The Lion in Autumn (14 page)

Paterno had pinpointed the last Boston College game as the beginning of the end for his 2003 Penn State team. He had mentioned it so often in the spring and summer and now during this week of preparation that his players had begun to talk about exacting some revenge.

A year ago, after an opening-game victory over Temple, Penn State hosted BC, the two Eastern teams' first meeting since 1992. The Eagles exploded for three first-quarter touchdowns in a physically dominating 27–14 victory. What would become the worst season in Paterno's career was off and crawling.

“They laughed at us last year, basically,” Michael Robinson said. “[With a 21–0 lead] the game started to seem like it was a joke to them. They really handed it to us. I'm not going to say they relaxed, but they
were like the game was over. We all remember. We've got to go up there and play Penn State football and see what happens.”

Sophomore linebacker Tim Shaw said, “[This week's game] is a little bit of a payback.”

Paterno and his assistants had used the game as motivation. When players erred in practice, he told them they obviously didn't recall the butt-whipping BC had administered a year ago. It may have been as thorough a physical and psychological beating, he reminded them, as any Penn State team had endured in their lifetimes.

“There is no question, as I look back on last year's game with Boston College, that we didn't measure up physically in a tough football game,” Paterno told reporters that week. “We have . . . to get that out of our craw.”

All that strong talk struck BC coach Tom O'Brien as a little odd. Hadn't Penn State lost nine times in ‘03? What about the other eight defeats? Were they somehow more acceptable? It wasn't like his Eagles had been pathetic. Their 8–5 season concluded with a victory over Colorado State in the San Francisco Bowl, making them the only school in the nation to have won bowl games in each of the last four years.

“It sounds like they blamed their loss against us for their whole year last year,” said O'Brien. “Reading all the stuff, it seems like Boston College is the whole reason they went three-and-nine.”

The desire to make a statement against BC may also have served to divert the players from two deaths that hit the Penn State football family. That week sophomore cornerback Darian Hardy's father had died of cancer. And the fourteen-year-old nephew of tight end Isaac Smolko was killed in a bicycle accident in Alabama.

In the past two years, Paterno and his team had seemed to suffer a near nonstop run of death. He had lost his brother, George, who had been the color analyst on Penn State radio broadcasts for years, to a heart attack in 2002; that same year, Ganter's wife, Karen, fifty-three, had died of a sudden brain aneurysm, falling dead in her kitchen as she and her husband talked; Kevin Dare, the brother of cornerback Eric and a fellow Penn State student, had died in a pole-vaulting accident during track practice; and just a few months earlier, Kevin Baugh had been murdered.

Time on the football field became their respite from tragedy. And another victory would heal them further.

The Eagles had opened this season with a 19–11 road victory, but because it came against a Ball State team that went 4–8 in 2003, no one was quite sure what it signified. As Paterno prepared for the game, the matchup that most concerned him was BC's athletic defensive line against his still-inconsistent offensive front. Boston College had registered five sacks in its opener, led by the large and talented Mathias Kiwanuka's two. Junior tackle Andrew Richardson would be matched up with Kiwanuka.

“I think Andrew will do a good job,” Paterno predicted. “I thought he did a good job last week and I think he will get better. He and Levi Brown are a little bit in the same category as some of the defensive linemen were last year. A lot of them were young, new, and had to play themselves into being a little bit better. I think Andrew will get better. He has a tough job this week. Obviously, we're going to try to help him in the schemes we're going to use. We're not going to hang him out there and say, ‘Hey, if you don't get it done, we don't get it done.' We're going to, obviously, change up on things. . . . He's a smart kid and a good athlete. He's a tough kid. Playing against somebody as good as this kid is will make him even better eventually.”

In private, though, Paterno and his staff looked for ways to get the more elusive Robinson more snaps at quarterback, something they hoped might counter BC's anticipated pass-rush. Robinson had had four carries, four passes, and three receptions against Akron. Penn State had to get the ball more often to its only game-breaker.

