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

by Bacon, John U.

  True to form, the Wildcats came out swinging, driving the ball on the game’s first possession inside Michigan State’s 10-yard line. But the ’Cats stalled and kicked a field goal, a microcosm of their three losses that season: start strong, fade at the finish.

  The Spartans then embarked on their own impressive drive, but on third and one at the 3-yard line, they fumbled, which served as a pretty good microcosm of their season, too: play tough for a long stretch, then blow up at the end.

  After the Spartans notched a safety against Colter, the first quarter score read: Michigan State 5, Northwestern 3. You had to remind yourself you were watching a football game.

  When Fitzgerald was asked in the postgame press conference about the first-quarter score, he quipped, “I thought the White Sox were playing the Tigers.”

  Even though the second quarter was no better, the fans got louder. Northwestern’s kicker, Jeff Budzien, the best in the league, hit a 43-yard field goal to give Northwestern a weird-looking 6–5 halftime lead.

  The Spartans started the second half by throwing an interception to David Nwabuisi, who slithered back 43 yards for the charity touchdown, and a 13–5 lead. But the Spartans fought back with a touchdown and a 2-point conversion to retie the game, then the teams swapped touchdowns to tie the game yet again, 20–20, early in the fourth quarter. Halfway into the final quarter, Northwestern couldn’t get past State’s 9-yard line, so Fitzgerald called on the surefire Budzien to kick another field goal for a 23–20 lead.

  With 1:29 left, the Spartans started from their own 20-yard line. This was their moment of truth.

  Maxwell threw a pass over the middle to Tony Lippett, who got hit, and dropped it. Maxwell then passed to Le’Veon Bell—who wasn’t hit, but dropped it anyway. Then Maxwell tried Aaron Burbridge, who got hit—possibly early—and dropped it, but the fans’ call for an interference penalty didn’t persuade the refs. Finally, on fourth and 10, Maxwell went to a wide-open Dion Sims—who just flat out dropped it.

  Even the steadfast Spartan fans had their limit, and the last play reached it. They headed to the aisles, grumbling things like “an embarrassment” and “pathetic.”

  A few “victory formations” later, and it was done: a hard-fought if sloppy 23–20 game, but enough to give Northwestern an 8-3 record and put State on the verge of spending the holidays at home.

  The Spartans’ postgame postures expressed pure defeat. A season that had started so well for the Spartans, who had been ranked tenth before the Notre Dame game and were picked by some pundits to win the division, had become a lost year.

  Standing on the field next to longtime Spartan beat writer Jack Ebling, I said, “This is not a five-and-six team.”

  “But they are,” he said, and in the unforgiving world of college football he was right. It was that simple. They were.

  The shadows had started crawling across the lush green grass. After the compulsory handshakes, the Northwestern players ran to the corner. They didn’t care if they didn’t make ESPN’s Top 10 that night, and neither did the stripe of purple fans who descended to the rails, making their numbers seem to expand. They yelled a chant, then sang the fight song, and finally launched into a dozen rounds of “Go—U! N—U!”

  I followed the teams up the tunnel, where I ran into Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis, one of the best in the business. He had now suffered through his fifth loss by less than a touchdown, and his expression gave it away. “I’ve seen this one before,” he said, then struggled to produce something close to a wry grin.

  When I heard the Northwestern players chanting in the visitors’ locker room, I asked a middle-aged woman standing in front of the steps, wearing purple, what they were saying.

  “To be honest,” she said, “I have no idea.” But after she turned to the locker room doorway, still open, and saw them whooping and hollering and gallivanting around, she changed her mind. She did know. “Happiness!”

  • • •

  When Fitzgerald got to the press trailer, he started with his customary opening: “Thanks to everyone for being here,” in his customarily hoarse postgame voice, then followed with his customary comments, such as “I want to wish Mark [Dantonio] and his young team good luck.”

  If Northwestern never quite develops the kind of wait-all-year rivalries other Big Ten schools have, you can blame Fitzgerald. You just can’t hate the guy.

