The Lion in Autumn (28 page)

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

Robinson 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.”

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 scenario 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.

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.