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

by Bacon, John U.

After the game, O’Brien gathered his team in Iowa’s famed pink visitors’ locker room and said, “It’s one thing to be a bully. It’s another thing to be a badass.”

  The players erupted. The flight home was a party fueled by five straight wins.

  The celebration ended when the plane landed. The week preparing for the 8-0 Ohio State Buckeyes would be all business.

  “It’s the biggest game of our careers,” Mauti told me.

  “It’s the statement,” Zordich said.

  The Navy game had stopped the bleeding. Victories over Illinois, Northwestern, and Iowa provided revenge and redemption, while solidifying the team like cement. Now, a victory over undefeated Ohio State before a rabid home crowd would provide more joy than State College had felt in years. It would establish, unequivocally, that Penn State was alive and well and not going anywhere. It could be the booster shot that ensured a healthy program through the remaining three years of sanctions.

  “Hey, it’s fun now,” Jordan Hill told me at the team dinner Wednesday night. “We’re just going out playing, and playing for each other. We don’t want to screw this up for our teammates. Once we make a play, everyone is gonna be jumping around and going nuts.”

  It didn’t hurt that the Buckeyes are Penn State’s biggest rival—and biggest enemy. “Not a big fan of them—not at all,” the stoic Hill stated. “Just something about ’em. I’m a Penn State guy, and you’re an Ohio State guy, and we just don’t get along.”

  Once again, Penn State’s opponent made comments that got in the media, with Ryan Shazier tweeting, “We’re going to try to show them who is Linebacker U.”

  “It’s more than football,” Hill told me. “It means so much more to this team. It shows fight—and the type of people we are. I’m not talking just football players. I’m talking Penn State as a whole—the alumni, and the students here now. You gotta be a Penn State guy to know what it means.

  “Man, I’m ready to go right now!

  “This is our moment. This is our turn.”

  • • •

  On Friday morning, October 26, before the biggest game of O’Brien’s college coaching career, he met with three members of the academic staff. The breadth and detail of their discussion was striking. They covered more than a hundred players, focusing on the forty with one issue or another, right down to how each player was doing in every class.

  Most of these discussions came down to one thing: Was the young man making a sincere effort to improve, or was he trying to take advantage of his professors, advisers, and coaches? In most cases, the news was good—there’s a reason Penn State’s football program consistently ranks among the nation’s highest in academic success—but in a few, warnings went out to keep an eye on so-and-so and let him know his margin for error had evaporated.

  For those who scoff at the term student-athlete, this meeting—and many others—made it clear that if the schools didn’t require varsity athletes to learn, many wouldn’t go to college at all, let alone graduate. This part of the equation, at least, works a lot better than advertised.

  What was easily Penn State’s most maddening hurdle, however, was a consequence of the NCAA’s sanctions, which not only allowed the players to transfer without penalty—and invited opposing coaches to recruit them—but permitted the players to quit the team, stay at Penn State, and keep their scholarships.

  Those scholarships could not be replaced—but the NCAA still held the football program responsible for the academic fate of those students, without allowing the program to enforce class attendance. If a player who’d quit the team but stayed in school flunked out, the program’s Academic Progress Rating (APR) would take a hit. And that could cost Penn State still more scholarships.

  Plenty of players were still in the balance, but the team seemed to be on track for another stellar semester—the kind that NCAA president Mark Emmert’s former athletic department at LSU could only envy.

  “It’s amazing,” O’Brien said. “Amazing. This guy Emmert comes out and says, ‘There is a culture of football here at Penn State,’ then these numbers come out and say ninety-one percent of our players graduated, and ninety-four percent of the African-American players. What was LSU’s average?”

  But even if they tarred and feathered Emmert in State College’s town square, it wouldn’t help Penn State one iota.

  That brought O’Brien to his next meeting, with recruiting coordinator Bill Kavanaugh. If academics had been made tougher by the NCAA sanctions, recruiting had become Herculean.