  When one reporter said, “Fans complained about you running out the clock [last game], and today you passed the ball more,” Fitzgerald replied, “Yeah, I had our FBI guys compile all those e-mails, and because of the fans, I changed. I hope that’s crystal clear.” But his charm made the line come off less snarky than lighthearted.

  “Midseason, as a coach,” he said, “you sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher: ‘Wa-wah, wa-wah, wa-wah.’ They don’t hear you. They’re sick of you.” But, he added, with their season heading to their biggest goal—a bowl victory—ears open and focus sharpens.

  He, and the players who followed, were candid about how much the Michigan loss had taken out of them. “We had a big pit in our stomachs after the last one,” said freshman Dan Vitale, who would be named the league’s Rookie of the Week for his 110 yards gained on 9 catches. “This erased a lot of the demons from that.”

  “Singing the fight song,” David Nwabuisi said, “is one of the best feelings you get all season.”

  • • •

  Back in the Spartan Stadium press box, before packing my laptop, I took one last look at scores around the league.

  Michigan took care of struggling Iowa, 42–17, to go 8-3, and 5-1 in the league. The Wolverines could still win the division title if Nebraska lost its last game, against Iowa, and Michigan beat Ohio State. Not likely—the Hawkeyes were on a five-game losing skid—but not impossible.

  The Buckeyes found themselves in a dogfight in Madison, one of the nation’s toughest places to play, especially a night game. Down 14–7, with the ball on Ohio State’s 5-yard line and just eight seconds left, Wisconsin quarterback Curt Phillips hit Jacob Pedersen for the touchdown. But in overtime, the Buckeyes outscored the Badgers 7–0 to remain undefeated at 11-0 and clinch the Leaders Division with one game left on their schedule.

  Life was pretty good for Urban Meyer—and not just on the field.

  To fulfill his preseason promise to keep his family life as normal as possible, Meyer had to perform a trickier balancing act than even the average football coach because his two daughters both played college volleyball—Gigi at Florida Gulf Coast and Nicki at Georgia Tech—while his thirteen-year-old son, Nathan, was still playing Pop Warner football.

  “At Georgia Tech,” Meyer told me, “the AD there was nice enough to schedule their senior day on my bye week [the previous weekend]. So I got to see my middle daughter, Nicki, play volleyball. And Florida Gulf Coast scheduled a game in Toledo, so I could see Gigi play. That’s a first.”

  Meyer didn’t stop there. During the 2012 season, on Sundays, he came in an hour early to get his special teams work done, until he got a text about 10:45, telling him it was time to go see his son play football.

  “That’s a great thing,” he said. “I go there every Sunday, and you can see him there, on the sidelines, looking over his shoulder when I show up. He notices.”

  As he had hoped to do before the season started, Meyer had won every game on the field while maintaining his sanity off it.

  So far.

  Meyer didn’t need to be told that 11-0 didn’t count for much in Columbus if the Buckeyes didn’t get a little pair of gold pants.

  • • •

  The final score from State College read Penn State 45, Indiana 22. No great surprise there. The win gave the Lions a 7-4 overall record, and a 5-2 mark in the league. The Lions could still finish strong with a victory the next weekend over Wisconsin, which had already sealed an invitation to the conference title game thanks to the bans on both OSU and Penn State.

  But the brief recap contained some more ne
ws: “Senior linebacker Mike Mauti left the game with an injury.”

  Rich Mauti had made it to every Penn State home game that fall, and the last two would be no exception. He and his wife, Nancy, had spent the week before the Indiana game at their home in Louisiana gathering all the ingredients to make jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, and alligator for the coaches’ regular family dinner Sunday night, to thank them for all they’d done for their son, their family, and their school. The Mautis arrived in State College on Friday with a car full of food and planned to stay the whole week with an old friend and classmate, Penn State women’s field hockey coach Charlene Morett. They would celebrate Thanksgiving at her home with their entire family, and the Zordiches, then stay for the seniors’ swan song against Wisconsin.

