The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  Those circumstances reflected a couple of chilling statistics for anyone concerned about the commercialization of college sports. Ohio State athletics, after redoing the stadium and constructing new state-of-the-art basketball, hockey, baseball, and track-and-field facilities, owed more than $220 million. The $90-plus million 2004 sports budget—the nation’s largest—required annual debt-service payments that topped $16 million.

  Once Paterno accompanied his team onto the field for pregame warm-ups, he was extremely busy. These road trips gave all his admirers in those places an opportunity to get close to him. And now his age and uncertain future lent some urgency to their efforts.

  He talked with Ohio State coach Jim Tressel while photographers, sprawled on the grass below, snapped their photos. He chatted with Buckeyes assistants, one of whom introduced him to his son, a Buckeyes walk-on. He posed for pictures with the chain-gang crew and with some traveling Blue Band members. And he tested the footing on the wet surface.

  Mills was dressed for the game but would not play, which delighted his many critics. Even Jack Ham, the former all-American linebacker at Penn State who now served as Jones’s color analyst on radio broadcasts, was privately critical. While telling sportswriters he admired Mills’s character a great deal, Ham described the quarterback’s arm as “candy-ass.”

  Just before the game began, a Penn State fan released a clot of blue-and-white balloons. They rose quickly into the dark sky, buffeted back and forth by the winds, before drifting slowly out of sight.

  If nothing else, the Iowa loss had prompted Paterno to make a few dramatic changes. Concerned that the Hawkeyes might have been stealing sideline signs, the coach mandated that plays would be shuttled in. And for the first time, Hall would be stationed in the upstairs coaches’ box, alongside Jay Paterno. With the eyes of countless reporters on them, the two men in the glass-enclosed booth kept their attention focused on the field.

  “We felt like [Hall] could do a little better job upstairs,” Paterno explained. “He had always been upstairs when he was an assistant. The play calling was done exactly the same way. They consult on different things. It was a good change of pace and Galen didn’t have to listen to me bitch on the sidelines, so it was a good break for him.”

  The perception grew stronger that Penn State’s byzantine play-calling system—Hall calling the running plays, Jay calling the passes, all with the input of Dick Anderson and, ultimately, Paterno himself—was a hopeless muddle. Asked who had been calling the plays against Iowa, Robinson laughed and said, “God.”

  Paterno insisted he had little to do with the play calling once the games started. He said his main input had been to try to keep things simple, to remove plays from the game plan, not add them.

  But with an offense that ranked 107th out of 117 Division I-A teams in scoring and passing efficiency and 86th in rushing, the pressure on the staff intensified. Reports of a rift between Hall and the younger Paterno continued, reports the head coach continued to deny.

  Only Bill Kenney, who, along with Anderson, coached the line, remained on the sideline among the offensive staff. So it was he who had to endure Paterno’s frequent questions and complaints.

  “Bill Kenney has to take all the brunt now,” Paterno joked.

  Despite the show of self-deprecating humor, Paterno continued to bristle about the negative sniping at his offensive staff, criticism that stung all the worse when it was directed at his son.

  “I just don’t think it’s fair,” he said. “If there’s a criticism to be made of the coaches, I think I’m the guy to do it. If I allow people to criticize the offensive coaches or criticize the defensive coaches for something here, something there, I don’t think you can have a good organization,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  On a Penn State football blog, one fan summed up the feelings of many.

  “The fans want Oe Paterno,” he wrote. “That’s Joe Paterno without the Jay.”

  Ohio State was experiencing a down year too. The Buckeyes were 4–3, 1–3 in the Big Ten. Penn State, however, had lost five straight at Ohio Stadium, not having won there since 1978.

  The game began with Robinson at quarterback. And when the first play was a rollout run by the junior, a Penn State photographer in the press box yelped with joy. He had won a $40 bet, correctly anticipating that Robinson would run right on his first play under center. “He does it every time,” said the photographer.

  Without Mills, Paterno’s game plan was heavy with runs. Keeping the ball on the ground, the Lions moved to Ohio State’s 31 on their opening possession before Robinson’s sideline pass was intercepted by Buckeyes cornerback Ashton Youboty.

