Asked during the summer when he had last thought about possibly abandoning coaching for the law, Paterno laughed. “Last year,” he said.
The Penn State traveling party had arrived at the Sheraton Newton at 9:00 P.M. Friday. Paterno believed strongly in the power of a good night’s sleep. That’s why he insisted his teams stay in Newton, in a locale separated from—and nearly devoid of—any of Boston’s charm, history, culture, or nightlife.
The players disembarking from the two buses were dressed in suits or sport coats and wearing ties. Paterno and several of the assistants and administrators who made the trip had on the familiar blue blazers. Seven true freshmen—quarterback Morelli, defensive tackle Robinson, linebacker Connor, offensive tackle Harrison, receiver Mark Rubin, kicker Patrick Humes, and tight end Jordan Lyons—had made the trip. Their number was further evidence that Paterno’s desperation had caused him to rethink his core philosophies, though the coach adamantly continued to insist that was not the case.
“I don’t know where you get that business about I was always reluctant to play freshmen. I always get a kick out of that,” he said at one point. “If they are good enough, you play them. I have always felt that way. . . . I have never been reluctant to play the best kids we have.”
He was, however, reluctant to play those who missed or were late to meetings. And the previous Monday, Austin Scott, already brooding about losing his starting tailback spot to Tony Hunt, showed up late for a running-backs meeting and was absent for a full-squad meeting. His behavior was especially curious because, following the Akron game, Scott had apologized to the team for failing to show up for some preseason meetings. Paterno made him practice with the scout squad and told him he wouldn’t line up at tailback against Boston College.
“Yeah, I’m upset with Austin, he missed a meeting,” said Paterno when a newspaper later revealed the real reason for the tailback’s benching against BC.
Scott would blame the incidents on a faulty alarm clock. “I have a backup plan,” he later explained. “I bought an extra alarm clock, call people, tell them to call me at certain times just in case my alarm clocks don’t go off. There’s no reason to miss anything in the future.”
Whenever he was asked about Penn State’s recent decline, Paterno would bristle. The bad records, he frequently implied, were the results of bad breaks. He never failed to point out that as recently as 2002 his Lions were only a few questionable officiating calls from a Bowl Championship Series berth.
There was some justification in his complaint. If instant replay had been around to overturn a series of costly and apparently erroneous late calls that went against them in losses to Ohio State, Iowa, and Michigan—the latter two in overtime—the Lions might well have ended that regular season 12–0. Stung as badly as Paterno was by the controversy his reaction to those calls created, the Big Ten had decided to become the first major conference to utilize instant replay for its 2004 schedule.
Had it been in effect for the game against Boston College, which attracted a sellout crowd of 44,500 to Alumni Stadium, Paterno might not have had to sprint up the sideline to scream at an official early in the first quarter.
The Nittany Lions appeared to have stopped BC’s initial drive. But Hardy, recently returned from his father’s funeral, was whistled for running into punter Johnny Ayers. Despite the fact that replays appeared to show Hardy tipping the kick, Boston College had a gift first down on its 46.
To some extent, Paterno’s increasingly aggressive sideline behavior had become illustrative of the state of his program. Except for those moments when he paused to watch a play unfold, he could no longer stand still during games. He moved constantly within a 50- or 60-yard range, walking out his anxieties, his curiosity, and, with ever-increasing frequency, his frustrations. It’s as if he had become a human version of the explosives-rigged bus in the film Speed. Stopping would be a catastrophe.
He didn’t wear a headset but frequently went charging after assistants who did to demand some change or ask what had gone wrong on a busted play. When the offensive or defensive teams gathered around their coaches, Paterno would come bursting into their midst like a bouncer hurrying to break up a fight. And, after good plays and bad, he wore his emotions on his sleeve. To a lesser degree, he had been behaving that way for decades. But in the amosphere of defeat that had shrouded his program in recent years, his sideline habits appeared more desperate, more edgy, more pathetic.
