for me,” Mike recalled.

  This was the Paterno approach in a nutshell: no bells, no whistles, no bull. His offers—to everyone, always, whether they were five-stars or nobodies—were as straightforward as a firm handshake: the chance to get a good education at a good school and play football in a tradition-rich program. If you accepted, there would be no dancing in the end zone, just a lot of hard work, sacrifice—and success.

  • • •

  For every player I talked to on the 2012 team, however—over three dozen—it went downhill from there.

  In his last years, Paterno was hardly coaching at all, particularly after 2006, when a Wisconsin player ran into him on the sidelines and injured his leg just below the knee. He started watching the games from the press box, without a headset. After he recovered, he returned to the sidelines, where he still didn’t wear a headset, carry a clipboard, or seem to talk to anyone who was calling plays.

  He no longer ran the team meetings, the offensive meetings, or the positions meetings, rarely even attending those staples of a college football program. The staff joked privately that the less Paterno got involved, the better things usually went.

  Paterno, freed from almost all coaching duties in his final years as the titular head of the program, would often leave for lunch, then return to the football building to shoot the breeze with some staffers. When practice rolled around, every position group was already doing its own thing—discussed at length in various meetings earlier that day—when Paterno felt the urge to weigh in. When he did, he often confused the situation, got the players’ names wrong or just yelled at them by their numbers.

  After Paterno delegated so much of the coaching duties to his assistants, they tended to cling to the symbols of the Paterno Way, while missing their meanings.

  “Shave your face, cut your hair,” Mauti said, recalling the mantra. “If we weren’t shaved for a practice, we would have to work out on Saturdays in the off-season, or guys wouldn’t start during the season. Just stuff like that. It got almost to the point where that’s all that mattered, and you start to wonder, ‘Why are we doing these things?’ ”

  “I was in the middle of a pregame stretch on the field,” Zordich recalled. “I’m
getting focused, and [one of the assistants] walked up to me and asked, ‘Why didn’t you shave?’ Dude, I’m trying to get ready for this game. And this is what he’s worried about?”

  Penn State was not the first storied football program to rely too much on its past at the expense of its future, and Paterno was surely not the first coach to linger longer than he should have. In big-time college football, these are the rules, not the exceptions. By 2011, few programs could claim to have accrued a richer tradition or a better reputation than Penn State had. From the outside, it looked like Camelot. But that view did not match the reality the players faced on the inside every day.

  No, the program did not channel money to the players, write their papers, or pump them with steroids. They were clean, they went to class, and they graduated. But over time, the pristine image of the Penn State program, which had drawn them to State College in the first place, had become as reliant on reputation as reality, and Paterno’s persona had become as much burden as blessing.

  This is why I heard almost every Penn State senior I talked to say some version of this line: “We felt like we were protecting an image. And only we knew it.”

  • • •

  Six days before Sandusky was arrested, the Nittany Lions’ record stood at an impressive 7–1, with their only loss coming to eventual national champion Alabama. They were riding a six-game winning streak, and life looked pretty good in Happy Valley. But even before the Sandusky bomb hit ground zero, the Penn State locker room was anything but tranquil.

  On October 29, 2011, Penn State hosted 6–2 Illinois, which had just lost two close games. Neither team could score in the first half, thanks partly to Penn State quarterback Rob Bolden’s ineffective play.

  “Bolden was having a tough day,” Mauti recalled, “and our defense is going ape-shit on the sidelines because they won’t put in [Matt] McGloin.”

  Joe Paterno’s son, Jay, coached the quarterbacks and had always favored Bolden, a four-star prospect from a suburban Detroit prep school. When Bolden arrived in 2010, Jay immediately installed him as the starter, ahead of sophomore walk-on Matt McGloin.