  The public focused on the bowl ban—which insiders believed was probably the least punitive of the sanctions—while O’Brien and company worried far more about the effect of reducing Penn State’s scholarships from twenty-five to fifteen for each of the next four years, while prohibiting the school from replacing the scholarships of any players who quit or transferred. Since the attrition rate at peer programs like Michigan and Ohio State usually resulted in perhaps sixteen or seventeen of the original twenty-five scholarship freshmen finishing their senior year, at similar rates Penn State could have four straight senior classes of fewer than ten. That could be a death sentence, by slow poisoning.

  This only increased the pressure on recruiting. In other programs, after being given a draconian punishment that was more akin to the disastrous Treaty of Versailles than the wise Marshall Plan, that might also increase the temptation to cut corners. To O’Brien’s credit, he was taking the opposite approach: trying to discover the hidden gems who would appreciate what Penn State had to offer—without the bowl games and baubles other programs could promise.

  To those ends, they went over their list, sifting through piles of dirt for the shiny nuggets others might miss—the two- and three-star players with good work ethics, good grades, and a strong desire to play for Penn State. In a football-rich state such as Pennsylvania, that usually meant staying close to home.

  Despite all their handicaps, the class of 2013 was shaping up to be—well, better than expected. They actually had twenty scholarships to offer, thanks to five carryovers from 2012 that went unused during the transition. Twelve players had already promised to come—including one of the best tight ends in the country, Adam Breneman from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, and Christian Hackenberg, a five-star quarterback from Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia—leaving scholarships for eight more players. If Penn State could hang on to this group and add a few more, they could play competitive football for at least one more year—which would give them the chance to climb the same hill all over again the next year.

  He’d already had a full day of meetings and media, but O’Brien still had to squeeze in a personal task before running the team meeting, practice, practice review, the team meal, more meetings, and finally lights out.

  On a cold, gray Friday afternoon, I saw two men in the farthest corner of the third practice field, with Mount Nittany in the background. I had to walk a hundred yards or so, on the crisp grass and hard clay, to recognize that it was strength coach Craig Fitzgerald and head coach Bill O’Brien, doing a workout I’d never before seen conducted anywhere.

  They ran to the 30-yard line and back, then pushed a sled with lead plates on it back out to the 30, then ran over to a huge tractor tire, grabbed a sledgehammer, and beat the hell out of the tire with ten full swings—then they did it all again, again and again, a series of tasks that looked like a Caveman Triathlon.

  Fitz looked stylish in his blue shorts and loose-fitting, gray, nylon T-shirt, but O’Brien looked like a fraternity couch waiting to be picked up from the curb: gray T-shirt over a blue long-sleeve shirt and blue sweatpants, all loose and rumpled. His T-shirt was turning dark with sweat. You would not pick this guy for your magazine cover, but you might for your farm.

  He was not doing all this to appease his doctor, his wife—a graduate of the Georgia State University School of Law—or his vanity. He was one of the few contemporary coaches who’d rather do without the attention that came with the job. H
e was not doing this for his seven-year-old son, Michael, already a jock’s jock, who frequently came to practice to play catch with anyone who would throw the ball back.

  Bill O’Brien was doing all this for his ten-year-old son, Jack, who was born severely handicapped and would live his entire life in a wheelchair. Because Bill and Colleen could never seem to settle on a caretaker to look after Jack while they went about their busy days, it was their job to get their eighty-five-pound son in and out of his wheelchair several times a day, every day. O’Brien wanted to be sure he was strong enough to do the job and give their oldest son, as they so often said, “the best possible life.”

  • • •

  Ohio State and Penn State had earned the right to play a meaningful, nationally televised game by playing surprisingly good football when both were expected to stumble.

  Because both schools were on probation, however, and neither was eligible for the Big Ten title game or any bowl games, T-shirts inevitably popped up with lines like INELIGI-BOWL, BATTLE OF THE BANNED, and the particularly tasteful SCREWED V. TATTOOED. Their status in purgatory only increased the stakes. Both teams could still win the Leaders Division, even if they couldn’t go on to the title game.

