The Lion in Autumn (26 page)

When Iowa's next possession ended with a 28-yard Bradley punt, Lowry's 33-yard return left the Nittany Lions with a first down at the
Hawkeyes' 24. But after two penalties and Roth's sack of Mills, Gould was forced to try a 51-yard field goal. It fell short. Iowa took the lead, 3–2, on a 27-yard field goal by Kyle Schlicher with 1:42 left in the first quarter.

Early in the second quarter, Mills threw the first of four Penn State interceptions, with Iowa safety Sean Considine returning it to the Nittany Lions' 10. A loud chorus of boos began to submerge whatever homecoming cheer remained. The negative noise resurfaced a short time later when Schlicher added another 27-yarder for a 6–2 Iowa lead.

Mills's next pass was nearly picked off. Then, just five minutes after his first, he further emboldened the boobirds by heaving another interception, killing a drive that had advanced to Iowa's 34. The quarterback, who took a nasty lick on that second interception, would complete just four of twelve first-half passes for 33 yards.

Both the booing and the offense worsened in the second half. On Penn State's first play, a groggy Mills threw the ball to no one, eliciting another crowd reaction. But Penn State got another golden opportunity when Donnie Johnson blocked a Bradley punt and the Lions recovered at Iowa's nine. This time, runs by Hunt and Robinson and another Mills incompletion preceded another missed field goal by Gould from 25 yards.

On the Penn State sideline, Paterno hunched over, put his hands on his knees, and shook his head. His offense's incompetence was so complete that it seemed to suggest Iowa might be stealing the signals, which were being relayed to Mills from the sideline. “We had a couple of times when they yelled out the play before it started,” said Smolko. “They were definitely well prepared for the game.” That may have been so, but it didn't explain their ineptitude the previous three games.

Robinson replaced Mills, who was experiencing dizziness, late in the third quarter, prompting cheers for one of the few times all day. With Hunt carrying the load, he moved Penn State deep into Iowa territory again.

But on a second-and-goal from the 9, Penn State was called for an
illegal-procedure penalty. Then Robinson threw an incompletion. And on third down, his pass was intercepted by Antwan Allen, who was tackled at the Hawkeyes' 8.

What followed was the ultimate indignity in a season filled with them.

Iowa couldn't move the ball and an illegal-procedure penalty left the Hawkeyes facing a fourth-and-17 at their own 1 with just over eight minutes to play. Bradley had struggled on his punts and Ferentz was reluctant to risk one from the back line of the end zone. His only other option was a safety. That might be sound strategy with a big lead, but with only a four-point advantage, if Iowa took one, Penn State could then win with a field goal.

The Iowa coach knew he had no reason to fear Penn State's offense. Mills was out. Robinson looked rusty. Who else was there?

So he ordered the safety that made it a 6–4 game.

“The decision was pretty obvious,” Ferentz would later say. “I'd rather give the safety and then play field position, you know, ride our defense. That was a pretty good thing to do today.”

Paterno agreed with his counterpart's call, even though it was a slap in the face. “We weren't going anywhere,” he said.

Ferentz's call paid dividends immediately. Robinson's first pass on Penn State's subsequent possession was intercepted by Jovon Johnson at Iowa's 40.

Penn State got the ball back again after Iowa's offense sputtered. This time, again on the first play, Robinson fumbled it back to Iowa—three turnovers on three plays—at the Nittany Lions' 14 with 2:30 to play.

Much of the crowd had departed by then but for those who remained, there would be one final embarrassment.

With 1:23 still to play and facing a fourth-and-2 at Penn State's 6, Ferentz passed up a field goal that would have given Iowa a 5-point lead, insurance against a possible game-winning 3-pointer by Penn State. That risky decision became moot when Penn State defenders jumped offsides, the penalty yielding the Hawkeyes the first down and allowing them, beneath a final ceiling of boos, to run out the clock.

The game's final statistics were stunning.

Iowa had managed just ten first downs, 168 total yards, and two field goals—all of which surpassed Penn State's figures.

The Nittany Lions' six first downs were the fewest ever for a Paterno team. They had gained less than 100 yards rushing (51) and passing (96). They had fumbled three times, thrown four interceptions, and turned the ball over five times.

All against an Iowa defense that had surrendered 435 passing yards and 44 points to Arizona State a month earlier.