  There were no passes and no first downs on Penn State’s next drive. But Kapinos’s punt was returned 67 yards for a touchdown by Ted Ginn Jr. Ginn raced untouched into the end zone, displaying the kind of breakaway speed the Nittany Lions sorely missed. For the game, the Buckeyes’ return teams would outgain Penn State’s by a total of 192 to – 1.

  “Those guys,” said Kapinos, who fanned on Ginn late in the return, “are freak athletes.”

  Robinson’s next pass, a screen to Terrance Phillips on a third-and- 7 from his own 23, was intercepted too. Strong safety Tyler Everett returned it 24 yards for a score. With 3:41 left in the opening quarter, Ohio State had run four plays, gained five yards, and accumulated no first downs. And the Buckeyes led, 14–0.

  Robinson, who had ended the previous game with two interceptions and a fumble on his final three plays, had thrown two interceptions in three attempts in this one.

  No one could blame the defense. While Penn State now had given the ball away twenty-three times this season, its defense had permitted only two touchdowns and three field goals on those turnovers.

  Paterno was experiencing his standard sideline agita—reacting angrily when Rubin dropped what would have been a first-down completion on a third-and-15 pass from Robinson; repeating the tantrum when Phillips dropped another one later; throwing his hands up in the air after the second interception; collaring Kenney for a heated exchange. ESPN, which televised the game, kept track of his pacing, calculating that the coach logged more than four miles during the course of the game.

  At one point, when he made the decision to go for a first down on a fourth-and-short, Paterno disgustedly waved “go ahead” to his players, as if this woeful offense had forced him to abandon all his cautious instincts.

  After the two lightning scores, the Ohio Stadium bell tolled joyously for the crowd of 104,947. But for Penn State and its season, it sounded ominously like a death knell.

  A three-yard TD run by Tony Hunt in the second quarter (only the third Penn State TD since September 18) was negated immediately by Branden Joe’s four-yard scoring run on the ensuing drive.

  The Nittany Lions’ defense had controlled Ohio State’s attack throughout the game, but the Lions still trailed 21–7 when Paterno made another bizarre fourth-quarter decision. With under ten minutes to play, his team trailing by 14 points and facing a fourth-and-goal at the Ohio State 3, he decided to go for a field goal. At that point, the possibility that the Big Ten’s worst offense might score twice more in the closing minutes seemed as remote as a Ralph Nader victory in the coming Tuesday’s national election.

  “I thought we were playing really good defense with 9:30 to go,” he later explained. “I figured we’d get on the board, put some pressure on them rather than have to score twice, and get a two-point play to win. That’s one of those things you’re never sure you’re right, but I think I’d probably do it the same way again.”

  Gould’s 21-yarder made it 21–10. Penn State would have one more possession before time ran out—in that day’s game, and on their faded dreams of the postseason.

  The Nittany Lions had now lost five straight games for just the second time in Paterno’s career, the other streak having come a season earlier.

  “Each one,” said linebacker Posluszny, “gets worse and worse.”

  Rob
inson had run twenty times for 90 yards, but completed only seven of twenty-one passes for 69 yards and two interceptions. “I stunk,” he later admitted.

  The defenders were frustrated again. They had allowed Ohio State just 202 yards and one touchdown and now were, statistically, the nation’s seventh-best defense. Their average yield of 275.4 yards a game was Penn State’s lowest since 1978.

  Yet, at 2–6, the Lions were guaranteed a fourth losing season in five years and, much to the dismay of alumni who had once been accustomed to a winter’s vacation at a warm-weather bowl site, another December at home. That meant the graduating seniors would become the first class in the Paterno era to go through school without a bowl victory.

  “I never would have thought I would have lost as many games as I have wearing a Penn State uniform,” said junior guard Charles Rush.

  “Each week we’re so close,” said Paxson, “so close, but we just find a way to lose.”

  Someone asked Robinson what he would have said if, when he was a freshman, he had been told what awaited him in the seasons ahead.

