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

by Bacon, John U.

  When the game ended, the coaches and the players ran to midfield to shake the hands of their cerebral peers from the SEC, then charged over to the student section at full speed. They stood just a few feet from the five-foot-high wall and—with the band’s help—started singing their fight song, “Go U Northwestern,” one of the league’s best, punching their purple helmets into the air on the beat.

  This has become a happily common custom in the Big Ten, but never is it more personal and intimate than it is in Evanston, where the players are singing to the students, and the students are singing to the players, and it’s small enough that everyone can see each other’s face. Players often pointed to a particular student and smiled, and vice versa, during their serenade.

  They actually knew each other, and not as player and fan, but as classmates. If the Chicago Bears had ever actually played here, it would never be the same.

  It was raining hard. It was getting cold. It was becoming miserable. And everybody was thrilled.

  • • •

  Northwestern is the only Big Ten school I’ve visited that holds its post-game press conference not in a separate press area, but in its team room—perhaps because they’re the only school that never moved its football building from the stadium end zone, where most programs built them a century ago. The arms race has since separated the two buildings at just about every other school.

  The Big Ten’s team rooms are all pretty similar, resembling small movie theaters, with the chairs and carpet in some permutation of school colors, and motivational slogans and goals painted on the walls. Still, they all reveal something about each school.

  On the right wall of Northwestern’s, for example, they picture not their Big Ten titles, their colossal stadium, or their most famous players, but a black-and-white photo of their students, clearly ecstatic after a big victory, with chests painted to spell out WILDCATS.

  In the back, they’ve painted THE WILDCAT WAY and AS HARD AS YOU CAN, FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN.

  On the left side of the room, they’ve listed the goals of a Northwestern football player:

  BE A CHAMPION

  PREPARE FOR LIFE

  GET A NORTHWESTERN DEGREE

  Against this backdrop, Coach Pat Fitzgerald took the stage and sat down at a table.

  He delivered the requisite praise for Vanderbilt and his defense, and predictable concerns over his offense. When a reporter asked about the Big Ten’s troubles that day—final tally, 6 and 6—Fitzgerald answered honestly, “Sorry to hear that from our brothers in the league. But we’re not a good enough football team to put the league on our shoulders.”

  I asked if the relationship between the students and the team had grown since his freshmen year. “I don’t think it has anything to do with me,” he said with a grin, “but I think it’s because we’re very active on campus. We’ve got an unbelievably tight-knit family, and as a university I think we’re very close. Everyone’s involved in everyone’s lives.

  “We’ve had great student support for a number of years. But when you see those kinds of numbers, for a home opener when it’s raining and the students aren’t even in school yet, it was awesome! It’s a privilege for us to play for them.”

  Clearly, the contagion the seniors had hoped to spread was catching, and their coach knew it.

  He closed by saying, with another grin, “I look forward to not reading whatever you guys write.” It got a good laugh from the most collegial beat in the Big Ten.

  Then he added something you don’t often hear from big-time football coaches: “Our game next week [against Boston College] is at two thirty. I cordially invite each and every one of you. Thanks for coming down. Be safe going home in the rain—and go ’Cats!”

  The players followed their coach, delivering more of the usual answers, but in a manner you’d expect from twenty-five-year-olds. The only quote that stood out came from Mark, the small tailback who crashed through to the end zone and then celebrated with the fans. “Our destination isn’t done yet,” he said. “We’re only two games in.”

  But they were one-third of the way to another bowl bid, and a chance to do something no Northwestern team had done in sixty-four years.

  CHAPTER 11

  “IF WE COULD JUST WIN ONE ”

  The most beloved living figure of Penn State football is not John Cappelletti or Todd Blackledge or Ki-Jana Carter, or any of the eighty-eight all-Americans who have worn the navy and white. This guy has never even thrown a pass, scored a touchdown, or made a big tackle—because he can’t.

