In Paterno’s first thirty-five seasons as head coach, the Lions had never lost four games in a row. They had now done it three times in four years. The players’ growing futility was evident in the Nittany Lions’ locker room following the Iowa loss. The frustration, bewilderment, anger, and embarrassment were so thick and overpowering that several players again broke down and cried. And this time Paterno had run out of words with which to console them.
“Coach had a tough time with words after the game,” said defensive tackle Scott Paxson. “I think he’s thinking what everyone is kind of thinking, where do you go from here?
“He’s not used to this,” said defensive end Lavon Chisley. “This would be hard for any coach to deal with, but it’s especially hard for a coach like him.”
The defense had played so well again—and the offense so poorly—that a locker-room schism seemed unavoidable. “It seems like that’s the lullaby of this season,” cornerback Zemaitis said of the disparity between units.
During the game, defensive lineman Hali could be seen railing at the offense on the sideline. “I always get frustrated at the beginning of the game,” he explained, “and I get up and start yelling and say, ‘We’re going slow out there, let’s get it going!’ ”
Penn State’s offense had scored two touchdowns in four Big Ten games. It had turned the ball over twenty-one times. Its rushing totals in its five losses were mind-boggling for a Paterno team—233 yards on 115 carries, barely 2 yards an attempt.
Waiting in the media room for the coach, the sportswriters joked cynically, about the offense, about the rare 6–4 score, about Paterno’s apparent inability to recognize his team’s failings.
“I guess Robinson will have to give back the Heisman,” one writer mocked.
Finally, wearing a sweatshirt beneath a windbreaker, Paterno walked into the room. His entrance triggered a stacatto snapping of camera shutters from the balcony above. It was probably a hopeful sign for the program that the families and recruits who watched from up there still wanted his picture.
“I don’t know if we could have played much poorer,” Paterno began. “There have been a lot of tough ones. This one would certainly be right there with them.”
The question-and-answer session that followed was largely unrevealing and painfully familiar. When it was over and Paterno had departed, Penn State players, some of whom still had red and swollen eyes, touchingly patted their coach on the shoulder as they passed in the adjoining hallway.
“He’s frustrated,” said Hali. “It’s not his fault. I mean, people keep saying we need to get rid of him. You get rid of him and what does it change? The team? We’ve still got the same players. We’re the ones that have to make the adjustment. We’re the ones that have to play the game, that have to win. All the help we can get from our coaching staff, we’re still the ones that have to win.”
They were growing increasingly sensitive to criticism of their coach. All it did, from their perspective, was layer another level of pressure on them. They didn’t want to go down in history as the Penn State team that drove off Joe Paterno.
“I feel bad,” said Paxson. “He’s a great coach. All the winning seasons he’s had, and now he’s got to go through this. People on the outside are telling him he should give it up. But if people were allowed to come to practice to see Joe [they’d see how much he still cares]. He slaps us in the face. If you jump offsides, he grabs you by the helmet. He’s all over you. I don’t see a guy who is going to hang it up. I see a guy I want to hide from.”
Spectators, dizzied by the scope of Penn State’s impotence, lingered in the parking lots long afterward.
Some of their car radios were tuned to the local postgame call-in show on 970–AM. Fans, drinking beer in little clusters, listened intently and nodded their heads in agreement while cohost Phil Grosz lambasted Penn State’s “stone-age offense.”
Grosz, a lifelong Pennsylvanian whose gray-blond hair appeared to have been styled beneath a bowl, also published Blue White Illustrated, the weekly tabloid for Nittany Lions fans. In his column and on the radio, he had been urging Paterno to become a Bobby Bowden, a CEO-type coach who delegated all the offensive and defensive details to powerful assistants.
The parking-lot fans’ ears perked up when caller Skip Dreibelbis—a State College resident, a onetime high-school teammate of Jay Paterno’s, and an ex–Penn State football player—offered his sobering assessment.
“The program has taken a real turn for the worse,” Dreibelbis began. “And it’s really been disappointing to me as a former player. . . . It’s no reflection on the players. My heart goes out to every single one of those guys. They deal week in and week out with Joe’s little hissy fits. He gets in a tirade and carries on. But they deal with that. They go out and they work really hard. You’ve got to blame the leadership of this team.
“I’ve talked to former players who played in the NFL and who’ve come to Joe and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to get a chance to do a little bit of coaching.’ Joe won’t take them in. Don’t have enough coaching experience. You know I like Jay as a person. He was a great holder for me and a nice guy. But doggone, Jay’s only played maybe one quarter of football and it was in high school and he’s out there coaching quarterbacks. And there’s Mike McQueary, who played [quarterback] all through high school and college, and he’s coaching tight ends.
“Sooner or later someone has to take the bull by the horns and say enough is enough. Last year was the worst in Penn State history and what do they do? Give him a new contract and a bonus. Let’s start holding people accountable.”
Cohost Jerry Fisher, a devoted Penn State loyalist whose father had been the Nittany Lions’ boosterish radio voice for decades, had walked through the parking lots before the game. There he asked fans if they thought the inevitable decision on Paterno’s future ought to be left to the coach or the administration.