  “It’s a lie,” he imagined. “You’re crazy.”

  The postgame performance wasn’t one of Paterno’s best either. No one bought his explanation on the field goal. He said Hall’s being upstairs “didn’t make any difference to me.” He admitted to planning to play Morelli despite having said the freshman wasn’t ready a few days earlier. And when asked why safety Andrew Guman, who had badly bruised his chest, didn’t play late in the game, the coach responded that he hadn’t even been aware of his absence.

  When Paterno and Tressel came together at midfield for the postgame handshake, Brent Musberger, the ESPN broadcaster, advised his audience to pay attention to their exchange.

  “Because when you’re a coach,” he said, “you never know if this will be the last time.”

  CHAPTER 17

  WHILE PATERNO HAS been widely praised over the years as “the conscience of college sports,” his thought-provoking suggestions have nonetheless been as widely ignored. Since he first gave voice to the concept in the late 1960s, his Grand Experiment has done little to improve national graduation rates or to prevent academic scandals at Minnesota, Tennessee, Georgia, and elsewhere. His nearly forty years of prodding about the need for a postseason play-off system to replace the arbitrariness of the college-football polls has produced little change. His warnings about freshman eligibility have gone unheeded.

  The reason, as he eventually came to understand, was that big-time college football was a formidable commercial industry, a multibillion-dollar enterprise supported by corporate sponsorships, tax breaks, and TV money. For all the nobility of purpose Paterno and some of his colleagues espouse, the desire for change among American colleges has never been as potent as the hunger for cash and the lure of football success. There were rare exceptions, such as when the national powerhouse University of Chicago abandoned football to concentrate on academic success, or when the Ivy League was formed in 1956 and its members subsequently eliminated athletic scholarships. Like politics today, the sport is driven increasingly by an endless need to raise money. The circular nature of that process prevents substantive change: Victories attract big crowds and generous donors. Big crowds and generous donors provide the revenue to build and maintain state-of-the-art sports facilities. Those facilities attract the top recruits. And the top recruits produce the victories.

  Take Paterno’s loudly trumpeted belief that the football season is too long for busy student athletes. Regular seasons have grown from nine games when he started at Penn State to twelve. And for teams involved in conference play-offs and bowls, it can be extended even further, to thirteen or fourteen.

  “People don’t seem to understand,” Paterno has said. “A kid comes into a big-time program and a place where you demand he goes to class, you demand he takes legitimate subjects, and then you say to him, ‘OK, but don’t screw up on Saturday. You’re going to play. You better do your homework. You better be in meetings. You better pay attention. Take a tape home. Do the whole bit.’ . . . I hate it. . . . I think we need to make up our minds. Are we here to educate kids? Or are we using these kids to make money?”

  Many coaches agree with him. So does the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which in 1991 characterized football’s lengthy schedule as “one more extension of the overcommercialization of college sports.” Finally, in 2000, the NCAA decided to compromise, limiting regular-season schedules to eleven games, except in years when there was a fifth Saturday in either September or October. But when Penn State played eleven games in 2004, its Big Ten and other scheduling obligations meant the Nittany Lions had only six at home instead of the typical seven. The loss of that single Saturday cost the athletic department more than $3 million in revenue. Other schools also were penalized financially, and so, not surprisingly, the NCAA soon was pressured to reinstate permanent twelve-game schedules. Paterno had tilted at another windmill and lost.

  His frustrations with the misappropriated priorities of college athletics, however, always were ameliorated by his obsession with coaching. Whenever the dollar signs threatened to overwhelm him, he would lose himself in Xs and Os. Still, there were times when Paterno’s administrative headaches wouldn’t go away. Football is the linchpin of Penn State athletics. Its revenue, as Paterno never fails to note, supports the other twenty-eight sports. That being the case, in the early 1980s university administrators decided that the man in charge of football ought to be the man officially in charge of all athletics. So at President John Oswald’s request, Paterno, for two hectic years, served as the school’s athletic director.