  Brad Caldwell was born with a severe case of scoliosis. The condition cost him part of his left shoulder blade and a few ribs and gave him a bit of a hump, leaving him slightly bent over. He grew up in Curwensville, a former brick-manufacturing town in west-central Pennsylvania. When Caldwell was in eighth grade, his science teacher, Mike Keely, convinced him to become the junior high football team’s equipment manager. Caldwell reluctantly agreed, but before long, the varsity coach called him up—and changed his life forever.

  Adding to the self-consciousness every high schooler feels, the five-foot-two Caldwell had to wear a back brace. Working with the football team gave him an identity, a sense of belonging, and forced him out of his shell. He was hooked and followed his new passion to Penn State when he enrolled in 1983.

  Caldwell got his nickname one day when he was joking around, crawling across the locker room floor on all fours to pick something up. Defensive lineman Joe Hines said, “You look like a spider!” It stuck with everyone. Well, almost everyone. Although even his best friends call him Spider, with his blessings, Paterno never did because his wife wouldn’t let him. “That was Joe,” Caldwell said with obvious affection.

  Caldwell, his top lieutenant, Kirk Diehl, and a few interns are responsible for outfitting 120 football players, organizing some two thousand jerseys and two thousand pairs of cleats, and replacing any piece of equipment at a moment’s notice, right on the sidelines. (Caldwell’s wife, Karen, is a skilled seamstress and repairs the jerseys.) During the season, Caldwell and Diehl work eighty-hour weeks, minimum.

  When you’re in the Penn State locker room before a game and you hear a huge cheer suddenly go up in the concourse, that’s because Spider tried to sneak out the door to get something from the sidelines, but the fans and the lettermen saw him and gave him a spontaneous ovation. When the lettermen return, their first stop is the BRAD “SPIDER” CALDWELL equipment room, according to the plaque outside the door. When the coach’s son, seven-year-old Michael O’Brien, was riding in the van with his mom one day, he said, “Everyone in the football building is nice. But Spider is the nicest.”

  I have yet to meet anyone who disagrees with Master O’Brien’s assessment. But in the spring of 2012, when the Sandusky scandal was consuming everything, for the first time in his twenty-nine years at Penn State, Caldwell started asking himself, “Do I really want to keep doing this? This isn’t the Penn State I knew.”

  After O’Brien told him and Diehl how important they were to Penn State, and Caldwell watched the seniors that off-season not only stay but step it up, Caldwell knew he wanted to stick it out at least one more year to see this team through.

  But his resolve, like everyone else’s, had to be tested after the Lions’ painful 17–16 loss to Virginia, their worst start in a decade. When I arrived in State College the day after, I fully expected to see cracks running through their foundation. That was the national pundits’ prediction, convinced Penn State football was on the verge of crumbling, right on schedule—and arguably by the NCAA’s design.

  But, contrary to the forecasts, the Penn Staters were not giving up. At Wednesday’s Quarterback Club, they planned for 290 people, but 350 showed up. In a normal season, 0-2 would have sent fans jumping off the bandwagon. In 2012, it caused more to jump on. Likewise, the coaches, staffers, and players weren’t running for the exits, or even eyeing them, after a particularly tough loss.

  I found Spider, “Captain Kirk,”
and their interns folding the first of eight hundred towels that week—just a small sample of the forty thousand towels Caldwell has folded in his career. Caldwell admitted that when Ficken missed the final kick against Virginia, “It was just a kick in the gut.

  “But it’s coming,” he said. “We’ll get there. The attitude has been good. Really, it’s been amazing. None of the usual rumblings after a loss like that: ‘I’m sick of this!’ ‘This is crap!’ And you always get some whispering after losses, people pointing fingers—it’s human nature—but not this time. We’ve been through so much together that no one’s pointing fingers. I’ve heard not one word of that, and after a game like that, that’s a first in all my years here.

  “We’re hungry. They’re dying for it, but we can handle this and move on. Something positive is gonna happen.

  “We know it’s gotta happen.”

  • • •

  “We have a very big game,” O’Brien said, standing in the center of the team-room stage, hands on his hips. “We need this to get back on track. Once we get one—this one!—we’ll be rolling. But we have to get that first one.