  Rich and Nancy knew it would be a bit sad to see their youngest son leave the field for the last time, but they would not miss these two games for the world.

  The Penn State seniors had the schedule on their minds, too, but they were experiencing it from a decidedly different vantage point. Preparing to play their eleventh game of the season, they knew something few outside of those in Columbus knew: no matter how well they played in their last two games, no matter how many wins they posted, they would not be going to a conference title game, or a bowl game.

  This was it.

  “I’ve had tears in my eyes before every game,” Mauti told me that week. “I think about it before every game. To be grateful to be healthy, to be put in a position to be able to do what I love with people I love doing it with.”

  Paradoxically, because Mauti had felt that way all fall, he’d failed to register that their careers would end in less than two weeks. Their five-year odyssey had been reduced to days.

  It hit his fellow seniors at odd moments: sitting in team meetings with the lights off and the overhead on, eating at the training table, lying in bed late at night. When it hit them, it hit them hard.

  The night before the Indiana game, a bunch of the seniors were sitting at the same table. “Guys were talking about it,” Mauti recalled. “ ‘It’s getting close. Time’s running out.’ Until I heard that, it hadn’t hit me: this is it!

  “Then Farrell says, ‘Man, last night I couldn’t sleep. We only have a week left!’

  “When he said that—man, it smacked me in the face like a ton of bricks. It’s not just my final year. It’s my final week.”

  Mauti, sitting at the end of the table that night, started staring off into space. The longer he thought about it, the more his eyes welled up. After about five minutes, he got up and said, “I’m sorry, guys,” and left without another word. He walked down the stairs, by himself, and “just lost it. It was the first time I full out let it all go.”

  “I was at the table,” Zordich said. “I saw it. And I knew. I just laughed, because I was doing the same damn thing an hour before.

  “And that’s the beauty of it all: Everybody cares. Everybody cares.”

  Unlike the others at the table, however, Mauti and Jordan Hill knew their football careers would not end in November. Barring serious injury in their final two games, both would be drafted, probably in the first three rounds. For Hill, that was expected. He had been one of the few true stars returning that season, and so long as he could stay healthy—not a guarantee for a man whose knees kept him out of pads during practice—he would get a good contract and be in a position to take care of his mom and ailing father.

  For Mauti, however, it was a bit surprising. After having had both knees operated on—an MCL and an ACL—he’d started his senior year as damaged goods, unlikely to be taken seriously by NFL teams, who were literally running a meat market. But with two games to go, O’Brien’s NFL scouting friends had told him Mauti had proved he could still play linebacker at the highest level and would likely be a second-round pick. That portended a big payday, and a good run in the league.

  All Hill and Mauti had to do was get through eight more days in good health.

  • • •

  But that’s not what they were thinking about when they took the field that Saturday at noon, a sunny day in the low fifties—not bad for November 17. Perfect football weather.

  Quite a few dreams seemed in jeopardy when Indiana took an early 10–7 lead. If Penn State lost to the Hoosiers, beating the Badgers the following week would only be that much harder, and an uninspiring 6-6 record their likely punishment.

  Still in the first quarter, Indiana moved the ball into Penn State territory, heading toward the student section—the end where the Lions’ defense had made its most memorable stands. When the Indiana runner headed toward Mauti’s side, he stepped up to engage the lineman. He was about to disengage to pursue the runner when a smaller player from Indiana’s backfield, not accustomed to blocking, threw his body into Mauti’s right leg, which had been planted in the grass.

  “I’ll attribute it to bad football,” Mauti told me, dismissing intent. “Terrible technique.”

  Mauti crumpled to the grass and lay on his back, twisting and turning and holding his helmet. Thanks to his history with both knees, he had no illusions about what had just happened.

  His best friend figured it out almost as quickly. When Penn State’s defense was on the field, Zordich always sat on one of the Gatorade jugs by the phones. That’s where he was when the announcer said, “A Nittany Lion is down on the field.” Like everyone else, Zordich knew that happened all the time, and the player usually walked off under his own power.

