“A three-and-nine season is miserable for everybody,” said sophomore offensive tackle Levi Brown. “Nobody wants to go through that. So you try to get some of it, like the constant losing, out of your head. . . . We’re trying to capitalize on every little good thing we do.”
The best therapy would be early-season victories. Paterno had told his players there was no reason they couldn’t start 3–0, a perfect springboard into the killer Big Ten schedule that began at No. 20 Wisconsin on September 25.
Now, after the loss to BC, hopes had to be revised, confidence bolstered. The size of the psychic wound Boston College inflicted on Penn State hinted at just how fragile Paterno’s once rock-solid program had become.
“That was a game everybody was real emotional about. We wanted to win,” said senior wideout Ryan Scott in its somber aftermath.
Fearing this first setback might trigger another season-long retreat, Paterno and the seniors immediately moved to counter that possibility. Before flying back to State College late that Saturday night, the coach, surprisingly upbeat in the locker room despite his downcast performance with the media, told his players to keep their heads up.
“You played hard,” he said. “But there are an awful lot of areas where you need to improve. You’ve got ten games left. You can win them all. But you can also lose them all. It’s up to you.”
“At practice Monday,” he said, with a glance at Austin Scott, “I expect you all to work hard.”
When Monday came, no one was surprised when some of the seniors—Mills, Wake, and Gerald Smith—called a players-only meeting, a preemptive strike against any negative residue. Its theme was clear: The loss to Boston College didn’t mean they were headed for a repeat of 2003.
“[They] looked everyone in the face,” said defensive tackle Scott Paxson, “and said whatever happened last year isn’t going to happen this year.”
“I don’t want to go back to last year,” Mills told them.
“We’re not the same team as last year,” Robinson said.
Smith might have been the most emotional of the speakers. In the spring, he had been one of those eager to rectify the locker-room problems that helped sink the previous season.
“There was a lack of leadership last year,” he would say. “The upperclassmen this year really wanted to step up and set a foot down and try to establish a positive foundation for the team. We’re young, fairly young, and that’s one thing we wanted to do.”
Now, with his teammates all around, and with his career-best five catches against BC lending him a pulpit, the wide receiver from Ellicott City, Maryland, reemphasized what Paterno had told them Saturday night.
“[Gerald said] we can go two ways,” Mills recalled. “We can let this loss get at us and affect us the whole season. Or we can get better.”
That first practice for the Central Florida game lasted about fifty minutes. It was routine—mostly meetings and film study. Paterno and his aides discussed a couple of minor position moves. The man who once wanted to move Hall of Fame QB Jim Kelly to linebacker had tried senior defensive end Jason Robinson at tight end against Boston College. Junior receiver Gio Vendemia also had been moved, to cornerback.
According to Paterno, his players had been “alert” during the workout. That encouraged him. He had wondered how he was going to handle them, both after the BC game and throughout the following week. That was a coach’s perpetual dilemma: Good cop or bad cop? Praise them or bury them? Last year he would have angrily lit into them.
“That’s one of the biggest things you get to do in college coaching or any coaching—whether it’s high school, college, or pro—depending on how your kids play, the depth of their concern about having gotten licked, and that kind of thing,” he would explain. “If you have a couple of flippant kids and some kids just walking around after the game like it really wasn’t that important, obviously, you take a different attitude. . . . There are a lot of things that go into it and sometimes you make a decision that you regret. I wish that there was a formula that told you, ‘This is exactly the way you do it every week.’ I think that for this football team I want to encourage them because they have worked hard and are concerned about getting on with it.”
After fifty-four years, he had developed pretty good instincts. And this time, unlike the wake of the ‘03 loss to BC when he thought his team had given up, he sensed a different attitude. There was no need to panic. Paterno believed this team had played “good, tough, and hard” in the loss.
Paterno liked that about them. It would have been easy for his players to doubt their coach, to buy into the notion that he was over the hill and incapable of substantive change. Instead, they had made a commitment to listen to him, to practice and play hard for him, to follow his rules. Consequently, the staff decided to remain upbeat at what they saw as a critical juncture.
“They’re trying [to be positive],” center E. Z. Smith said. “They get intense when they have to be. And if they need to get intense with us, we understand that it’s the nature of the game. But for the most part they are very positive.”
His players had been waiting for Paterno’s response. The coach’s surprisingly buoyant demeanor was another indication that he was going about things differently this season. The Nittany Lions, with nine games left, including their entire conference schedule, welcomed his positive attitude.
“He told us we still have a chance to do some big things this season,” Michael Robinson said. “People are talking about salvaging the season. It’s a loss in the second game. What are we salvaging? The season has barely started.”
A daylong rain, the nasty remains of Hurricane Ivan, pounded Penn State’s campus on Friday, September 17. Before it ended early the following morning, up to eight inches had fallen on central Pennsylvania, triggering the area’s worst floods in thirty-two years.
