Paterno (32 page)

The press pounded Paterno for not having tried the field goal. “Young athletes can make mistakes under pressure and so can veteran coaches,” Joe Lapointe wrote in the
New York Times
. “In his 400th game as coach of Penn State today, Joe Paterno made a difficult decision that might have cost his team a chance for a national championship.” Other reporters followed suit. Closer to home, the
Daily Collegian
published a column blasting Paterno for not having tried a field goal.

But Paterno, as self-critical as he was, did not blame himself for this loss. In his mind, he had done exactly the right thing: he had relied on what was supposed to be a great defense, a defense that would never allow a team to drive the length of the field in the final minutes, lucky play or not. “It wasn’t just Jerry,” Paterno would say. “It was all us coaches. That should have been a great defense. And it wasn’t.”

Things got worse. A week later, again at home, this time on Senior Day against Michigan, Penn State built a 27–17 lead with less than ten minutes left. Once again Paterno felt sure that his defense would not blow the lead. Once again, he was wrong. Michigan’s young quarterback, Tom Brady, scored a touchdown and threw for another to give Michigan a 31–27 victory. Again the press blamed the offense, which was indeed anemic (Penn State had just 7 yards rushing for the game) and sloppy (they lost three fumbles). Even LaVar Arrington seemed to suggest that the offense could have helped out more. “It seemed like we were out there a lot,” he told reporters.

Again, though, Paterno’s fury focused on the defensive failures. How could the team win when it gave up 31 points? When Penn State lost again the next week—this time a 35–28 embarrassment to Michigan State, with the Spartans’ T. J. Duckett scoring four touchdowns—the collapse was complete. Years later, Paterno would call 1999 his worst coaching job. “We let those kids down,” he admitted. When I asked him if Sandusky deserved the lion’s share of the blame, he shrugged. “We all deserve the blame.”

Penn State played Texas A&M in the Alamo Bowl, and for this game the team was motivated. Penn State won 24–0. This kind of dominant defensive performance only made Paterno angrier; it suggested what the season might have been. When the game ended, the players gave Sandusky the game ball. “Man, it was like a Hollywood script,” Arrington told reporters.

“Will you miss Joe Paterno?”
Sports Illustrated
’s Jack McCallum asked Sandusky.

“Well, not exactly,” he replied.

WHEN THE SEASON ENDED, THERE
were various celebrations for Sandusky. Paterno was conspicuously absent. He released a statement on the day Sandusky’s retirement was announced: “We can’t say enough about what he has brought to the football program as an exceptional coach, a fine player and a person of great character and integrity.” But he did not answer questions, and he did not say much publicly about Sandusky. He did not even offer the expected nice comment about Sandusky for Jack McCallum’s
Sports Illustrated
story. At the team banquet, Paterno usually called up the seniors individually and said something about them, but this time he told Guido D’Elia that he would rather not. D’Elia recalled, “He told me, ‘We let those players down. We did a terrible job coaching them. I can’t stand up there and just act like it’s a celebration.’ ”

Paterno appeared briefly at Sandusky’s retirement celebration in April; he left early, claiming a “prior commitment.” Shortly afterward, at Penn State’s Media Day, he unloaded on Sandusky’s coaching deficiencies, while carefully not using his name:

• People don’t realize that we have not been a good defensive team since we’ve been in the Big Ten.

• My biggest concern is for us to get back to where we’re a good defensive team.

• You win by forcing turnovers, not getting stupid penalties, and the team that plays tough, hard-nosed defense ends up winning most of the time.

• If we’re going to be a better football team, we can’t be seventieth [nationally] defensively.

And perhaps most pointed:

• We’ve got to improve on defense. We’ve got to do things better as a coordinated defense than we did at times last year.

That word,
coordinated
, was the direct hit. Sandusky, after all, had been defensive coordinator. Paterno was so eager to eliminate Sandusky’s fingerprints from the team that he got rid of the defensive coordinator title and instead called Tom Bradley assistant coach in charge of defense and cornerbacks. He later regretted making his feelings about Sandusky so public, and he tried to clear the air a bit by telling reporter Gordie Jones of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania)
Intelligencer
, “Jerry did a great job.” However, even in that story, he could not keep himself from saying that the team had to recruit better because Sandusky had “not done a lot of recruiting in recent years.”

By then, Sandusky and Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley had worked out the final details of a retirement package, which included professor emeritus status, access to athletic facilities (including the locker rooms), an office near the football building, a parking pass, and access to Penn State email. Paterno was not directly involved in the negotiations, and he would say at the end of his life that he was opposed to allowing Sandusky access to the football program, simply because he did not want the potential for distraction. When I told Paterno that people would find it hard to believe that he could not have influenced Sandusky’s retirement package, he said, “People like to give me too much power. That’s Tim’s department. I told Tim how I felt. He worked out the deal as he saw fit.”

Through the years, Paterno worked with a lot of coaches. Some retired. Some left for jobs at other schools. Some, like longtime offensive coordinator Fran Ganter, found jobs in athletic administration. It was business. In Paterno’s mind, Jerry Sandusky was no longer his concern.

P
aterno felt sure that with Sandusky off the staff and with a few changes, everything would feel new and exciting again. Everyone talked about how energetic he seemed as the 2000 season started. He tinkered with everything. He had the players’ sheet of rules and regulations rewritten so that it was a little bit stricter but also a little bit fresher. (Paterno added, “As they said in
The Lion King
:
Remember who you are.
”) He worked hard to be more active in practice,
to challenge coaches more, to do anything to eliminate the bad taste of the 1999 season.