“Ninety percent are saying that Joe is the one that needs to make a decision,” said Fisher, “but that he needs to make it soon.”
A few days later, Paterno did nothing to aid his supporters’ case. When asked if he thought his players were too tight, he veered off into another frustrated riff about bad luck and bad officiating.
“Those kinds of things happen to us,” he said. “It’s very easy to generalize and easy to start to panic about different things. . . . [But] I think we can get started. We were ahead two to nothing on Saturday. We couldn’t take advantage of it.”
For his critics, the bizarre allusion to the 2–0 score proved just how far Paterno’s expectations had slipped. Once he had wanted a national championship so badly that he publicly criticized a U.S. president who had declared Texas No. 1. Now he was satisfied with a 2–0 lead?
By that last week in October, Paterno’s age, abilities, and status were being debated so passionately in State College that the subject even found its way to the coach’s dinner table.
Following the homecoming humiliation, the Paternos, as they did after most home games, hosted a dinner at their house. Among the old friends in attendance was Don Bellisario, a seventy-year-old Penn State grad who had gone on to Hollywood, where he had produced, among other shows, Magnum P.I., the Tom Selleck series.
“[Bellisario] said the worst thing ever invented was dates,” Paterno recalled. “I was teasing him about how long he was going to produce and write for television . . . and that is how he responded to that. He looks great at seventy and you wouldn’t believe he was seventy. I don’t feel seventy-seven. That’s not my problem. My problem is not winning games. That’s my problem.”
His players had problems of their own. The civility that always had surrounded Penn State football appeared to be vanishing in the toxic vapor of another four-game losing streak. There had been more boos during the Iowa loss than in entire decades of Nittany Lions football. Mills, who was the target of most of them, probably had been vilified more than any Penn State player who ever set foot in Beaver Stadium.
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��That wasn’t right,” said fullback Paul Jefferson. “I don’t think Zack deserved that. [A loss is] never one person’s fault.”
Angry fans continued to berate the senior quarterback in e-mails and nasty, anonymous telephone messages.
“One e-mail said, ‘You need to go up there and tell [the coaches] you don’t want to play anymore, and let some one else play,’ ” Mills recalled. “I got a message on my phone that said basically that I suck. . . . I haven’t got to the point to e-mail people back, but I’ve been close.”
Robinson said he got the same question over and over from fellow students who once had been too shy to approach him but now felt emboldened enough to ask: “What’s wrong with the offense?”
Tight end Smolko noted that he sat silently on campus buses, listening as fellow students disparaged his team. “There’s not much good for anyone to talk about anymore,” he admitted.
“It’s frustrating,” linebacker Shaw said of the negative buzz on campus. “You start to think if we were doing better, life would be a lot better and people would like us better.”
“It’s hard on everybody,” said Chisley. “Nobody came here to lose.”
Paterno, who was shouldering plenty of the blame himself, tried again to deflect criticism from his players and assistants in the days before they traveled to Ohio State.
“You guys are being critical of the wrong people,” he told sportswriters. “You should be critical of me. I’m the boss. I hate it when you guys are critical of kids or critical of the staff. I know what’s going on and I know what kind of coaches I have. If I didn’t think they were doing their job, I would do something. I’m not sure how critical we should be of anybody. I think we should look back and realize that we’re playing against some people that are good football teams and [we] may be playing with some kids that are a little bit outmanned or a little bit out-experienced or something like that. That’s the attitude I have to take.”
Paterno continued to take hits from the media. And some of the writers and talk-show hosts now demanded that Morelli play at Columbus on Saturday.
It seemed logical. Mills was ninety-fifth in Division I-A passing efficiency and was still groggy from the concussion. Robinson had turned the ball over the last three times he touched it. And unless the Nittany Lions somehow won their final four games, they weren’t going to be going to a bowl anyway. So why not play the promising freshman? Hadn’t Paterno said that his decision not to redshirt him was made because he hoped to give the young QB some experience? Here was his chance.
Apparently, given the coach’s emphatic answers at his weekly news conference, either his thinking or his assessment of Morelli’s ability had changed.
“Do you think Anthony Morelli is adequately prepared to play against Ohio State should you need him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He isn’t adequately prepared.”
“Does he not know the plays?”
“He isn’t adequately prepared.”
The truth was somewhat different. The coaches had inserted some plays for Morelli into the Ohio State game plan. But Paterno was hoping not to have to use him. He didn’t want to get Morelli killed. The offensive line had already allowed two mature quarterbacks to endure serious beatings.
“I think they lost a little confidence in themselves because they have had some breakdowns in key situations,” Paterno said of the line. “I just think we have to get a little bit more confident, consistent, don’t make so many mental mistakes, concentrate a little bit better, and not get discouraged if you get licked every once in a while, because we are going to get licked every once in a while.”
Pep rallies. Inspirational movies. Soft words. Harsh words. Nothing Paterno had attempted could get his team over the hump. But he was too stubborn and too competitive to stop trying.