  “We were in a little transitional situation,” Paterno recalled. “The reason I took it over was . . . we had been to four or five straight New Year’s Day bowls as an independent and I was trying to get some facilities done and we didn’t have any money. It was a lot of late nights until three or four A.M. . . . There still were some things that were not right. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, but that is just the way it drifted a little bit. So I took it over.”

  By then, Paterno could see a shifting sports landscape. New, made-for-TV basketball leagues like the Big East, which began play in the 1979–80 season, were thriving. More significantly, football conferences and the big independents wanted to make their own TV deals. The NCAA’s monopoly on those contracts was being challenged in the courts. In anticipation of its nullification—which eventually came from the Supreme Court in 1984—the Southeastern, Southwest, and Atlantic Coast Conferences were moving openly toward expansion. They recognized that the bigger and broader they and their audiences became, the more they could demand in TV-rights fees. (The size of the bonanza was unimagined at the time. Between 1996 and 2000, the Big Ten, Big East, ACC, SEC, Pac Ten, and Notre Dame would earn $373 million from televised football.) Suddenly, football independents like Notre Dame, Miami, Florida State, and Penn State were being hunted like prized high-school tailbacks.

  By the early 1980s, Paterno knew Penn State football had to get into a conference if it wanted to ensure a steady flow of television revenue. So he tried to persuade the school’s traditional rivals to form an eastern all-sports league. But several, especially those where basketball was far more powerful than at Penn State, balked. In particular, Pitt, Boston College, and Syracuse did not want to abandon lucrative Big East basketball to join a conference with the Nittany Lions. Another of Paterno’s dreams was dead.

  Not long after that disappointment, he relinquished the AD’s job, though certainly not the power. He turned it over in 1982 to his handpicked successor and close friend, Jim Tarman. And when Tarman retired in 1993, another Paterno loyalist, Tim Curley, became AD.

  Its vision for the East thwarted, Penn State looked westward, toward the Big Ten.

  Paterno continues to insist that the real impetus for Penn State’s move into the Big Ten came from the university’s administrators and not its football coach. But it’s impossible to examine the s
cenario and not see Paterno’s fingerprints.

  Had Penn State’s request to join the ninety-four-year-old conference been left to the ten coaches and athletic directors, it’s doubtful the move would have occurred. Paterno knew how his colleagues thought, and he realized there was no way those competitive individuals were willingly going to welcome a program like Penn State’s, one that had the potential to upset the balance of power among perennial strongboys like Michigan, Ohio State, and Wisconsin. So he helped orchestrate an end run.

  President Oswald, on whose watch the first negotiations took place, was a native Minnesotan who had long been an admirer of the Big Ten schools and their broad-based, politically supported, research-driven academic agendas. While leading a major transformation at the University of Kentucky in the 1960s, he had looked to those large midwestern schools as models. At Penn State, with Paterno’s urging and essential imprimatur, he did so again.

  To Oswald and Paterno, the Big Ten looked to be a perfect fit. Rural central Pennsylvania was far more midwestern than northeastern in its outlook on life and sports. Penn State’s fans had a soft edge when compared to those in Philadelphia, New York, or Boston, whose markets were dominated by professional sports. The league’s stadiums and national reputation were larger than those of Penn State’s traditional eastern rivals. And all of its members but the private Northwestern were big, research-oriented state schools with academic missions similar to Penn State’s.

  Still, as eager as the league’s presidents may have been to add Penn State and its promise of financial bounty, they needed something that would lessen the concerns of their top athletic people. What eventually clinched the deal was the realization that an expanded Big Ten would include the millions of viewers in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh TV markets, no small point when negotiating future network contracts.

  While there were potential drawbacks, most were relatively minor. The most immediate hurdle was scheduling, because game commitments were made years in advance. Travel expenses would jump tremendously for all the schools. State College’s tiny airport couldn’t yet accommodate the kind of large jets in which Big Ten football teams traveled. Nittany Lions fans, accustomed to making relatively short drives for Penn State road games in Annapolis, Morgantown, Philadelphia, New Brunswick, Syracuse, or Pittsburgh, would instead have to get to Chicago, Madison, or Minneapolis.