The roughing-the-kicker flag infuriated Paterno. He rushed toward the Big Ten referee working the game, gesturing frantically as he spat out his displeasure.
“He said the umpire didn’t think it was tipped,” Paterno explained of the conversation. “Everybody else . . . I think the other officials thought it was tipped. I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. We thought it was tipped, obviously.”
He continued to fume right through Boston College’s next three plays, which produced a minus-2 yards and led to another Ayers punt—and another roughing-the-kicker penalty. This one, though, on linebacker Posluszny, was clearly a violation.
With a third chance, BC capitalized, a bootlegging Peterson hitting tight end David Kashetta on a 6-yard scoring pass that gave the Eagles a 7–0 lead.
At that point, Paterno went back into his positive-reinforcement mode, clapping as he paced, seeking out players for reassuring taps on their butts and backs.
Early in the second quarter, a Mills interception triggered what would become a series of turnovers. Junior defensive back Calvin Lowry recovered an A. J. Brooks fumble. But three plays later, senior fullback Paul Jefferson lost the ball after a pass reception. Shortly afterward, Peterson hit Grant Adams on a 26-yard TD pass. BC led 14–0 and Paterno looked glum again.
Against much better competition this week, Penn State’s offense appeared overmatched. Its receivers looked slow, rarely got any separation, and dropped passes. So desperate was Paterno for a wideout that he began utilizing—and calling plays for—Brendan Perretta, a five-foot-seven walk-on redshirt freshman.
As for the offensive line, it couldn’t get any push against the BC front. As a result, Mills, who would play exclusively at QB this night, was under constant pressure and Hunt looked like a different back than he had against Akron.
If that weren’t distressing enough for all those Penn State fans occupying a corner of renovated Alumni Stadium, as well as those watching on ABC, there was a reoccurrence of the sideline-coaching indecision that had been so troubling in recent seasons.
“I’m glad I’m on the field and not on the sideline with all the chaos,” Mills had said earlier. “It’s pretty comical sometimes.”
Down by two touchdowns, facing a fourth-and-1 at the BC 48 with just over a minute left in the first half, Penn State appeared to have little choice but to go for it. And that was the initial indication from the sideline. But suddenly, with the clock running, Paterno and his coaches began a heated discussion. With fifty seconds left, and the play clock winding down, the Lions signaled for a time-out.
Somehow, the initial decision was reversed and Paterno sent the punt team out. Boston College got the ball back and held on until halftime.
“What does that say about the state of Penn State football,” Boston Herald columnist Michael Gee noted to colleagues in the press box, “when the coaches feel like they can’t even make one yard when they have to?”
The indecision, the confusion, the wasted seconds, the lack of faith, all suggested a crisis in confidence along the Penn State sideline.
“I didn’t want to punt it right away and give them a couple chances—you don’t know what can happen. A punt can be blocked,” Paterno would explain after the game. “I did debate going for it but then I figured if we don’t make it, in two plays it’s a field goal and then we’re three [scores] down. I knew we were getting the ball in the second half and I thought we could get a couple of scores.”
But if they were initially thinking about keeping the ball, why did they let the clock run
down?
“If we were going to give it to them, I wanted to give it to them with as little time as I could,” Paterno said.
Then why the time-out?
“I wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page. To make sure that the kids knew not to get careless where it could be blocked or could be returned, because they’re a good return team.”
Rather than scream at the ineffective offense, Paterno and Hall tried to stay positive at halftime.
“Coach Hall brings a little bit more laid-back attitude toward us,” said Robinson. “He told us that when things don’t go our way, we can’t panic.”
The relaxed approach appeared to work. Mills—wearing a T-shirt honoring the memory of high school teammate Billy Gaines, who had died in an alcohol-related fall the previous June—completed all five passes on Penn State’s first second-half drive. The last was a 13-yard touchdown to fifth-year senior wideout Ryan Scott that cut BC’s lead in half, 14–7.
