The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  Nonetheless, with Paterno’s considerable input, Oswald and his successor, Bryce Jordan, continued secret, sporadic negotiations with Big Ten presidents for years until, in December of 1989, the marriage was formally announced. Football would make the switch in 1993 and the other sports, then members of the Atlantic Ten, would convert sooner. On hearing the surprising news, Michigan’s legendary coach Bo Schembechler telephoned Paterno and called his new league rival “a sneaky son of a bitch.”

  Paterno warmed to the Big Ten instantly. For a man in his mid-sixties who had been at one school all his coaching life, it was a welcome change. “It’s like starting a second career,” he said. He ratcheted up his exercise routine, walking farther, lifting weights, watching his diet more closely. The Penn State coach, who needed only a victory in the Pasadena classic to complete a grand-slam sweep of the major bowls, began wearing Rose Bowl ties to games and various social functions. He took to videotaping every televised Big Ten game and studying it intently. “I go to sleep watching those tapes,” he said in 1992.

  He would soon awake to a new dawn for Penn State football.

  Finally, after a nearly four-year wait, the Nittany Lions played their first Big Ten game at State College on September 4, 1993. In anticipation of the move, Beaver Stadium had been expanded again. The addition of an upper deck in its north end zone added 10,033 seats and raised the stadium’s capacity to 93,967. So great was the anticipation of Big Ten success that a record 95,387 attended the conference opener, a 38–20 triumph over Minnesota.

  Anyone who feared that the switch to a league renowned for its physical, earthbound style might make for boring football was comforted immediately. Penn State rolled up 504 yards in offense that day, while Minnesota quarterback Tim Schade threw 66 passes for 478 yards.

  “It feels pretty good,” Paterno said after the long-anticipated debut. “I went into the game with a little anxiety.”

  Penn State’s star in that Minnesota game had been wide receiver Bobby Engram. Engram had sat out the previous season after he and fellow wideout Rick Sayles were implicated in an off-campus burglary. An unprecedented spate of off-the-field problems in 1992 had hit Paterno’s program. In addition to Engram and Sayles, defensive back Brian Miller was charged with cocaine possession, and Sayles, O. J. McDuffie, and Mark Graham faced disorderly conduct charges after a bar fight.

  The unusually serious nature of some of the arrests led to speculation that Paterno’s standards were slipping. The Centre Daily Times editorialized that the incidents tarnished “the reputation of the team and the individuals.” They also revived talk about the perceived hypocrisy of Paterno, who was happy to criticize other programs but apparently couldn’t control his own.

  “Penn State gives the impression that its kids walk out of chemistry class and say, ‘We only have sixteen credits this fall, let’s play football,’ ” said ESPN football analyst Beano Cook, the former Pitt sports-information director. “My only resentment is those holier-than-thou statements, those self-serving statements. I don’t get mad at Miami, because they don’t try to represent themselves like Penn State does. Penn State is no different than Miami, Michigan, Texas. It’s a business. Notre Dame is no different. It’s money. It’s big time.”

  But winning can cure a variety of sins. And the immediate success that accompanied the Lions’ entrance into the Big Ten quickly quieted all the concerns.

  In the past, Paterno’s best offenses seemed always to lack one crucial element. Maybe it was the strong-armed quarterback in ‘69, the NFL-quality wide receiver in 1973, the kind of sure-handed tight end missing since Ted Kwalick in 1968, or an offensive line that was solid from end to end. But in 1994, there were no weaknesses.

  Paterno had an offense that would be unparalleled in Penn State history. The unit would establish fourteen school records, lead the nation in total offense (520 yards) and points (47.8) per game, produce five all-Americans—Engram, quarterback Kerry Collins, guard Jeff Hartings, tight end Kyle Brady, and tailback Ki-Jana Carter—and four first-round NFL draft picks, including Carter, the No. 1 overall pick in the 1995 draft.

  “You don’t see any NFL offenses like that,” a shell-shocked Michigan State quarterback Tony Banks said after the Nittany Lions thumped his Spartans, 59–31.