  If they couldn’t play for all the marbles, the ones that remained were that much more valuable.

  • • •

  The morning of the season-opening game against Ohio University, McGloin had eaten his breakfast quickly, then put himself in a trance, listening to his music with his eyes wide-open while bobbing his head back and forth. Wired would be a fair description.

  Exactly eight weeks later, McGloin looked like a different man: calm, relaxed, poised. Ready.

  After the breakfast plates had been cleared, O’Brien pored over the last details with his quarterbacks, focusing on McGloin.

  “Right from the start,” O’Brien said, “be ready for the speed of the game. Both teams are going to be jacked up. Get adapted, get adjusted. In warm-ups, work on the urgency of your throws. You’re going to have to deliver it fast today.

  “Once you’re in your rhythm, everyone else will follow you. They feed off you. Your tempo is their tempo. Once in a while, we’ll put you under center to give them a running look, but not that often.”

  They reviewed their signals one last time:

  O’Brien hiked his pants up. McGloin said, “Zero-Flood.”

  O’Brien made a magician’s move. “Rabbit.”

  O’Brien made “glasses” with his fingers. “Joe-Pa.”

  O’Brien sped up his signals, but McGloin never missed. He answered with confidence, pausing only occasionally, never having to check the play chart.

  Finally O’Brien asked, “Can you believe how far you’ve come in the last nine months?”

  “Yeah, I can,” McGloin said, and they both laughed.

  “Your Scranton is showing,” O’Brien said, their code for McGloin’s cocky, steel-town attitude. “Yeah—well, good. It’s true. You’ve got this—and this is the same stuff we did with the Patriots.

  “Now, you’ve got to know: I’m going to do anything I can to jack this crowd up. If I’m yelling at a ref, you stay calm. This is the most fun you’ll ever have. You’ll remember this the rest of your life. So, you just keep your poise.”

  In just a few hours, the hands of the young man to my left would have 100 teammates, 1,100 lettermen, 108,000 spectators, 600,000 alums, and millions of fans depending on them.

  Reading the situation, O’Brien said, “Hey, remember what Peyton Manning said pressure is?”

  “ ‘Pressure’s what you feel when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,’ ” McGloin recited. “ ‘Study your tip sheet.’ ” With a glint in his eye, McGloin couldn’t resist adding, “Peyton Manning. Good quarterback. Maybe the best.”

  “Shiiiiit,” O’Brien said with a stubborn grin, knowing exactly the comparison McGloin was making—to O’Brien’s guy, Tom Brady.

  “Eli’s pretty good, too,” McGloin added. “Two rings!”

  “Fuck you,” O’Brien said, since Eli’s second ring was at O’Brien’s expense. They both laughed again. “Meeting dismissed. Now let’s go kick some Buckeye ass.”

  • • •

  Earlier in the week, I’d talked with athletic trainer Tim Bream, a quietly intense, wiry guy who wears the kind of reading glasses that can break apart in the middle, hanging from a rubber strap around his neck. Craig Fitzgerald described him as “sharp, smart, quick. Comes in at five, leaves at eight every night. Guys trust him, trust his ability, and they know he cares about them.”

  From what I’d seen over several months, that all sounded about right.

  Bream, a native of Gettysburg, was a student trainer at Penn State from 1979 to 1983, which included the 1982 championship team. He worked his way up to the NFL, where he served nineteen years for the Chicago Bears. He and his family were happy in Chicago, but when the Penn State job opened up after Paterno’s firing, Bream didn’t think too long before taking it.

  “Some of my peers looked at me, like, why are you leaving this?” he said in his glass-enclosed office looking out on the training room. “My university was getting beat down so bad, I wanted to give back a little bit, not just send money or write letters to the editor. How many people get an opportunity like this?”

  The position also provided a chance to work with college kids again.