  “But for some reason,” he said, “this time, I popped up. ‘Who is it?’ ”

  “Mauti,” someone said.

  “What’s he holding?”

  “His head.”

  “Right then, I knew what it was.”

  By this time, the entire team—offense and defense—had drifted out to the field.

  “Then we see the cart come out for him,” Urschel told me, “and then we know.” With that, Urschel turned quiet and dropped his head, red-eyed.

  The coaches knew, too, but they also knew they had to play a football game. They swept everyone back to the sidelines—but not Zordich, who went out to meet the green Gator, which hauled players off to the locker room. Mauti’s head was down, with his helmet still on, but he looked up when Zordich approached him.

  “Don’t worry, man,” Zordich told him, and clasped hands. “We got this.”

  Which, between these friends, didn’t mean the game, but Mauti’s grueling rehab. Zordich was promising him they would go through it together, and Mauti understood immediately.

  • • •

  Kirk Diehl knew the drill too well. He made it to the locker-room door in time to meet the Gator. “I was thinking, ‘God, we just did this a year ago.’ Mike looked at me and said, ‘Well, are you ready to do this again?’

  “That’s when it dawned on me that he remembered me helping him into the shower last year. When I handed him the towel this time, he said, ‘You’ve always been there for me.’

  “And I said, ‘No, you’ve always been there for me.’ ” Recalling this, Diehl started crying again.

  Mauti remembered, too. “He’s got tears going down his face. He said, ‘You don’t understand the kind of effect you had on me. You got me through this year, you’re the reason I’m still here, the reason I’m able to get up in the morning and go to work.’ ”

  Anyone who had lived in Happy Valley that year—from professors to pastors—knew exactly what Diehl was talking about.

  In the locker room, Diehl and Mauti were soon joined by Mauti’s dad, Mauti’s girlfriend—and Zordich’s cousin—Julianna Marie Toscani, and longtime coach Fran Ganter, who still worked for the department. It didn’t take long for all of them to lose it.

  “But I knew,” Mauti said, “this day was not close to over.”

  • • •

  Back on the field, after O’Brien had watched Mauti loaded onto the Gator and carted off, he realized he had a considerable challenge on his hands. “I felt terrible for the kid,”
he said, and would talk to him at halftime. “But at that point we weren’t playing very well. I looked back at the team and they were in a funk. They weren’t there.”

  “You could see the entire bench deflate,” Spider Caldwell said. “Zordich was in a total fog. He was gone. I was so worried, our team seemed to go flat. Another loss wouldn’t have helped anything.”

  O’Brien agreed. He told me later, “Coming off a loss like that, the whole next week would have been that much tougher.”

  Before Mauti even made it to the locker room, O’Brien wisely gathered the squad. “That guy on the field, I know what he means to you, but we can’t do anything for him right now but play hard. So whatever your motivation is—play well for Mauti or just play for your team—we need to pick this shit up.”

  They listened and, as usual, followed their coach’s lead.

  In less than nine minutes, McGloin hit Allen Robinson for a 53-yard touchdown, then hit him again for a 10-yard touchdown, then hit Zach Zwinak for a 16-yard touchdown. The Lions played possessed, turning a 10–7 second-quarter deficit into a 28–13 halftime lead.

  But that’s not what the coaches and players remember about that day.

  “The rest of the game, I was just in a daze,” Zordich said. “I just wanted it to end. A lot of guys felt that way. I didn’t want to be on the field. We wanted to follow the cart, to be in the locker room.”

  They had their chance at halftime, when the players lined up to see Mauti in the training room.

  “I was standing outside the door the whole time when all those guys were going in,” Zordich said. “Coaches, players—everybody was crying. Everybody was crying. As much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t go in there. I would have lost it. If I’d’ve lost it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to go out for the second half.”

  Led by Jordan Hill, Penn State’s defense held Indiana to 9 more points, while Zwinak, Zordich, and Ficken added 17, for a safe 45–22 victory, and a 7-4 record.

  When the team returned to the locker room, everyone made a beeline for the training room, where they could talk as long as they liked.