That Friday night, outside the Nittany Lion Inn, a seventy-three-year-old campus hotel, a continual flow of cars splashed up the circular driveway. Their doors opened outside the lobby entrance. Umbrellas bloomed and guests emerged beneath them. Though operated by the university, the inn, like the athletic department and the school’s dining facilities, was classified as an “auxiliary enterprise.” It had its own budget and generated its own revenue. Big contributors, powerful alumni, former Penn State players, all preferred the blue-blazered ambience of the Nittany Lion Inn on football weekends. That afternoon, a board of trustees meeting had taken place at the inn and many of its thirty-two members were staying around for the following day’s game. The guests typically packed its bar, “Whiskers,” on Friday nights, before and after the booster banquets that also were held there.
Paterno’s teams’ achievements over the last several decades had made it impossible for the average fan to book a room there on football weekends. But in the final weekends of the miserable 2003 season some had been available. It was one more sad reminder of the delicate condition of Penn State football. But on this rainy night, the two-story hotel was full and bustling. In a basement banquet room set up for Paterno’s media cocktail reception, a handful of reporters talked and drank as they waited for their host.
Once again, the coach failed to show up. What had initially been seen as an aberration now had the appearance of a trend. The sportswriters increasingly were baffled.
Wilkes-Barre’s Kellar believed Paterno might have been annoyed when the Centre Daily Times reported that week that the reason Austin Scott had not played against Boston College was that he had missed a meeting. Jenny Vrentas, a junior engineering major who was one of three Daily Collegian writers on the school paper’s football beat, suggested Penn State’s players and coaches may have been upset by her criticism during the week of defensive back Anwar Phillips. Phillips’s fellow defensive back, Alan Zemaitis, had exposed that displeasure during a teleconference a few days earlier.
Or, perhaps, they were all too paranoid. Maybe the old coach simply didn’t want to get drenched in the storm. That seemed unlikely.
Paterno didn’t casually cast traditions aside, particularly ones that he had fathered.
“No,” said David Jones, a veteran Penn State writer for the Harrisburg Patriot-News and a longtime thorn in Paterno’s side. “He’s at war.”
Meanwhile, the persistent storm was causing problems for that week’s opponent, Central Florida. At Orlando’s airport, the possibility that the team’s flight to State College might have to be diverted elsewhere meant UCF’s chartered jet had to take on extra fuel. Considerable weight had to be shed before the plane could depart. The cheerleaders, athletic department official Art Zeleznik, and faculty athletics representative Bill Callarman were removed and booked on a commercial flight through Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
As it turned out, their jet was redirected, to Harrisburg. Players and coaches boarded buses there for the two-hour trip to State College along Route 322, which would soon be closed because of flooding. They wouldn’t arrive at their hotel until late Friday night. At 2:30 A.M., the eastbound lanes of I-80, the main east–west access to State College, also would be shut down, guaranteeing even more congestion in the traffic that poured in and out of town on a football Saturday.
Paterno, as was his weekly habit, praised Central Florida in the days leading up to the game, even though that school’s football program appeared to be the antithesis of all he had built in Happy Valley.
The Golden Knights had little or no tradition. They wore garish gold uniforms, relied on speed and spontaneity, had serious academic problems, and a small and fickle fan base. And in George O’Leary, the former Georgia Tech coach, they also had their third coach in eleven months.
The forty-one-year-old college in booming Orlando hadn’t fielded a football team until 1979, when Paterno was in his thirtieth season at Penn State. Then came a slow march up the ladder, propelled by the promise of TV riches, from Division III to Division II in 1982, to Division I-AA in 1990, and finally to the big-time Division I-A level in 1996.
As the level of competition increased, so had the size of the university. Its student body had grown from thirteen thousand in 1980 to more than forty-four thousand in 2004, making it second in size only to the University of Florida in its home state.
“We’ve become the school of choice for the average Florida student,” said ex–football coach Mike Kruczek.
But not yet for the average Florida football fan. The Knights, surrounded by all the Orlando area’s entertainment options, drew an average of only 21,920 fans to its games at the 73,000-seat Gator Bowl in 2003. Still, given its enticing location, Florida’s bottomless high-school talent pool, and an apparent willingness to accept academic risks among its matriculating players, Central Florida, which was set to join Conference USA in 2005 after three seasons in the MAC, possessed enormous potential.
“I really believe Central Florida is a sleeping giant,” O’Leary had said when he took the job the previous December.
While Miami, Florida, and Florida State enjoyed a sizable advantage in reputation and recruiting, Central Florida hoped to close the gap with the hiring of O’Leary and the recent construction of a $7 million, football-only training facility on campus.
Finding players wasn’t its problem. There are enough Division I prospects coming out of Florida each year—250 to 275 by most estimates—that UCF could do quite well with the table scraps. Forty-nine of the sixty-three players O’Leary brought to State College were Floridians, many of them drawn there by a schedule that included attractive interconference opponents like Wisconsin and Penn State.
Paterno, on the other hand, hoped to get something out of the matchup too. In part because his coaching staff remained so static, he had never established strong connections in populous southern and western states like Florida, California, and Texas, where many of the best and speediest prospects were being developed.