  The offense had begun to take shape early in 1993. During that season’s third game, a 31–0 shutout victory at Iowa, Paterno replaced junior quarterback John Sacca with junior Kerry Collins. Collins scuffled at times, but following a loss at Ohio State on October 30, the Nittany Lions would not lose another game for twenty-three months. They would finish 10–2 overall, 6–2 in the conference for their first Big Ten season, and thump Tennessee, 31–13, in the Citrus Bowl.

  In 1994, the Lions won their first five games—over Minnesota, Southern Cal, Iowa, Rutgers, and Temple—by an average score of 51–17. When Penn State rallied for a stirring 31–24 victory at No. 5 Michigan in Week 6, it moved to the top of both national polls and moved students in a way that took State College authorities by surprise.

  Police said more than ten thousand students, many of them fueled by a day’s worth of drinking, gathered around campus for a spontaneous celebration after Penn State’s win at Ann Arbor gave it the No. 1 spot. Near midnight, some in the roaming pack entered Beaver Stadium, where they tore up sod near the fifty-yard line and in the end zones.

  The damage was repaired before an October 29 homecoming matchup with No. 21 Ohio State. A year earlier, in Columbus, the Buckeyes had manhandled the Lions, 24–6, and then taunted them afterward, mocking them as “pussies” who were undeserving of Big Ten membership. “That was really a low point for me,” Collins would later recall.

  This time, before a record Beaver Stadium crowd of 97,079, Penn State’s players avenged their humiliation. The final score would be 63–14, but only because Paterno, as always, called off his dogs in the fourth quarter and sent out the second- and third-team units. It was Ohio State’s worst defeat since an 86–0 shellacking by archrival Michigan in 1902.

  But there may have been an explanation beyond revenge. Undefeated Nebraska was No. 2 in the polls that week and its victory over No. 3 Colorado concluded before the start of the Penn State–Ohio State game. While Paterno never admitted to any such calculation, his team understood that it would need an impressive victory to counter Nebraska’s win.

  Afterward, Paterno adamantly refused to touch on the subject of rankings and routs. “You guys can talk about it, you have papers to sell,” he said. “I don’t have to talk about it and I’m not going to.”

  Apparently, 63–14 wasn’t impressive enough. While Penn State held on to the lead in the USA Today/CNN coaches’ rankings, Nebraska jumped into the No. 1 spot in the next Associated Press writers’ poll. Some observers made the connection between the Nittany Lions’ lopsided victory and the tight battle in the polls, accusing Paterno of intentionally running up the score on Ohio State—even though he had substituted liberally in the final minutes.

  A week later, however, the polls and the criticism must have been on his mind. His reluctance to pile it on an outgunned Indiana team probably cost him a third national championship.

  Following the victories over Michigan and Ohio State, the Nittany Lions leveled off emotionally against Indiana. Before and during the game, Paterno chastised them for being lethargic. The Lions played solidly against the 5–3 Hoosiers, but nowhere near their spectacular standards. Collins threw for 213 yards and two scores and Carter collected 192 yards on the ground, 80 of which came on a touchdown run with six minutes left that gave Penn State a comfortable 35–14 advantage.

  It was then that Paterno might have doomed his chances for a third national title. While his need to win was overpowering, he never wanted to embarrass a coaching colleague. Up by 21 points with less than half of the final quarter remaining, he began to make wholesale substitutions.

  “What I owe to my team is to make sure everybody plays and works hard and I have an opportunity to play them,
” he said. “I think that for me to take some kids who look forward to playing on a Saturday and not play them when I think the game is in control because I want to make sure that we win by X number of points so we can preserve a place [in the polls] would be irresponsible.”

  Indiana scored twice in the game’s last three minutes. The second touchdown came with the clock at 0:00, on a successful Hail Mary pass into the end zone. Hoosiers coach Bill Mallory then, for some reason, ordered a two-point conversion try. When it was successful, the final score was deceptively close, 35–29.

  The built-in flaw in the polls, of course, is that no single voter can see every game, or even a majority of them. They are left to digest reputations, prejudices, newspaper reports, TV highlight shows, and raw scores. Voters who hadn’t seen or read about the Indiana game assumed the Nittany Lions had barely squeaked by the lowly Hoosiers. And since Nebraska had won easily, 45–17, against Kansas, they moved the Cornhuskers to the top of both polls.