It was the first career reception for Scott, a native of Renton, Washington, who lacked a wideout’s speed. He had been one of those fifth-year seniors Paterno urged to leave after 2003. Instead, he pleaded for a last chance, had a superb spring and Blue-White Game, and now was contributing.
“He said, ‘Coach, I think I’m better than you think I am,’ ” Paterno recalled.
Scott’s catch animated the Penn State sideline and all those Nittany Lions fans who, in the absence of a huge parking lot on BC’s cramped campus, had spent the afternoon grilling on tiny patches of the college green.
But the joy didn’t last long. Boston College responded with a 74-yard scoring drive on its first possession of the half, Peterson capping it with his third touchdown pass, a 2-yarder to tight end Mark Palmer. It was 21–7. And 14 points looked like an awfully large deficit for this Penn State offense.
Indeed, neither team would score again. Mills’s interceptions would end three of the Lions’ next four drives. That gave him a Penn State–record-tying four in the game—one fewer than he threw in all of ‘03. Overall, Penn State turned the ball over five times that night.
“He was under a lot of pressure,” Paterno said of his quarterback. “Really, they did a good job with that. They were putting a lot of pressure on him with only four guys coming. So you know it wasn’t like he had some people that he could go to. . . . And obviously, when we were down and somebody had to make a play, he might have forced the ball a couple times, but that was just because he was trying to make a play.”
As Paterno had feared, Peterson’s elusiveness was a sizable advantage. He ran seven times for 27 yards and completed twenty-three of thirty-one passes for 199 yards and three touchdowns. The injured Whitworth’s backup, Andre Callender, finished with 114 yards on twenty-seven carries. For Penn State, meanwhile, Hunt collected 52 yards on fourteen carries as the Lions could manage only 73 yards on the ground. A wide-open Phillips had mishandled a pass at the BC 5, one of several more drops by wide receivers. And despite all the talk about increasing Robinson’s workload, the junior was involved in only nine plays—four carries for 35 yards and five receptions for another 54. The final score was 21–7.
Asked if he were comfortable with his star playing such a limited role, Paterno was vague. “They did a good job on some things. I think we’ll make some adjustments. I wouldn’t want to say we’re going to do exactly what we’ve done, but I think we’ll make some adjustments.”
Following the Lions’ sixth consecutive road loss, Paterno looked old and tired as, just before midnight, he walked into the postgame news conference. One writer described his demeanor as a mix of “puzzlement, discouragement, and dejection.” Even the coach’s surroundings here were funereal. In the Skating Lobby of Kelly Rink, which adjoined the stadium, black drapes had been fixed to the podium table and the wall behind for his news conference.
Paterno cradled his head in his right hand and answered questions in a tone dripping with disappointment.
“They just played better than we did,” he began. “They played hard. They played very well. Now I’ll have to look at the tapes. We obviously didn’t block them very well. They didn’t do anything fancy. They beat us. . . . I tried to tell people, you know, we weren’t home free because we beat Akron. That’s not to take anything away from Akron. I think I said that to everybody else. But BC played very well. We did not play well. I thought we were ready to play well.
“We turned the ball over, what, four, five times? You can’t win games with five turnovers. What’d we get? One? And they get five. You can’t win. . . . I don’t have all the answers right now. I’ve got to go home and look at tape and look at people, see if maybe we’ve got to change some people.”
At this point Paterno hid Austin Scott’s punishment from the media, insisting that the tailback hadn’t played because “right now [Hunt] is a little better.”
The coach was called immediately on what seemed to be a disingenuous response. Even if that were the case, why in the fourth quarter had he used senior Mike Gasparato, the No. 3 tailback on the depth chart, instead of Scott?
“Hunt took himself out and we were throwing the football, and Mike’s a little better at pass protection [than Scott],” he said.
Though it was only one loss, Paterno’s mood indicated that, in this feeble Lions effort, he may have been able to glimpse more.
