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

by Bacon, John U.

  In April, Dave Brandon announced that season tickets for Michigan students would now be general admission, to encourage students to arrive on time. He simultaneously increased the price of their season tickets 23 percent, with the extra revenue earmarked for recreational sports. So, he said, “No one can make a claim, even though they want to try, that we’re doing anything here that’s financially motivated.”

  All this had my gang in Ann Arbor complaining about issues bigger than flying the marching band to Dallas, or wearing white jerseys with yellow numbers in Tampa. Were the students leaving Michigan football, or was Michigan football leaving the students? And if it was the latter, what would the future look like when the surplus of goodwill that previous leaders had built up over a century was squandered in just a few years?

  “College football is getting to be like a bad high school relationship,” said Tim Petersen, one-half of Jim Harbaugh’s junior high backfield. “You keep getting abused, you know you should swear it off, but you can’t get yourself to let it go.”

  Paul Barnett, a.k.a. Barney, was the guy whose parents had played in the Michigan band, the one who had gone door-to-door with his grade-school friends and their shiny cornets and trombones, playing “The Victors” for their neighbors.

  He still went to a few games a year, mainly because his kids wanted to go. “And there’s still some small sliver of the magic of college football left,” he said, “and I like to think—perhaps naively—that it could come back.

  “But I’m just about through with Michigan football.”

  • • •

  Forty-seven seconds into Northwestern’s game against Mississippi State in the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, Bulldogs quarterback Tyler Russell dropped back to pass downfield, then turned his torso to toss a screen pass.

  Senior Quentin Williams, Northwestern’s 255-pound defensive end, hadn’t caught an interception all year. But he read the play perfectly and intercepted Russell’s throw at the Bulldogs’ 29-yard line, then ran for the end zone as fast as his ponderous frame would allow. He made it, barely.

  With less than two minutes left to play, Northwestern led Mississippi State, 34–20. The same Quentin Williams chased down the same Tyler Russell and sacked him for a 4-yard loss. It was the last play of Williams’s football career. It allowed the Wildcats to run three straight victory formations to end the game, and they savored every second.

  After the final seconds ticked off, Northwestern’s players, parents, coaches, and even President Schapiro stayed on the field for a full half hour. It was Northwestern’s second bowl victory in the school’s 131-year history, their first since 1949, and the first after four straight bowl losses for the fifth-year seniors. It was the goal they had talked about privately when they met in January 2012, and it was the goal they had talked about publicly at the Big Ten meeting in July. It was the one thing they had wanted most.

  Back in the locker room, they gathered in the center. They had gone 10-3—Northwestern’s first 10-win season since 1995 and only its second since 1903. They were the only Big Ten team to win two games against SEC teams—and not pikers, either, but squads that finished 9-4 and 8-5. And they had won more games—forty, for the fifth-year players—than any other senior class in Northwestern’s history.

  They knew what to do: sing the fight song, one last time. But this time, there was something new—the monkey.

  “Man, when they were done with it,” Pat Fitzgerald told me, “there were just remnants, no signs of a corpse.” He pulled out his iPhone to show pictures of the locker-room carpet, which looked as if it had been covered in snow.

  “That damn monkey,” Kain Colter said, grinning. “I feel bad for whoever had to clean that up.”

  • • •

  Every Penn State player, coach, and staffer had played, coached, or worked for teams with better records, most of them the previous season. Some had won conference titles, national titles, even Super Bowls. But they all said the same thing: this season had been their favorite. And they agreed that a bowl game would have added nothing to their experience.

  “You go to a bowl,” Mauti said, “you’re spending time away from your family, in a hotel room Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve. Unless you’re playing for something—unless you’re in a BCS bowl—man, it’s hard.

  “I don’t want to crap on the bowl system, but we knew about all that. We’d already done it. But this year, we played our last game at home in front of our families and our friends. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  But the players were concerned about their coach’s future at Penn State.