  “We have to.”

  At the team dinner that night, quarterback Matt McGloin said, “I think we’re playing well at times. But something always happens, and we get screwed up. We just have to string it together.”

  He adjusted the ice pack on his elbow—something you see a lot of at training tables once the season starts. Probably a dozen players were sporting similar packs, wrapped to their shoulders and hips and knees.

  “I took one hit right here, on my funny bone,” McGloin said, pointing. “Some three-hundred-pound guy.”

  “He wasn’t three hundred pounds, because that would be my guy,” Stankiewitch said, sticking a cube of steak, dripping with A.1. sauce, into his mouth, then pointing his fork at McGloin. “My guy didn’t get to you.”

  “Okay, okay,” McGloin said, wincing a bit while readjusting the pack. “A six-six D-end did. Hurt just as much. Then another guy hit it again, same place. Not sure if the bone’s chipped or it’s just a ligament. I came back in—and at that point you don’t pay too much attention to it—and threw for two touchdowns, 197 yards, and no interceptions. But we came up short.”

  No matter what players or coaches tell you, they almost always know their stats, down to the penny. But in Penn State’s case, it was not a cliché to say the players felt their many good individual performances in the Virginia game—including a great fake punt and four takeaways—were wiped out by the big stat: 0 and 2.

  “The plane ride home—it’s kind of to the point where you’re so frustrated, you can’t say anything,” McGloin said. “What did we do wrong? Am I doing something wrong? You have to question yourself. Then you pull everything together, you talk it over, and you keep fighting. And that’s why this senior class stuck it out.

  “We’ve dealt with so much adversity in the past ten months, being 0 and 2 shouldn’t faze us.”

  “We don’t like it,” Stank clarified.

  “Exactly—we don’t like it,” McGloin said, “but it will make us work harder, stick together, and do our jobs.”

  • • •

  In the meantime, out in LA, Silas Redd ran for almost 200 yards for USC that weekend, and Justin Brown was starting a promising career year as a wide receiver at Oklahoma, while kicker Anthony Fera missed the first four Texas games with a groin injury. But all three were winning games and enjoying life without the stigma, the judgments, and the endless e-mails the Penn State players had to face every day.

  Back in Happy Valley, wide receiver Shawney Kersey and kicker Matt Marcincin dropped off the team, though—thanks to the NCAA’s sanctions—they could keep their scholarships, and if they screwed up in school, it would count against the team’s average, which could cost the Lions still more scholarships.

  If the folks who ran the NCAA had set out to design an experiment to prove the student-athletes’ commitment to their school and their studies was greater than their need for glory on the gridiron, it’s hard to imagine they could have done a better job than what they’d created for Penn State’s players that fall.

  • • •

  During a practice two weeks earlier, offensive coordinator Mac McWhorter told his players, “We’re looking at film for Ohio for their twist percentage.” That is, how often they employed a certain defensive strategy. “On third down and seven-to-eleven yards, they twisted 49 times out of 361.”

  Offensive guard Miles Dieffenbach turned to John Urschel and asked, “Ursch—what percentage is that?”

  Urschel looked down for just a moment, came up, and said, “About . . . 13.6 percent. But you should check my math.”

  With whom, exactly?

  Every team has its academic stars, but only Penn State has John Urschel. As a redshirt junior, Urschel was in his fourth year at Penn State. He had already earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, so three of his four math classes were PhD-level courses, including Math 551: Numerical Solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations, and Math 597-B: Discrete Differential Geometry and Applications.

  You get the idea.

  “Tuesdays and Thursdays are the easy days,” he told me, giving me false hope. It was ten thirty on a Thursday morning. While we waited for Math 597-B to open its doors, he told me how he got there.

  Urschel’s mother is an attorney, and his dad played football at the University of Alberta while attending medical school. He turned down the Canadian Football League to become a surgeon. After he retired, he went on to earn a master’s in economics, then another in mathematics, then another in industrial engineering, “just for fun,” John said.