His philosophy had always been that by recruiting in distant locales, he might be ignoring talent in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. That had worked for decades, until the nexus of football talent, along with jobs and population, shifted south and west in the 1980s and 1990s. Penn State’s roster for the Central Florida game, for example, included only one Floridian, John Wilson, a backup offensive tackle; one Californian, fourth-string backup QB Mike Hart; and no Texans. Among its Big Ten rivals, Minnesota had eight Floridians, Ohio State five. Purdue had fourteen Texans, Wisconsin eight. Michigan had ten Californians.
O’Leary had replaced interim coach Alan Gooch, who had filled in after Kruczek was fired early in the Knights’ disappointing 3–9 ‘03 season. Kruczek’s final year in Orlando had been marred by eight player suspensions—including cornerback Omar Laurence, who was accused of possessing not one but two guns on campus. At that season’s end, sixteen of the team’s sixty-two players were on academic suspension. The school’s graduation rate for athletes, according to AD Steve Orsini, was just thirty-three percent.
UCF took more criticism when it hired O’Leary. His base salary of $700,000 was nearly four times more than Kruczek had earned. And he had been forced to resign at Notre Dame when, just days after accepting the pretigious job in 2001, it was revealed that he had lied about academic credentials on a résumé.
“Nobody is perfect,” Paterno said of O’Leary. “George made a mistake on a résumé. I would hope that we don’t excommunicate him. The days of the Inquisition, I was hoping, were over.”
On the field, things weren’t going much better. UCF had been moving in reverse ever since it went 9–2 in 1998 behind future NFL all-Pro quarterback Daunte Culpepper. The Golden Knights went 16–19 in the three succeeding seasons and had opened the 2004 season with two lopsided losses against nationally ranked opponents—34–6 at Wisconsin and 45–20 to West Virginia at home.
This was the kind of game Paterno always hated to play. A victory, even one as decisive as the win over Akron, wouldn’t signify much of anything. A loss would be disastrous.
If the latter happened, he knew that his team—with games against Wisconsin, Minnesota, Purdue, and Iowa in the next four weeks—could be so devastated that it might not win again this season.
Central Florida was going to want to run the ball, especially if, as Paterno expected, the Beaver Stadium turf was wet and slippery. O’Leary hadn’t yet decided from among three first-year quarterbacks. The Knights’ offense, such as it was, consisted largely of senior tailback Alex Haynes, who had run for 193 yards in the two losses.
Still, Central Florida was quick and dangerous. An early score or two might inflame Penn State’s self-doubt. In the Nittany Lions’ 2002 home opener, UCF had nearly ruined the one good season Penn State had experienced in the previous four, just missing a noteworthy upset before succumbing, 27–24.
“I think Central Florida has played a couple of tough opponents,” said Paterno. “Wisconsin is really a good football team. I don’t know what people are ranking them. I know West Virginia is ranked right up there and West Virginia has some awfully good skill people and very, very clever people. Central Florida can do a lot of things. They have a couple of wideouts that played against us that hurt us. They have a running back who is a really good running back. They are a football team that is kind of just feeling its way. . . . When you look at them, they scare you because of the fact that they do have tremendous potential. They really do. There isn’t anyplace they don’t have speed. They have an awful lot of speed.”
Like Akron, Central Florida was a midlevel Division I-A school willing to play big-name foes on the road for a big payout guarantee. They had turned up as a semiregular on Penn State’s schedule, in part because Alabama, beset with NCAA problems, had begged out of its scheduled games with the Nittany Lions in 2004 and 2005, and because of Central Florida’s connections with their athletic department.
Central Florida AD Orsini was from Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. He had been recruited by Paterno. His brother, Mike, played defensive back for the Nittany Lions between 1971 and 1973. His father, Tony, had been a senior running back when
Paterno arrived in State College.
“Tony was a tailback in 1950,” said Paterno. “He was a good, tough kid, with not a lot of speed—like most Italians—and couldn’t run very well, except away from the cops. That was our only claim to fame for speed when I was in Brooklyn. Tony was a great guy. Then when young Mike came along, Tony’s son, we recruited him. . . . We debated on whether we wanted [Steve] and we waited too long and then Notre Dame came in and made him an offer and we were late with it.”
The tail end of the ugly hurricane weather blew past State College just before game time, leaving a sunny, windy Saturday afternoon with temperatures in the mid-sixties.
There were wide-open gaps in the parking lots and patches of empty seats inside Beaver Stadium when the 12:10 P.M. game began, an indication of the access problems motorists were experiencing. In addition, many fans, convinced that an easy Lions victory was inevitable, stayed away when they saw the early-morning weather.
The mood among those in the announced crowd of 101,715—the total who had bought tickets—was confident. Even as far as Penn State had fallen, they couldn’t conceive of the Lions losing to 0–2 Central Florida. In the press box, forty-five minutes before kickoff, a sportswriter for the Altoona Mirror began banging out his game-story’s lead:
“Penn State dominated Central Florida yesterday,” it began, “bouncing back from last week’s disappointing loss to Boston College.”
He never did have to rewrite. Penn State clearly “dominated” the smaller Knights, 37–13. But despite the score, it wasn’t the kind of victory that forecast great achievements in the Big Ten.
The Lion in Autumn Page 16