  Two days after the season ended on that glowing field of grass, I sat at the O’Briens’ breakfast table. Bill and Colleen made it clear they wanted to stay in State College.

  “We like it here,” Bill said. “She likes it here, and the kids do, too. We love this team, the families. I love the values here, and I believe in them.”

  But as he was talking, his cell phone buzzed so often it almost danced off the edge of the table. It wasn’t friends or well-wishers calling. It was the athletic directors at Boston College, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, Cleveland Browns, and San Diego Chargers. They all wanted to know one thing: What would it take to get O’Brien to jump?

  The Monday after the football season ends, college and pro alike, is traditionally the day when the athletic director, the general manager, or the owner calls in the head coach to assess the season just past and to plan for the seasons ahead.

  But not at Penn State. At least, not in 2012.

  While O’Brien’s phone was blowing up, his boss, acting Athletic Director Dave Joyner, was on a hunting trip. It was the opening day of Pennsylvania’s deer season.

  O’Brien shrugged it off, but not Mike Mauti.

  “That enrages me,” Mauti told me. “Let’s lay it out there: he’s the reason we did all this. They hire anyone else, this season doesn’t happen—and who knows where the program is? He’s it. If O-B leaves in the next three, four, five years, it’s their fault, not his fault. It’s not because of him. It would never be. It’s because they didn’t do their jobs and do what’s right.”

  O’Brien decided to stay anyway.

  “You could wrap my whole thing up with this,” Spider Caldwell said. “Looking back when Bill was hired, at first I was a little disappointed we didn’t hire a Penn State person.

  “But you know what? We ended up hiring a Penn Stater. He just went to Brown first.”

  • • •

  In December, I drove back to State College to sit down with the coaches and players one more time.

  When I sat down with Matt McGloin and the three Mikes—Mauti, Zordich, and Farrell—I promised myself I’d ask about a couple things I’d been curious about.

  In the locker-room celebration after the Wisconsin triumph, I had noticed that Dave Joyner had never showed. I assumed he was trying to avoid the appearance of basking in reflected glory. Penn State’s president, Rodney Erickson, did come down to the locker room, but because no players greeted him, I assumed they didn’t know who he was. But when I asked the seniors about it, they told me the real story.

  Ever since Dave Joyner and Gerald Hodges had come close to blows in the team room a year earlier, the seniors had made it clear they wanted Joyner nowhere near the team, even during pregame warm-ups. Joyner had complied, never so much as ducking his head into a team meeting.

  As for President Erickson, all the players actually had recognized him, but they chose not to acknowledge him.

  When the NCAA sanctions had come down and the Penn State program was being bashed on the cable news shows and in the national newspapers and even in the players’ own e-mail inboxes, no one in the university’s administration building had said a word in support of the players—despite the fact that, of all the parties involved in the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, they had clearly done no wrong.

  “In the past year,” the normally calm Mike Farrell sa
id, “the only visible thing the trustees did successfully was cover their asses with the Freeh Report.”

  “Who was stepping up and taking it?” Zordich asked. “We were. They never stood up for us. Not the president, not the AD. They were silent. Silent. Thanks. Who was standing up for us? O-B—and that’s it.”

  I asked Zordich about my memory of President Erickson standing alone in the locker room, smiling stiffly, clenching his hands and releasing them, uncertain what to do. I thought I had seen him make eye contact with Zordich from about ten feet away, and Erickson looked as if he was about to say something. But Zordich just continued staring at him, until Erickson turned away and walked out.

  Zordich confirmed my memory, then explained what had happened. “He was so out of place, and you knew that he felt out of place. You could feel how uncomfortable he felt.

  “You could say, yeah, he’s the president of the university. But he had absolutely no business there, as far as I’m concerned.”

  His teammates nodded in agreement.

  Of course, the seniors had played their last game. They would be leaving campus and starting their new lives in just a few weeks. They had nothing to lose by excluding the AD and snubbing the president.

