At first, the two seniors agreed, but after letting it sink in, Zordich said he thought it might backfire; opposing coaches would hear about the deadline and start pounding the players’ phones all over again. The younger players might panic and make a bad decision. Then Mauti chimed in, arguing that the more the players got to know O’Brien, his staff, and their cutting-edge program, the more likely they would be to stay.
O’Brien looked at Zordich, Mauti, and Fitzgerald. He knew he had to make a decision, one that could make or break the historically stable program he had just inherited. And he had to make it that instant.
“You’ve got to understand,” O’Brien told me, “all four of us, nobody knew what to do. Nobody ever had to know! The entire staff was on vacation—it was our last summer break—so nobody was around. The setting was important.
“The key is you’re talking about two very mature guys, smart guys, Penn State guys, whose dads were heroes here, who’ve already been through a lot. I love these kids and I wanted them to stay, so we were just trying to figure out the best thing to do.”
After scanning their faces one more time, O’Brien started nodding and finally said, “Okay. Then that’s what we’ll do.”
• • •
At another team meeting that afternoon, O’Brien soft-pedaled the idea of a deadline, telling the players assembled, “Just be respectful of me and the coaching staff and your teammates.”
“And that was the cool part,” Zordich said. “Coach listens to us. He’s open to what we’re saying, and he has enough trust in us to try it our way. And that’s what he did.”
Since top-down, CEO-style management seemed to be all the rage at other athletic departments around the country, O’Brien’s approach to vital decision-making looked unorthodox, if not downright crazy. But, as he said, unprecedented events had also made it necessary. Nobody had ever sailed these waters before, forcing him to rely more heavily on his seniors—and they on him—and a North Star they couldn’t always see behind the clouds. It was undeniably scary—but when it worked, it was undeniably thrilling, too.
“Looking back on it,” Mauti concluded, shaking his head in both disbelief and pride, “that was a serious meeting.”
• • •
The four men split up and started working their phones, contacting every member of the team, some of them several times. “We had a whole operation going,” Zordich said. “This was nuts.”
“I have never used my phone that much in my life,” Mauti recalled. “We started at seven Tuesday morning and went to ten thirty that night. Then we said, ‘Let’s get back to Fitz’s office at six thirty tomorrow morning and start all over.’ So Z and I would get up, go to the building, and do it all again. We only slept a couple hours a night that week.”
For all the calls they made to their teammates, the players received almost as many from coaches across the country. The long list included a call from a longtime assistant Mauti knew well, who resigned after Penn State picked O’Brien.
Therefore, when Mauti saw the name of his former assistant coach pop up on his cell phone that day, the senior linebacker assumed he was calling simply to offer his support. So, Mauti took the call. But after a few pleasantries, the coach made it clear the purpose of his call was to see if any Penn State players might want to transfer to a school where a friend of his was the head coach.
Mauti told him flatly that, no, no one at Penn State was interested in transferring anywhere, least of all Mauti. That call surprised Mauti, but not as much as a long text he received that same day from University of Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray. Although the two had never met, Murray was texting on behalf of their new strength coach, John Thomas, who had been Penn State’s strength coach for twenty years, until he left in the same wave that had swept the others out.
To hear that these two former Nittany Lions coaches, who had just months earlier spoken of Penn State as a devoted family, were now trying to tear that family apart was more than Mauti could bear. So Mauti decided to put an end to it. “Look, we appreciate your interest,” he replied to Murray, “but no one is looking to go anywhere.
“And please do me another favor. On behalf of the entire Penn State team, please tell JT to go fuck himself.”
We don’t know if Murray passed on Mauti’s message to John Thomas. But we do know Mauti received no more text messages from anyone at the University of Georgia.
• • •
Mauti’s message to Thomas aside, the seniors followed O’Brien’s example on this point, and every other: do not worry about predators, whom O’Brien knew they couldn’t stop anyway. The NCAA had set the new rules, and the new rules said competing programs could poach Penn State’s program without penalty.
Within twenty-four hours, coaches from around the country weren’t just calling and texting Penn State players. They were setting up shop in the parking lot of Penn State’s football building, waiting for players to come out to sell them on transferring to their school. Many of the players stayed inside the sanctuary of the football building as long as they could, in the hopes of waiting the coaches out.
On Wednesday, Adrian Amos and Stephon Morris, roommates and fellow cornerbacks, both tweeted, “We have chosen to stay at Penn State and opposing coaches are outside our apartment, was that the intention of the NCAA?”
Actually, that was precisely the intention of the NCAA. Instead of giving Penn State the death penalty—for which the NCAA leaders might themselves be castigated—they would let the vultures finish the job for them. Of course, given the setup, Penn State’s fate ultimately wasn’t up to the NCAA or the scavengers on the phone or in the parking lot. It was up to Penn State’s players, who would vote with their feet.
“Silas [Redd] was basically our first domino,” Mauti said, referring to the Lions’ soon-to-be junior running back, who had finished third in the Big Ten as a sophomore with 1,241 rushing yards. “There were a lot of guys who were waiting for him to make his decision. We almost drove to his home in Connecticut—”
“—because we knew USC was going to visit his home,” Zordich cut in.