“If you get the ball in his hands, he can run over you, run around you, you can throw it to him short and you can throw it to him downfield,” said Paterno. “You can put him in the backfield and he can be a tailback. You can put him in at quarterback and take Mills and put him outside. Michael Robinson gives you a lot of options.”

Penn State got some good news when they learned that freshman BC tailback L. V. Whitworth, who had accumulated 129 yards on twenty-one carries versus Ball State, would miss the game with a knee injury. But
quarterback Paul Peterson, a twenty-four-year-old ex–Mormon missionary who had transferred from BYU, worried Paterno with his poise, his mobility, and his ability to throw on the run.

After what he termed “a good week of practice,” Paterno and his team flew to Boston Friday night. Trips there were always bittersweet for him. He remembered the good times he'd had in that city as a postwar student at Brown, “chasing the girls,” or going to Fenway Park to watch Ted Williams hit.

But it also brought to mind what might have been. He could have owned a piece of the New England Patriots—perhaps as much five percent—had he accepted Billy Sullivan's coaching offer in 1972. The Patriots were now valued at $756 million by
Forbes
. Five percent of that would be more than $37.5 million.

Paterno's past was peppered with Boston connections. After high school, the future coach nearly had gone to Jesuit-run Boston College. “I went to a Jesuit high school. My dad wanted me to go to a Catholic college and the Jesuits all wanted me to go to Boston College, Fordham, or maybe Georgetown,” he said. “I decided that I just didn't want to go up there.” He had also been accepted into Boston University's law school and had planned to attend until Engle offered him the job as a Penn State assistant in 1950.

Asked during the summer when he had last thought about possibly abandoning coaching for the law, Paterno laughed. “Last year,” he said.

The Penn State traveling party had arrived at the Sheraton Newton at 9:00
P
.
M
. Friday. Paterno believed strongly in the power of a good night's sleep. That's why he insisted his teams stay in Newton, in a locale separated from—and nearly devoid of—any of Boston's charm, history, culture, or nightlife.

The players disembarking from the two buses were dressed in suits or sport coats and wearing ties. Paterno and several of the assistants and administrators who made the trip had on the familiar blue blazers. Seven true freshmen—quarterback Morelli, defensive tackle Robinson, linebacker Connor, offensive tackle Harrison, receiver Mark Rubin, kicker Patrick Humes, and tight end Jordan Lyons—had made
the trip. Their number was further evidence that Paterno's desperation had caused him to rethink his core philosophies, though the coach adamantly continued to insist that was not the case.

“I don't know where you get that business about I was always reluctant to play freshmen. I always get a kick out of that,” he said at one point. “If they are good enough, you play them. I have always felt that way. . . . I have never been reluctant to play the best kids we have.”

He was, however, reluctant to play those who missed or were late to meetings. And the previous Monday, Austin Scott, already brooding about losing his starting tailback spot to Tony Hunt, showed up late for a running-backs meeting and was absent for a full-squad meeting. His behavior was especially curious because, following the Akron game, Scott had apologized to the team for failing to show up for some preseason meetings. Paterno made him practice with the scout squad and told him he wouldn't line up at tailback against Boston College.

“Yeah, I'm upset with Austin, he missed a meeting,” said Paterno when a newspaper later revealed the real reason for the tailback's benching against BC.

Scott would blame the incidents on a faulty alarm clock. “I have a backup plan,” he later explained. “I bought an extra alarm clock, call people, tell them to call me at certain times just in case my alarm clocks don't go off. There's no reason to miss anything in the future.”

Whenever he was asked about Penn State's recent decline, Paterno would bristle. The bad records, he frequently implied, were the results of bad breaks. He never failed to point out that as recently as 2002 his Lions were only a few questionable officiating calls from a Bowl Championship Series berth.