CHAPTER 8
IT FINALLY GOT TO PATERNO at the end of the 1973 season. The pollsters might be willing to continue to overlook his team, but he would not.
So after Penn State beat LSU, 16–9, in the Orange Bowl, he had an annoucement for the reporters who gathered outside his locker room that night.
“This was the best team I’ve ever coached,” he told them. “We have as much right to claim the top place as anyone else. We’re undefeated. . . . I have my own poll, the Paterno poll. I took the vote a few minutes ago and the vote was unanimous: Penn State is number one.”
Then, when he got home to State College, the coach ordered rings for his team. Before graduation that spring, he presented them to his players. It was a gesture that displayed the coach’s generosity as well as his frustration.
“I still wear mine,” said Tom Shuman, that 1973 team’s quarterback. “It doesn’t say we were national champions but it’s got my name on it, our record, a replica of the Orange Bowl trophy. It was a nice gesture, and to be honest with you, it was kind of fitting since all of us felt like we were as good as any team in the country that year.”
Paterno’s 1973 Nittany Lions won all twelve of their games. They won them by an average of 26 points. They averaged 40 points in eleven regular-season victories and yielded under 11. They rushed for a phenomenal 2,994 yards. They had the Heisman Trophy winner. They had ten players selected in the next NFL draft. They had seven defensive players who would be drafted.
And they finished fifth in the polls.
In that season’s final Associated Press rankings, Penn State ended up behind, in order, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Alabama, upset by Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, topped United Press International’s list, which was calculated before the bowl games and also had Penn State fifth.
His third perfect season had been accomplished with a conservative, straightforward style that would be linked to Paterno forever, even after his wide-open 1994 team averaged 47 points a game. The Nittany Lions ran the ball four times as often as they threw it—643 rushing attempts to 161 passes. Shuman was a competent replacement for John Hufnagel, but the rush-heavy offense would limit him to just 83 completions on the season.
“I was the question mark that season,” said Shuman.
Defensively, Penn State was loaded again with smart and aggressive players like Ed O’Neil, Mike Hartenstine, and Randy Crowder. The unit was so deep, in fact, that O’Neil’s backup was Greg Buttle, a future all-American and NFL star.
By the end of that season, Paterno was wondering what he had to do to win a national title. His teams had won 62 of their last
68 games. They’d finished in the top ten of the Associated Press polls every year but one (1970, when the 7–3 Lions were 18th). They’d been perfect three times in six years, produced all-Americans and NFL all-stars. And yet there appeared to be a sizable portion of the college-football world that continued to classify Penn State football as inferior.
Part of it, of course, was a perception problem. For all its success, Penn State was still something of an interloper. Paterno and his program had not yet gained admission into the elite group of college-football powers that included Alabama, Ohio State, Texas, USC, Notre Dame, and Nebraska. Since 1960, those six schools had won every national title.
It was Paterno’s misfortune that his unbeaten seasons had coincided with perfect years by three of them—Ohio State in 1968, Texas in 1969, and Notre Dame in 1973. At that stage of their coach’s career, the Nittany Lions weren’t ever going to win a beauty contest with those schools.
“The sportswriters at the time, for whatever reason, just didn’t want to give Penn State much credit,” said Shuman.
Then there was the issue of its schedule, dominated as it was by eastern competition. Except for Penn State, no eastern team had finished in the top ten since 1963. Army, Navy, Pitt, and Syracuse were in a downward spiral from their glory days. In 1973, the Lions played Stanford, Iowa, and North Carolina State, but also Maryland, Syracuse, West Virginia, Pitt, Ohio U, and all three service academies.
Most of the sportswriters and coaches who voted in the national polls rarely saw Penn State. They could judge them only by the level of their competition. And, in most of their minds, there was no way eastern schools and the service academies matched up with teams from the Big Ten, the Pac Ten, the Big Eight, or the Southeastern and Southwest Conferences.
The Lion in Autumn Page 14