Two days before the Ohio State game, at the end of a long and grueling practice, he addressed the team in a T-shirt. It was a replica of a shirt that Boston pitcher Curt Schilling had worn during the just-completed American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox overcame a 3–0 deficit to defeat the New York Yankees in seven games. The shirt’s message read WHY NOT US?
“Why not us?” the coach, who grew up in Dodger-crazed Brooklyn despising the Yankees, asked the players. “We got four games left. We can win ’em all and wind up with a winning record and a bowl game. Don’t worry what people think. You think anybody but the Red Sox thought they were going to come back and win?”
The following day Paterno spoke at another rally, though this one was for the Bush campaign. The president’s father, George H. W. Bush, and daughters were, along with the coach, the star attractions at a Robeson Center gathering Friday afternoon.
In introducing Jenna and Barbara Bush, Paterno told the fifteen hundred spectators that the Bush family was “everything you ever wanted in people—courage, conviction.”
When former President Bush, eighty, spoke, he alluded to Paterno’s age and troubles.
“I think it’s OK when you get to be an older man,” Bush said. “I love him. I love him like a brother.”
There was some talk of Scott Paterno’s congressional campaign at the gathering. Privately, Paterno acknowledged his son wasn’t going to unseat the popular incumbent, Democrat Tim Holden. So he had already let reporters know he wouldn’t be attending Scott’s postelection party, scheduled for the Four Points Sheraton in Harrisburg late Tuesday night.
“It’s the middle of football season,” he said. “I’ve got too much work to do.”
Not long after the Bush rally, the coach and team traveled to Columbus. That night at their hotel, the Marriott North, which stood near the confluence of several new highways, ESPN Classic showed a replay of the 1995 Penn State–Ohio State game, won by the Buckeyes, 28–25.
Though it had been just nine years, the differences were striking. Paterno seemed far less agitated and restless along the sideline. And the ‘95 Penn State team looked bigger, faster, and infinitely more sure of itself. Anchored by future Pro Bowler Jeff Hartings, its offensive line, even when Ohio State stacked the box with eight and nine defenders, consistently cleared huge gaps for tailback Curtis Enis.
The hotel lobby was surprisingly empty that night. Typically, Penn State fans buzzed inside and outside the team hotel, hoping to see, chat with, or get autographs from players and coaches. But there just didn’t seem to be many Penn State fans here. Who could blame them? Who wanted to travel to watch a team that had lost nine straight road games? Besides, late October in Columbus was hardly springtime in Paris.
“I’ve talked to travel agents back home who said that Penn State’s move to the Big Ten has hurt their business,” said David Jones, a Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist who had covered Penn State for more than a decade. “I mean, look at the road trips you get. Bloomington? West Lafayette? Iowa City? Champaign? Who wants to go to those places? Especially not when your team stinks.”
The search for ways to explain Penn State’s descent was again the topic at the weekly media reception. In Suite 116 at the Marriott, several reporters, photographers, and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s waited in vain for Paterno.
The sessions were gaining a momentum of their own. In the absence of the coach, they had become forums for the exchange of opinions and speculation.
Wilkes-Barre’s Kellar had been told that a group of parents had informed Curley that unless Paterno stepped aside, they’d see that their sons transferred; Jones heard that Paterno and Jay had been accosted by angry fans as they’d walked home after the Iowa loss; and a source in Old Main told Reading’s Scarcella that administrators had contacted Sue Paterno in an effort to gauge her husband’s state of mind.
As for reasons for the program’s struggles, this week they focused on recruiting. They included Paterno’s inability to recruit the “speed states”—Texas, Florida, and California; the fact that the staff had only two black assistants and needed another to aid in recruiting; and the mo
ve to the Big Ten, which introduced rivals into territory Penn State used to dominate.
But just days earlier an anonymous Big Ten assistant had told ESPN.com that any suggestion Penn State wasn’t getting top talent was “a myth.”
“We recruited a lot of their kids, and to be honest, we really wanted some of those guys,” he said. “A few of them looked like Superman. But you watch them on tape now and you’re like ‘That’s so-and-so? Man, what happened?’ These kids aren’t developing. It’s actually like they’re regressing athletically when they get there. That tells me the problem isn’t just the coaching in practices, but in the weight room too.”
What none of them knew, though, was that the nation’s No. 1 recruit, speedster Derrick Williams of Greenbelt, Maryland, would be driving with his family to State College the following afternoon for an official visit. On Sunday, the Williamses would meet with President Spanier, and with Penn State players and students. They would enjoy lunch at Paterno’s house. And though the decision would not be revealed for another two months, they would be won over.
Even as the terrible autumn continued for the Nittany Lions, the seeds of a new season of hope were being sown.
When Penn State’s team entered Ohio Stadium early the next morning, a gray and rainy day was about to turn sunny and extremely windy. Though Ohio State also had recently refurbished and expanded its historic football stadium, the game-day atmosphere in Columbus was far more commercial than that at Penn State. Airplanes trailing banners from local car dealerships flew overhead. Commercials played constantly on the giant stadium scoreboard. Sponsors’ signs and logos were ubiquitous. And in the narrow streets and tiny parking lots surrounding the stadium, a chaotic festival of capitalism was in full flower.
The Lion in Autumn Page 26