AS POORLY AS
the Nittany Lions had performed on offense against Iowa, the four points they managed were four more than they scored with unhappy fans.

After this one, it seemed there ought to have been another category of postgame statistics, one that more accurately reflected all the humiliations Penn State—and by extension its supporters—had endured: The boos. The baseball-score loss on homecoming weekend. The five turnovers. Ferentz calling for a disrespectful safety. Another quarterback concussion. The national snickers. The incompetent offense of historic proportions.

In Paterno's first thirty-five seasons as head coach, the Lions had never lost four games in a row. They had now done it three times in four years. The players' growing futility was evident in the Nittany Lions' locker room following the Iowa loss. The frustration, bewilderment, anger, and embarrassment were so thick and overpowering that several players again broke down and cried. And this time Paterno had run out of words with which to console them.

“Coach had a tough time with words after the game,” said defensive tackle Scott Paxson. “I think he's thinking what everyone is kind of thinking, where do you go from here?

“He's not used to this,” said defensive end Lavon Chisley. “This
would be hard for any coach to deal with, but it's especially hard for a coach like him.”

The defense had played so well again—and the offense so poorly—that a locker-room schism seemed unavoidable. “It seems like that's the lullaby of this season,” cornerback Zemaitis said of the disparity between units.

During the game, defensive lineman Hali could be seen railing at the offense on the sideline. “I always get frustrated at the beginning of the game,” he explained, “and I get up and start yelling and say, ‘We're going slow out there, let's get it going!' ”

Penn State's offense had scored two touchdowns in four Big Ten games. It had turned the ball over twenty-one times. Its rushing totals in its five losses were mind-boggling for a Paterno team—233 yards on 115 carries, barely 2 yards an attempt.

Waiting in the media room for the coach, the sportswriters joked cynically, about the offense, about the rare 6–4 score, about Paterno's apparent inability to recognize his team's failings.

“I guess Robinson will have to give back the Heisman,” one writer mocked.

Finally, wearing a sweatshirt beneath a windbreaker, Paterno walked into the room. His entrance triggered a stacatto snapping of camera shutters from the balcony above. It was probably a hopeful sign for the program that the families and recruits who watched from up there still wanted his picture.

“I don't know if we could have played much poorer,” Paterno began. “There have been a lot of tough ones. This one would certainly be right there with them.”

The question-and-answer session that followed was largely unrevealing and painfully familiar. When it was over and Paterno had departed, Penn State players, some of whom still had red and swollen eyes, touchingly patted their coach on the shoulder as they passed in the adjoining hallway.

“He's frustrated,” said Hali. “It's not his fault. I mean, people keep saying we need to get rid of him. You get rid of him and what does it change? The team? We've still got the same players. We're the ones
that have to make the adjustment. We're the ones that have to play the game, that have to win. All the help we can get from our coaching staff, we're still the ones that have to win.”

They were growing increasingly sensitive to criticism of their coach. All it did, from their perspective, was layer another level of pressure on them. They didn't want to go down in history as the Penn State team that drove off Joe Paterno.

“I feel bad,” said Paxson. “He's a great coach. All the winning seasons he's had, and now he's got to go through this. People on the outside are telling him he should give it up. But if people were allowed to come to practice to see Joe [they'd see how much he still cares]. He slaps us in the face. If you jump offsides, he grabs you by the helmet. He's all over you. I don't see a guy who is going to hang it up. I see a guy I want to hide from.”

Spectators, dizzied by the scope of Penn State's impotence, lingered in the parking lots long afterward.

Some of their car radios were tuned to the local postgame call-in show on 970–AM. Fans, drinking beer in little clusters, listened intently and nodded their heads in agreement while cohost Phil Grosz lambasted Penn State's “stone-age offense.”

Grosz, a lifelong Pennsylvanian whose gray-blond hair appeared to have been styled beneath a bowl, also published
Blue White Illustrated
, the weekly tabloid for Nittany Lions fans. In his column and on the radio, he had been urging Paterno to become a Bobby Bowden, a CEO-type coach who delegated all the offensive and defensive details to powerful assistants.

The parking-lot fans' ears perked up when caller Skip Dreibelbis—a State College resident, a onetime high-school teammate of Jay Paterno's, and an ex–Penn State football player—offered his sobering assessment.