  When John was in kindergarten, the principal called his mother for a conference. “My mom loves to tell people this story—loves to,” John said.

  “We need to talk to you about John,” the principal said. Urschel’s mother was naturally a little nervous, but it only got worse when they explained why.

  “They thought I was mentally challenged—retarded,” John said. “They said, ‘He’s not interacting in class, he’s not playing with others, he’s not even looking at us or paying attention.’ ”

  “No,” Ms. Urschel insisted, “my son is not mentally challenged.”

  They were equally insistent that he was. They planned to hold him back a year and put him in a class for slow learners.

  His mother wouldn’t budge, finally demanding that they give her son an IQ test. They did—and young John got every single math question right. The principal issued no apology. Ms. Urschel moved her son to a different school, where he excelled.

  Football, however, didn’t come as easily. “I don’t really have any doubts about my math talents,” he said. “But I work at football.”

  The big schools weren’t biting for a two-star defensive lineman out of Buffalo. By late December of Urschel’s senior year, he thought he was headed to Princeton, and he was okay with that. But a month later, Penn State called, offering him the next-to-last scholarship available. He visited, he liked it, and he committed on the spot.

  But the Monday after Urschel’s weekend at State College, Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh called him directly, inviting him to fly out to Palo Alto. Urschel thought about it—but not long. “I had committed to Penn State during my weekend here. I know a lot of guys would break it, but when you make a commitment, you make a commitment. You don’t have much more than your word, you know?”

  Besides, he realized, “They have good academics here, and it’s paid for. I wanted to take that burden off my parents.”

  But Urschel’s dilemma, strangely enough, wasn’t over. After earning his bachelor’s in the spring of 2012 as a redshirt sophomore, he faced a rare predicament. If he wanted to keep playing football, he had to go to grad school. No problem, for him. But the byzantine NCAA rules allow all graduate-school students to go anywhere they like and play immediately, without sitting out a year like normal transfer students.

  So, U
rschel’s options opened up once more. He applied to Penn State, Stanford, and Northwestern. He then faced another twist: the programs he applied for—a master’s in applied mathematics at Northwestern, and a master’s in computational mathematics in engineering at Stanford—Penn State doesn’t offer.

  The temptation grew greater in the spring of 2012, when Stanford’s math department offered Urschel an academic scholarship, something they rarely do for master’s students, which was worth a cool $96,000 a year. “I could put thirty thousand dollars in my pocket, after tuition. I had a chance to be a math student, put away a little money, and play football for a good program.”

  He could also have avoided dealing with whatever sanctions the NCAA would give Penn State, and the grief that would surely go with it.

  “It’s funny how things work,” he said. “When I got my second chance to go to Stanford, I wanted to stay. It feels different when you decide to stay.”

  This is the double-down Urschel and his Penn State teammates had to make. Like all Penn State football players before them, they enrolled knowing what would be expected of them, on and off the field. But after the sanctions hit, and the NCAA threw Penn State’s door open for them to leave, they had a choice. They could bail out, avoid the hassles, and maybe get some of the extra stuff everyone was always talking about. Or they could stay, knowing that not only they would be expected to be clean, go to class, and graduate—just as before—but it would be all they would get out of the program. No title games, no bowl games, and lots of scrutiny from people they’d never met. Those who stayed would carry the team on their backs—including its rich history—and with it, a large chunk of the university itself.

  In other words, Christmas would come only after the NCAA’s Grinch had cleaned them out. Would it still feel like Christmas?

  Urschel embraced his decision, and Penn State—public opinion be damned—just like his teammates had.

  The NCAA, however, has not impressed Urschel as much. That spring, he had been asked by Penn State’s world-renowned Professor Jinchao Xu to join him and his graduate assistant Xiaozhe Hu to compose a grant proposal, and Urschel eagerly accepted. “If the grant goes through,” he said, “and in all likelihood it should, I would get paid in the high twenty thousands, or the low thirty thousands. But the NCAA is probably going to say no, I can’t take the money. If and when the grant money actually comes in, I’m going to formally petition and see what they say.”