“We figured,” Mauti said, “whether Silas stayed or left, the longer he drew out that process, the more he isolated himself from the rest of the team.”
“And the longer he waited,” Zordich said, “the more we could talk to the other guys, who might influence other decisions.”
“If he’d gone right away—”
“—it would’ve instantly cost us five or six guys, good players,” Zordich said. “At least.”
• • •
Given the endless rumors of departures, Mauti and Zordich knew if they were going to keep their team together, they had to do more than just make phone calls and visit their teammates.
“At first, Coach is telling all of us, ‘Don’t talk to the media,’ ” Zordich recalled. “Which makes sense. He didn’t want us stirring it all up. But when we met again, I said, ‘All these people are hearing about how many players are supposed to be leaving and how it’s all falling apart. And that’s not what’s happening here. We’re sticking. We’re working our asses off. We’re together. We need to go out there and tell them that.’ ”
“The media was making a story where there wasn’t one,” Mauti said. “Really, no one had left yet. And the guys who had left were already injured or walk-ons or whatever—reasons that had nothing to do with the sanctions.”
Once again, after O’Brien listened to his seniors and weighed the new data, he was not afraid to alter his original strategy. He gave them permission to contact ESPN and offer a statement. ESPN jumped at the chance, inviting the seniors to broadcast their announcement from the practice field Wednesday morning. Live.
At O’Brien’s request, the duo shared their plans with the Penn State athletic department’s PR staff, which asked to see their proposed speech. Mauti and Zordich walked over to Spider’s office, typed their speech out on his computer, and e-mailed it to Assistant Athletic Director for
Communications Jeff Nelson, who sent back a revised version, highlighting the things the office wanted them to say.
“We read it, and we looked at each other,” Mauti remembered, “and we said, ‘Nah, this ain’t us.’ Then we balled it up and threw it in the trash.”
They went back over their original notes and divided up the lines. “You’ll say this, and I’ll say that.” And that was it. But right before they went on camera, they asked a few teammates in the weight room if they wanted to come out to show support. Everyone there said, “Sure,” and walked outside.
Well, almost everyone. When math major John Urschel saw them, he asked, “Do you guys have notes?”
“No. Why?”
“Do you know what you’re going to say? Because this is going live. It’s going to go everywhere. It’s going to be big.”
“Jeez, John,” Zordich said. “I was doing fine until I talked to you! Now I want to shit my pants! Thanks!”
Armed with Urschel’s unconditional support—he walked out with them—the two seniors bravely stepped outside anyway to face the ESPN cameras, surrounded by thirty-some teammates who had interrupted their workouts to join them.
“We want to let the nation know that we’re proud of who we are,” Zordich said into the camera. “We’re the real Penn Staters. We have an obligation to Penn State, and we have the ability to fight for not just a team, not just a program, but an entire university and every man that wore blue and white on the gridiron before us.”
“No sanction, no politician, is ever going to take away what we have here,” Mauti said. “This is what Penn State’s about—fighting through adversity—and we’re going to show up every Saturday and raise hell. This program was not built by one man, and this program sure as hell is not going to get torn down by one man.”
Three minutes after they started, they were done.
“Good thing they taped from the chest up,” Zordich told me, “because my right leg was shaking the whole time!”
ESPN ran the piece in its entirety many times, which generated dozens of comments on air, hundreds of e-mails, and a wide range of reactions. Some expressed nominal support for the players, who had nothing to do with the Sandusky tragedy. Others called them everything from “Paterno apologists” to “child rapists.” And still others pointed out that only thirty teammates stood behind them, unaware they had come out spontaneously and the rest were in class, where they were supposed to be.
But all these reactions missed the point. The public and the press are so accustomed to consuming packaged hype pumped out by PR people that when we finally witnessed something rare—unscripted authenticity—we missed it. For all the official promotional spots constantly telling us how committed student-athletes are to the ideals of college sports, and how those ideals prepare them for life, when we saw the real thing, we didn’t see it for what it was: a group of young men defending the fundamental values of intercollegiate athletics.
If the public missed it, Penn State’s coaches caught it.
Defensive line coach Larry Johnson Sr. was sitting in his office when he saw the players walk out onto the grass field below. An hour later, he heard that they had made a statement. When he watched it, “I was impressed. I was emotionally charged that these young men knew it was about a lot more than football.”
By inviting players to admit that playing football was more important than remaining at their university, the NCAA sanctions, quite unintentionally, had given Penn State’s players an opportunity to prove the opposite.
“I think, at that moment, our team got solidified,” Coach Johnson said. “I think guys who might have thought they were in were really in after that.
“I think it was critical. I really do.”
• • •
The next day, Thursday, July 26, O’Brien would fly out for the annual Big Ten Media Days in Chicago. But before he did, he was trying to think of something else, anything, that might help ensure he’d still have a team when he returned Friday afternoon.
“Man, we were doing all we could—meeting with the players every day—to keep them on the team,” O’Brien said. “We decided to have each of the coaches give a speech that night on some adversity they’d overcome, and how they’d handled it.”