  If it seemed a minor setback at the time, it soon became an enormous one.

  At Illinois a week later, the high-rise hotel where Penn State was headquartered lost power on game day, forcing players to climb up and down steps, and eat pizza instead of their prearranged brunch. Given the school’s taste in uniforms, it wasn’t surprising that the fifty pies hurriedly ordered for the Nittany Lions were all plain.

  When the game began, the Lions quickly fell behind the 6–3 Illinois, 21–0. With 6:07 to play, they trailed 31–28 and had the ball on their own 4-yard line. But Collins, who completed thirteen of fifteen passes in the fourth quarter and all seven on this final drive, moved them 96 yards down a fog-shrouded field for the winning touchdown and a 35–31 lead with just fifty-seven seconds left. No other Paterno team had ever come back from a deficit as large as 21–0.

  “If there’s a quarterback playing any better than Kerry Collins, he’s got to be out of this world,” Paterno said afterward.

  “That,” said a surprised Collins when told of his coach’s comment, “is high praise from someone who doesn’t give high praise.”

  Penn State then ran out its remaining regular-season schedule—winning 45–17 over Northwestern and 59–31 over Michigan State. Nebraska, meanwhile, defeated Iowa State (28–12) and a mediocre Oklahoma team (13–3) to finish its regular season 12–0.

  Had Penn State still been an independent, it might have met the Cornhuskers in the Orange Bowl. This time, as Big Ten champs, the Nittany Lions were committed to the Rose Bowl, where they would play twelfth-ranked Pac Ten champ Oregon. That gave the Cornhuskers an enormous advantage. They would face No. 3 Miami in the Orange Bowl. So even if the Nittany Lions won big in Pasadena, the only way they were going to capture another national championship would be for Nebraska to lose.

  The statistics compiled and the awards won by his offense even impressed Paterno. “Some of those numbers,” he said while preparing for the Rose Bowl, “are amazing.” Carter had rushed for 1,539 yards, a single-season figure topped only by the legendary Lydell Mitchell at Penn State. He had scored twenty-three touchdowns, averaged 7.8 yards a rush, and finished second to Colorado tailback Rashaan Salaam in the Heisman Trophy balloting. Collins was fourth in the Heisman voting, won the Maxwell Award as the nation’s top player and the Davey O’Brien Award as its best QB. He completed 176 of his passes for 2,679 yards, both school records. Engram captured the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top receiver and caught fifty-two balls for a record 1,029 yards. Brady, the tight end, averaged 13.5 yards a catch.

  The Rose Bowl proved to be an enormous treat for Penn State football. Fans who had wearied of the Lions’ New Year’s trips to Florida or New Orleans flocked to Pasadena for the team’s first trip there since 1923, when the entire traveling party, team and all, totaled twenty-nine people. The partylike atmosphere surrounding the school’s second Rose Bowl seventy-one years later is still recalled as one of the greatest moments in Penn State football history.

  The game was entertaining, if ultimately fruitless. Carter burst 83 yards for a touchdown on the Nittany Lions’ first play from scrimmage. Penn State, its all-white uniforms contrasting sharply with Oregon’s garish green-and-gold outfits, pulled away from the Ducks in the third period for a 38–20 triumph.

  In just its second league season, Penn State had become the first Big Ten school to finish with a 12–0 record. Paterno, meanwhile, now had assembled an undefeated team in each of the four decades he’d coached, captured all four of the major New Year’s Day games, and won a record sixteen bowls overall.

  But Nebraska had won that day as well, 24–17, over Miami. There was some hope among the Nittany Lions that the close Orange Bowl result and Penn State’s easy Rose Bowl victory might combine to cause poll voters to rearrange the two top spots. In the end, though, sympathy for Cornhuskers coach Tom Osborne, who had yet to win a national title, was likely a more significant factor. Nebraska held on to its No. 1 ranking.