  Bill O’Brien did not have that luxury. The athletic director was his boss, and the president was his boss’s boss. The sanctions would run for three more years. If O’Brien intended to protect Penn State football into the future, he would need the help of every official he knew.

  When O’Brien saw President Erickson in the locker room, he gave him a hug.

  But that didn’t change the central truth of the previous twelve months. As Jim Bernhardt had put it, “Our kids knew how to handle the situation better than most of the adults. That’s what I’ll always remember.”

  • • •

  I also felt compelled to ask the seniors about the Big Ten’s bringing in Maryland and Rutgers.

  It was quickly clear they agreed with 83 percent of the almost 1,000 respondents on MGoBlog, who concluded the decision had nothing to do with the quality of the two universities’ academics or even athletics, but money. Worse, Maryland had twenty-eight players leave that season, without sanctions, and Rutgers was taking a beating for not reporting their abusive basketball coach and then hiring an athletic director with a checkered past of her own. The two schools were not exactly enhancing the Big Ten’s reputation.

  “As soon as we first heard that the Big Ten might be adding two new teams,” Mike Farrell said, “it seemed like a done deal overnight. One of my first thoughts was that it didn’t seem to be in the best interest of the student-athletes. How much sense does it make to have kids traveling from Nebraska to New Jersey and vice versa to compete, especially in sports that play on weekdays, when classes are in session?

  “No matter what anyone thought about the new universities that were being added, the glaring catalyst was money.”

  “The fans see everything, sooner or later,” Mauti said. “They’re catching on.”

  “Men have played this game throughout history, for their own reasons,” Zordich concluded. “Now it’s just currency for someone else to sell.

  “I worry about the future of the game, because what they’re going to be playing in twenty years will have nothing to do with what we had.

  “The suits are ruining the whole thing, for money.

  “It makes enough fucking money.

  “How much do they need?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every time I set out to write a book, I think my next one won’t be as difficult as the last one—and every time, I’m wrong.

  The more demanding the book is, the more help I get from a lot of good, smart people—this time too many, sadly, to name here. But I’ll do my best.

  Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany spoke knowledgeably and candidly with me, and offered the help of his staff, including the first-rate Scott Chipman.

  Big Ten Network President Mark Silverman and Elizabeth Conlisk were remarkably helpful, as were John Heisler at Notre Dame; Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis and John Lewandowski; and Dean John W. Boyer at the University of Chicago.

  At Ohio State, Jerry Emig provided all manner of information, contacts, and help, connecting me with Urban Meyer, who was refreshingly direct during my visits, plus Craig Krenzel, Jim Lachey, Etienne Sabino, Ben Buchanan, and Zach Boren, who was nice enough to help out despite disliking my depiction of his brother in my last book. (Zach, I admire your loyalty, and your professionalism.) Emig takes great pleasure in having a “Good Sports Information Day.” Well, sir, you had a Great Sports Information Season. At the OSU Alumni Association, Jay Hansen made my life easier, and his boss, Archie Griffin, provided ninety of the best minutes of this project.

  In Evanston, Roger Williams, Jack Griffin, and Matt Albers helped me understand a host of issues, large and small. Northwestern’s Paul Kennedy came through with great information and great interviews, including Kain Colter, Quentin Williams, Coach Pat Fitzgerald—who was everything you’d expect him to be—and athletic director Jim Phillips. Alan Cubbage made me look smarter than I am, which I always appreciate. President Morton Schapiro met with me for a memorable ninety minutes, providing vital insights and great stories, with no spin. He was a delight.

  Without the access Bill O’Brien provided, the reader never would have learned what remarkable people play and work for Penn State, including the three Mikes—Farrell, Mauti, and Zordich—Matt McGloin, Jordan Hill, and John Urschel; assistant coaches Mac McWhorter, Ted Roof, Larry Johnson Sr., Ron Vanderlin, Charlie Fisher, John Butler, and Charles London, among others; and staffers Jim Bernhardt, Bill Kavanaugh, Jevin Stone, Todd Kulka, Jeff Nelson, Tony Mancuso, and Christine Laur, who was unfailingly kind. Special mention to Craig Fitzgerald, whom the players said was a close second to O’Brien himself in keeping the team together, but was always—and I mean always—interesting, energetic, and helpful. Thanks to his staff, too.