All the coaches knew how to connect with the players—a skill that usually comes with the territory—but the most memorable speech, by all accounts, was Larry Johnson Sr.’s. Johnson played and later coached at the high school made famous in Remember the Titans and led his teams to three Maryland state titles before coming to Penn State in 1996. He quickly proved to be an excellent recruiter and a topflight coach.
A few years earlier, Illinois had called to see if he would be interested in becoming the Illini’s defensive coordinator—a promotion from D-line coach. When his players heard about it, they said, “If he leaves, we’re going with him.”
“I try very hard to build relationships with young men outside of football,” he told me, “and I’ve turned down things because, I tell them, ‘You guys are important.’ ”
“The D-linemen, they love that guy—for all the right reasons,” Zordich said.
Johnson is an unusually calm, self-possessed man, a former deacon with a deep baritone. When he speaks, he has a way of looking deep into your eyes that makes you give him your undivided attention.
That night, when he took the floor of the team room, he told them, “My message is simple. Everybody has a role. We are given a road, and we choose how we travel that road. We’ve been chosen to do something extraordinary, something that’s never been done before.
“This is bigger than just football. To be able to look back on your lives when you have kids who are fifteen, sixteen years old, and they ask you, ‘Hey, Dad, have you ever faced adversity?’—you will say, ‘Yes, this is what I was given, and this is what I’ve done.’
“So you see, we’re here for a reason, and we have a job to do.”
“Near the end, you could see him tearing up,” Zordich said. “His voice was cracking. It was pin-drop stuff. He had us. Coach Johnson—he should get a whole lot of credit for keeping this team together.”
“Our D-line has some of our best athletes,” Mauti added, players such as Jordan Hill and Pete Massaro. Once Coach Johnson secured the D-line to stay, “we built it out from there. Make no mistake: Coach O’Brien got us through this. But Coach Johnson’s leadership during this time cannot be overstated.”
• • •
Seeing how well the coaches’ speeches were received, O’Brien had another inspiration: “Penn State has the largest letterman club in the country, over a thousand guys. I thought, ‘Let’s invite them in to talk to the team, about what it means to play here.’ ”
Good idea, but no small feat. O’Brien’s secretary, Christine Laur, sent out over a thousand old-fashioned letters that day, which arrived at most of the lettermen’s homes Friday. O’Brien had invited them for a meeting that coming Tuesday, a workday, with just five days’ notice.
“And let’s be honest,” O’Brien said, “State College is still not exactly the easiest place to get to.”
O’Brien had no idea what the response would be—not only to his invitation, but to his decisions that week, including putting names on the jerseys—but he didn’t have any time to worry about it. The morning after the letters went out, Thursday, July 26, O’Brien woke at 4:00 a.m. to get to work, then hop on Penn State’s private jet to fly to Chicago for the annual Big Ten media circus.
Naturally, Penn State would be center stage.
CHAPTER 5
FOUR TEAMS, FOUR GOALS
Thursday–Friday, July 26–27, 2012: “Hello! And welcome to the forty-first annual Big Ten Media Days.”
The Big Ten’s always affable assistant commissioner for communications, Scott Chipman, stood at the podium to welcome the five hundred journalists at Chicago’s McCormick Place.
The league started hosting this media event in 1971, when the Big Ten actually had ten t
eams and no TV network and allowed each member only two televised games per season. Woody Hayes coached Ohio State, Bo Schembechler coached Michigan, and Joe Paterno coached Penn State, which was still twenty-two years from playing in the Big Ten. No one in the Big Ten sold out every game.
Forty-one years later, the Big Ten had twelve teams, the nation’s biggest stadiums, the most living alumni (4.4 million), and the most fans attending games—over 6 million in 2011. Four of those stadiums drew 100 percent or more of capacity, eight of them 90 percent of capacity or more, and all twelve drew 70 percent or more. Of the nation’s twenty-one schools with the highest attendance, seven of them were in the Big Ten, fully a third.
Big Ten teams played ninety-six regular-season games in 2011, and every single one of them was on TV, many on the league’s own Big Ten Network. Just five years old, the BTN was by far the most successful conference TV network, going out to 53 million homes and paying out $24.6 million to each team in 2012 alone.
This kind of growth generates a tremendous amount of money, and with it, power. But you could argue such unprecedented growth requires this very concentration of power just to manage it. If contemporary athletic directors sounded increasingly like corporate CEOs, with endless talk of branding and business models, market value, and return on investment, they had cause: the Big Ten had become a stunningly successful business.
Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany had played on two of Dean Smith’s Final Four teams at North Carolina and captained the 1970 squad, then graduated from UNC’s law school. He was entering his twenty-fourth season as Big Ten commissioner and deserved the lion’s share of the credit for the league’s unprecedented success. After listing the Big Ten’s impressive highlights, he said, “I couldn’t stand up here without addressing the Penn State case.”
And he did, in comments that ran a full page, before opening the floor to questions. Over the next thirty minutes, with admirable candor, he fielded eight questions—seven of them pertaining to Penn State in some form. A reporter pointed out that all four of the Big Ten’s marquee football programs—Nebraska, Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State—were currently on NCAA probation. He asked the commissioner what that did to the league’s reputation.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 8