  For a fourth time, a Paterno team had finished unbeaten and not won a national championship. This time, though, his complaints were few. “If I could do something about it, I’d do it,” he said. “If I could rant, scream, and yell and get people to change their votes, I’d do it. But it’s over. I don’t think it was fair. I think we were as good as anybody. I wouldn’t say we were better than Nebraska, but we were as good.”

  The Rose Bowl season did have its rewards beyond the field for Penn State. While researchers consistently found that athletic success did not translate into increased alumni contributions, a 2000 Western Economic Association International study determined that there was one exception—a football bowl victory. Contributions to the Nittany Lion Club increased sharply the following year, as did requests for season tickets. Before long, the school announced plans for yet another Beaver Stadium addition. And a Penn State professor, who established that each Nittany Lions win was worth an additional fifteen hundred applications, calculated that in 1996 the number of applicants jumped by fifteen percent, a phenomenon he attributed to Rose Bowl–driven publicity.

  For a while, Penn State would be remarkably successful in the Big Ten. In their first five seasons, Paterno’s teams would go 31–9 in league play and 51–10 overall. But then something changed.

  Some say Penn State’s descent into a conference also-ran came about because the week-to-week competition was stiffer. Others pointed to the recruiting inroads other Big Ten schools had made in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. Whatever the reason, from 2000 through 2004, Penn State went 16–24 in the conference.

  And on Penn State Web sites and chat rooms, in response both to their team’s recent record and a new national rush toward conference realignment, a cry that must have made Paterno chuckle went out from some Nittany Lions fans:

  Let’s get out of the Big Ten and form an eastern conference.

  CHAPTER 18

  JOE PATERNO LIKED TO SAY that newspaper reporters used to be among his best friends. Even now, when the wall of separation between press and State was as thick as ever, he was willing to make time for The New York Times or USA Today.

  A coach’s relationship with the men and women who cover him and his team on a regular basis might seem trivial or a little too “inside baseball” for the general public, until you consider that it was the media who introduced America to Paterno. It was the media who chronicled his controversial stands over the years and who voiced its approval of his methods. And it was, of course, the media, with the considerable aid of the coach himself, who constructed the legend of Joe Paterno.

  But they never really had much access to Penn State football except through the coach. Practices were off-limits. So were assistant coaches. You could request interviews with players, but very often they weren’t granted. As a result, the beat writers became dependent on maintaining a good and happy marriage with Paterno. And for the most part, through all the years of Penn State success, they did.

  When the Nittany Lions began their recent decline, however, the rela
tionship suffered. Criticism became necessary and often Paterno, while insisting he didn’t read the papers or watch TV, bristled. Things worsened considerably during the 3–9 season in 2003 and in 2004.

  “I get to the point where I don’t read it,” Paterno had said of the coverage. “I read the news section of the local paper and I get the Sunday New York Times, and they never rip on us in the New York Times. . . . I’ve told Zack Mills and Michael Robinson and all these guys, ‘If you don’t read it, it doesn’t exist.’ ”

  The sessions with reporters generally were conducted with civility, and Paterno usually cooperated good-naturedly. But while his answers frequently were expansive, they became less and less revealing over the years. He gave reporters what he wanted to give them and didn’t care what they did with it.

  “I wouldn’t enjoy reading some of the crap people write,” he would say after the 2004 season. “Newspaper guys have got to sell newspapers. They’re in a tough business. They’re competing against talk shows and television and all those guys who are talking all the time, so I can appreciate where they’re coming from. They’re trying to get a story. They’re trying to get some interest. . . . And one of the ways to do it is create some controversy. Whatever they say or do doesn’t really make any difference to me.”

  But clearly it did. That strained relationship, he later admitted, turned out to be the reason he had stopped attending the cocktail receptions on Fridays. Paterno said that he once enjoyed providing writers with insights into his thinking and strategy. He knew they had a tough job to do and, he said, he genuinely wanted to help them. But as he got older and the reporters younger, they often came to cross-purposes. Because he revealed less, the writers asked less. Eventually, according to the coach, the sessions grew to be little more than a bunch of people sitting around a hotel suite watching sports on TV.