  When every Penn State lettermen returns to the Lasch Football Building, they first stop by the equipment room to see Brad “Spider” Caldwell and Kirk Diehl. I found myself doing the same thing, and for the same reasons. Thank you both.

  Thanks also to Colleen O’Brien, who maintained her sense of humor throughout an often crazy season, professor extraordinaire Michael Berube, and Ed Zeiders, a.k.a. Pastor Ed, whose flocks are lucky to have them.

  I’m grateful to the many people who were kind enough to provide information essential to my account of Michigan’s program, starting with former President James Duderstadt and former athletic director Bill Martin. University of Michigan Alumni Band Director John Wilkins and his musicians kindly opened their doors to me, while the men at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house let me eavesdrop in their “locker room” during the Mudbowl. Countless tailgaters gave me their time and thoughts, beers and brats, including the Ciullo family’s Tailgation crew, Frank Dimaggio, and Michelle and Kevin King. Michigan Law School professors Jack Bernard and Sherman Clark taught me how higher education and the NCAA interact. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was never dull.

  Old friends Eric Miller and Steve Chronis and former student-turned-superscribe Scott Bell provided great dispatches from the front lines in Dallas. Mike Zoller, another former student, did the same at Northwestern. Tom Montell and Tommy Plank gave the best welcome to Columbus a Wolverine has ever received. Special thanks to my friends on the Magic Bus to South Bend and at our watch parties: Jim Carty, Alan Harris, Tim “Rhino” Payne, Bob “Chili” Spence, Nick Standiford, and Bob Westrate, plus Paul “Barney” Barnett, Scott Bogard, Tim Petersen, Keith Severance, and Brian Weisman.

  My team of researchers included Alli Marzella and Emily Kaplan at Penn State; Kyle Rowland and Evan Speyer at Ohio State; Len Clark at Notre Dame; Mary Curzan at Michigan State; and at Michigan, Morgan Bailey, Joe “Cornchowder” Cornicelli, and my parents, George and Grace Bacon, who also provided unconditional support, once again. A trio of overqualified and underpaid law
students, Danny Sirdofsky, Michael Spitulnik, and Nick Standiford, compiled thorough files for months. Zach Helfand is not only a fine student and a great writer for The Michigan Daily, he is also a dogged reporter, without whose help I would not have been able to finish.

  I have never relied more heavily on a circle of very smart friends to read and react to several drafts of the manuscript—work that is time-consuming, inconvenient and, of course, unpaid, but incredibly valuable. Thank you, Vince Duffy, John Lofy, Jim Russ, Nate Sandals, Pete Uher, Bob Weisman, and James Tobin, who helped me sort out the final chapters at the eleventh hour.

  Agent Dave Larabell went above and beyond, once again, even after having his first child during bowl season. His boss, David Black of the David Black Agency, provided crucial help at crucial junctures.

  Whenever I questioned the considerable ambition of this project, my editor at Simon & Schuster, Thomas Lebien, calmly encouraged me to stay the course and gave me good reasons why I should, just like he did on our last book together. His editorial skill and bold vision drove this book, too. Thank you—and thanks to Brit Hvide and Meg Cassidy, too.

  If you’ve already read this book, you know it would not exist without the help of Bill O’Brien. If there was one key to Penn State’s unexpected success in the fall of 2012, he was it, of course, which just about every coaches’ award in the country confirms.

  He was also the key to this book. Thank you.

  © JOHN SCHULTZ

  JOHN U. BACON is the author of Three and Out, a New York Times bestseller, and five other books. He gives weekly commentary on Michigan Radio, teaches at the University of Michigan and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and speaks nationwide on leadership and diversity.

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  ALSO BY JOHN U. BACON

  Three and Out