  “In the NFL, the players still have the gleam in their eyes for the first two, three, maybe four years, where they’d play for free. But after they get through that first contract, they’re married, they have kids, they have business interests, and they have to be there. They do their work, but it’s a job. It gets mercenary to a certain degree. You’ll see very few Brian Urlachers, who go to one team and stay there.

  “These guys,” he said, motioning through his window to the players getting taped, “are tired and all that, but they genuinely enjoy playing football, and the experience that goes with it.”

  And that’s what sold Bream on the decision: working with the students, from the football players to the student trainers, in the largest undergraduate training program in the country. “The whole thing was getting back to teaching young people. And when I thought about it, that’s what I missed in the NFL, the academic component.”

  • • •

  A couple hours before the blue buses left for the stadium, O’Brien was sitting back on his hotel bed, going over his play sheets, with ESPN’s College GameDay on the TV.

  “I just can’t give more credit for the job’s he’s done,” Kirk Herbstreit said, talking on TV about the man who was going over his play sheets a few feet from me. “And Mike Mauti reminds me of Ryan Fitzpatrick in Buffalo.”

  “Mauti will hit you!” Desmond Howard added.

  “This is not your father’s Penn State offense!” Lee Corso added. “They ran ninety-one plays in their last two wins.”

  For these reasons, Corso and Howard picked Penn State to pull the upset, while Ohio State alum Herbstreit stuck with the Bucks.

  Whatever reassurance this might have provided was lost on O’Brien, who barely looked up from his work. But when I mentioned why Bream left the Chicago Bears for Penn State, O’Brien became engaged. He’d faced a similar decision: stay in the best league with the best coach and the best quarterback, or take over a college program that looked to be going to hell in a handbasket?

  “This is college football,” he said, referring to the unprecedented season they’d been going through. “You take it all away, and that’s what’s left. These guys are playing for a lot more than bowl games. They’re playing for all the guys who came before, the guys on their team, their classmates in the stands—and Joe! They’re playing for Joe!”

  O’Brien was undeniably surprised by the severity of the NCAA sanctions. He’d turned down the Jacksonville Jaguars’ offer to become their next head coach to accept Penn State’s offer, partly because he was told there was little chance that Penn State would rec
eive more than a slap on the wrist. Yet, for all the headaches it created in the present, and the worries for the future—for O’Brien more than anyone else—he was not so consumed by his daily tasks that he was missing what was unfolding before his eyes.

  “When you coach at this level, you really do have an effect on kids later in life,” he said, a list which would surely include Matt McGloin. “After this year, he will have learned how to work, study, and prepare like an NFL quarterback. When you win, good things happen to you—and if we continue to win, a large part of it will be due to his play. And I tell you what: if he continues to play well, he could get into an NFL camp. I would love for this kid to be the All–Big Ten quarterback. How great would that be? He’s got a shot.”

  On that day, McGloin was leading the league’s quarterbacks in just about every category. But could the former walk-on really be the league’s best?

  McGloin would face the main obstacle to that goal, Ohio State’s Braxton Miller, later that day. In just a few hours, the winner of that duel would take a big step toward being named the Big Ten’s best quarterback.

  • • •

  The players go stir-crazy trying to kill the hours before night games. Five meals help, as does serial napping, but when they were finally packing up to board the buses, a little after two, it was still a relief.

  The strength staff stood at their stations by the three blue buses, handing out Gatorades and taking attendance. On the school buses, the players put their heads down, their caps on, and their earpieces in, bobbing gently to their music. It is not a ride for chitchatting.

  It was fifty-nine degrees and gray, with rain expected by game time. On the tree-lined route to the stadium, most of the leaves had fallen, with only the bloodred ones still hanging on. The corn from the university’s fields had been harvested, but the Mushroom Research Farm seemed to be running at full speed.

  “Been on one of these buses?” Kirk Diehl asked me, as we sat together in the last row.

  Yes, I said, for the Ohio and Navy games.

  He grinned. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”