There was some justification in his complaint. If instant replay had been around to overturn a series of costly and apparently erroneous late calls that went against them in losses to Ohio State, Iowa, and Michigan—the latter two in overtime—the Lions might well have ended that regular season 12–0. Stung as badly as Paterno was by the controversy his reaction to those calls created, the Big Ten had decided to become the first major conference to utilize instant replay for its 2004 schedule.

Had it been in effect for the game against Boston College, which attracted a sellout crowd of 44,500 to Alumni Stadium, Paterno might not have had to sprint up the sideline to scream at an official early in the first quarter.

The Nittany Lions appeared to have stopped BC's initial drive. But Hardy, recently returned from his father's funeral, was whistled for running into punter Johnny Ayers. Despite the fact that replays appeared to show Hardy tipping the kick, Boston College had a gift first down on its 46.

To some extent, Paterno's increasingly aggressive sideline behavior had become illustrative of the state of his program. Except for those moments when he paused to watch a play unfold, he could no longer stand still during games. He moved constantly within a 50- or 60-yard range, walking out his anxieties, his curiosity, and, with ever-increasing frequency, his frustrations. It's as if he had become a human version of the explosives-rigged bus in the film
Speed
. Stopping would be a catastrophe.

He didn't wear a headset but frequently went charging after assistants who did to demand some change or ask what had gone wrong on a busted play. When the offensive or defensive teams gathered around their coaches, Paterno would come bursting into their midst like a bouncer hurrying to break up a fight. And, after good plays and bad, he wore his emotions on his sleeve. To a lesser degree, he had been behaving that way for decades. But in the amosphere of defeat that had shrouded his program in recent years, his sideline habits appeared more desperate, more edgy, more pathetic.

The roughing-the-kicker flag infuriated Paterno. He rushed toward the Big Ten referee working the game, gesturing frantically as he spat out his displeasure.

“He said the umpire didn't think it was tipped,” Paterno explained of the conversation. “Everybody else . . . I think the other officials thought it was tipped. I don't know, you'd have to ask them. We thought it was tipped, obviously.”

He continued to fume right through Boston College's next three plays, which produced a minus-2 yards and led to another Ayers punt—and another roughing-the-kicker penalty. This one, though, on linebacker Posluszny, was clearly a violation.

With a third chance, BC capitalized, a bootlegging Peterson hitting tight end David Kashetta on a 6-yard scoring pass that gave the Eagles a 7–0 lead.

At that point, Paterno went back into his positive-reinforcement mode, clapping as he paced, seeking out players for reassuring taps on their butts and backs.

Early in the second quarter, a Mills interception triggered what would become a series of turnovers. Junior defensive back Calvin Lowry recovered an A. J. Brooks fumble. But three plays later, senior fullback Paul Jefferson lost the ball after a pass reception. Shortly afterward, Peterson hit Grant Adams on a 26-yard TD pass. BC led 14–0 and Paterno looked glum again.

Against much better competition this week, Penn State's offense appeared overmatched. Its receivers looked slow, rarely got any separation, and dropped passes. So desperate was Paterno for a wideout that he began utilizing—and calling plays for—Brendan Perretta, a five-foot-seven walk-on redshirt freshman.

As for the offensive line, it couldn't get any push against the BC front. As a result, Mills, who would play exclusively at QB this night, was under constant pressure and Hunt looked like a different back than he had against Akron.

If that weren't distressing enough for all those Penn State fans occupying a corner of renovated Alumni Stadium, as well as those watching on ABC, there was a reoccurrence of the sideline-coaching indecision that had been so troubling in recent seasons.

“I'm glad I'm on the field and not on the sideline with all the chaos,” Mills had said earlier. “It's pretty comical sometimes.”

Down by two touchdowns, facing a fourth-and-1 at the BC 48 with just over a minute left in the first half, Penn State appeared to have little choice but to go for it. And that was the initial indication from the sideline. But suddenly, with the clock running, Paterno and his coaches began a heated discussion. With fifty seconds left, and the play clock winding down, the Lions signaled for a time-out.