But the 2000 season turned out to be the worst of Paterno’s career. It crashed before it even began. In May, Penn State quarterback Rashard Casey and a friend were arrested for aggravated assault against an off-duty police officer outside a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey. What made matters worse was that it appeared to be a racial incident; Casey was black, and the police officer, who was white, was with a black woman. Casey went to see Paterno in his office. “Rashard looked me in the eye and said, ‘Coach, I didn’t do anything,’ ” Paterno recalled. “I knew Rashard. I knew what was in his heart. And I believed him.”

Paterno announced that he would not discipline Casey and would start him in the first game of the season. This set off a firestorm, with columnists across the country calling Paterno a hypocrite and a sellout. “Just a guess,” a Pittsburgh columnist wrote. “If the Penn State long snapper had been charged with assault, he would have been kicked off the team.” Most of the stories that criticized Paterno’s decision to play Casey also mentioned that Paterno was only seven victories away from passing Bear Bryant for most victories by a Division I-A coach. “People rush to judgment and they want to believe the worst,” Paterno responded.

At the end of the season, it was announced that Casey would not be indicted. In time, he would be awarded a settlement in his own lawsuit against the Hoboken Police Department for malicious prosecution and violation of his civil rights. Paterno had been right; Casey was not guilty. “May they burn in First Amendment Hell!” Casey’s lawyer Dennis McAlvey said of all the people who had convicted Casey in the press. Paterno did not say anything at all. By then few Penn State football fans even cared.

The reason few cared: Penn State kept losing. The Nittany Lions began the season ranked twenty-second in the country, but in their first game they got pounded by Southern California. Then, in perhaps the most shocking loss of the entire Paterno era, they lost to Toledo 24–6. In retrospect the loss was not so shocking: Toledo was a very
good team, probably better than Penn State. But at the time it suggested a colossal shift in college football. Penn State was supposed to destroy teams like Toledo. After the game, Penn State running back Larry Johnson (son of assistant coach Larry Johnson Sr.) did something perhaps even more shocking than the loss: he ripped the coaching staff. “Everything we do is too predictable,” he told reporters. “Everybody knows what we are doing. The system has been around too long. We’ve got coaches who have been here for thirty years, twenty years, it seems like things never change.”

Penn State lost again two weeks later, to Pitt, and suddenly there was a lot of talk about Paterno’s age. He was seventy-three. His team looked out of sorts. He was still six victories away from passing Bear Bryant’s record, and many people thought that record was what motivated him. His son Jay thought he knew better: “The people who think that Joe cares about the wins record just don’t understand what makes him tick.”

Paterno downplayed his age and the slow start. “I work harder at coaching today than I have ever worked in my life,” he told the
New York Times,
one of several news organizations that sent someone to State College to find out what was going on with Penn State football. When asked on his weekly radio show how he maintained his composure through the tough start, he answered, “I guess I’m philosophical.” Paterno figured if he just kept pushing and demanding and insisting, things would get back to normal. It had always worked before.

ADAM TALIAFERRO WAS A BRIGHT
and talented freshman who grew up outside of Philadelphia. His story is familiar to anyone who follows Penn State football because it is the story of so many of Paterno’s players: he was recruited by numerous schools, by flamboyant and charismatic coaches, but he was drawn to Penn State by Paterno’s honesty. “Coach Paterno didn’t make me any guarantees. He didn’t tell me, ‘You will start as a freshman’ or ‘You will be an All-American.’ Other coaches said that stuff. But he just told me that Penn State was a good
place for me, that I was more than a football player, that I could do anything and that he would always help me.”

The Taliaferro path was like hundreds of others. Paterno was as hard on him as he was on every freshman, telling him on more than one occasion that he was useless and not Penn State material. “Play like that,” Paterno told him once, “and I’ll send you back to New Jersey.”

As mentioned, one of the great dilemmas of Paterno’s coaching life was how to handle freshmen. He believed deeply that freshmen were not ready physically (in most cases) or emotionally (in all cases) to play college football. Yet he played freshmen. He would say he had little choice if he wanted Penn State to be competitive. And he did want that very much. “I’ve been a hypocrite about that my whole life,” he said. “I always knew that it was wrong to play freshmen. But I did it. True, I did it less than most people. But I still did it.”

He did do it less than most. For years, other coaches would tell eager high school seniors,
You don’t want to go to Penn State. They don’t play freshmen.
But as time went on, Paterno played freshmen more and more. He knew that playing freshmen was the new reality of college football, and he did not deny that he was making another concession for success. The last great coaching surge of his life would be powered by freshmen.

But before that, in 2000, he played freshman Adam Taliaferro. “It was actually a bit surprising,” Taliaferro said. “I really didn’t think I would get a chance to play much as a freshman.” Taliaferro had shown a great sense of the game, a great feel for what to do in confusing moments on the field, and this was what mattered most to Paterno. Before the 2000 season, he had given his players a score sheet that showed exactly how he and the other coaches would grade them. It looked like this:

Attitude (10 points)
. This means behavior off the field, class attendance, grades, appearance, maturity, respect for teammates and other people, and being on time for meetings and appointments.

Athletic ability (10 points).
This is a tough one . . . . Remember, if you have the essential quality—attitude—our evaluation of your athletic ability will be based just on that and nothing else.

Speed (8 points).
No explanation needed.

Toughness (8 points).
It isn’t only physical, but also mental toughness.