“The program has taken a real turn for the worse,” Dreibelbis began. “And it's really been disappointing to me as a former player. . . . It's no reflection on the players. My heart goes out to every single one of those guys. They deal week in and week out with Joe's little hissy fits. He gets
in a tirade and carries on. But they deal with that. They go out and they work really hard. You've got to blame the leadership of this team.

“I've talked to former players who played in the NFL and who've come to Joe and said, ‘Hey, I'd like to get a chance to do a little bit of coaching.' Joe won't take them in. Don't have enough coaching experience. You know I like Jay as a person. He was a great holder for me and a nice guy. But doggone, Jay's only played maybe one quarter of football and it was in high school and he's out there coaching quarterbacks. And there's Mike McQueary, who played [quarterback] all through high school and college, and he's coaching tight ends.

“Sooner or later someone has to take the bull by the horns and say enough is enough. Last year was the worst in Penn State history and what do they do? Give him a new contract and a bonus. Let's start holding people accountable.”

Cohost Jerry Fisher, a devoted Penn State loyalist whose father had been the Nittany Lions' boosterish radio voice for decades, had walked through the parking lots before the game. There he asked fans if they thought the inevitable decision on Paterno's future ought to be left to the coach or the administration.

“Ninety percent are saying that Joe is the one that needs to make a decision,” said Fisher, “but that he needs to make it soon.”

A few days later, Paterno did nothing to aid his supporters' case. When asked if he thought his players were too tight, he veered off into another frustrated riff about bad luck and bad officiating.

“Those kinds of things happen to us,” he said. “It's very easy to generalize and easy to start to panic about different things. . . . [But] I think we can get started. We were ahead two to nothing on Saturday. We couldn't take advantage of it.”

For his critics, the bizarre allusion to the 2–0 score proved just how far Paterno's expectations had slipped. Once he had wanted a national championship so badly that he publicly criticized a U.S. president who had declared Texas No. 1. Now he was satisfied with a 2–0 lead?

By that last week in October, Paterno's age, abilities, and status
were being debated so passionately in State College that the subject even found its way to the coach's dinner table.

Following the homecoming humiliation, the Paternos, as they did after most home games, hosted a dinner at their house. Among the old friends in attendance was Don Bellisario, a seventy-year-old Penn State grad who had gone on to Hollywood, where he had produced, among other shows,
Magnum P.I.
, the Tom Selleck series.

“[Bellisario] said the worst thing ever invented was dates,” Paterno recalled. “I was teasing him about how long he was going to produce and write for television . . . and that is how he responded to that. He looks great at seventy and you wouldn't believe he was seventy. I don't feel seventy-seven. That's not my problem. My problem is not winning games. That's my problem.”

His players had problems of their own. The civility that always had surrounded Penn State football appeared to be vanishing in the toxic vapor of another four-game losing streak. There had been more boos during the Iowa loss than in entire decades of Nittany Lions football. Mills, who was the target of most of them, probably had been vilified more than any Penn State player who ever set foot in Beaver Stadium.

“That wasn't right,” said fullback Paul Jefferson. “I don't think Zack deserved that. [A loss is] never one person's fault.”

Angry fans continued to berate the senior quarterback in e-mails and nasty, anonymous telephone messages.

“One e-mail said, ‘You need to go up there and tell [the coaches] you don't want to play anymore, and let some one else play,' ” Mills recalled. “I got a message on my phone that said basically that I suck. . . . I haven't got to the point to e-mail people back, but I've been close.”

Robinson said he got the same question over and over from fellow students who once had been too shy to approach him but now felt emboldened enough to ask: “What's wrong with the offense?”

Tight end Smolko noted that he sat silently on campus buses, listening as fellow students disparaged his team. “There's not much good for anyone to talk about anymore,” he admitted.

“It's frustrating,” linebacker Shaw said of the negative buzz on campus. “You start to think if we were doing better, life would be a lot better and people would like us better.”

“It's hard on everybody,” said Chisley. “Nobody came here to lose.”

Paterno, who was shouldering plenty of the blame himself, tried again to deflect criticism from his players and assistants in the days before they traveled to Ohio State.

“You guys are being critical of the wrong people,” he told sportswriters. “You should be critical of me. I'm the boss. I hate it when you guys are critical of kids or critical of the staff. I know what's going on and I know what kind of coaches I have. If I didn't think they were doing their job, I would do something. I'm not sure how critical we should be of anybody. I think we should look back and realize that we're playing against some people that are good football teams and [we] may be playing with some kids that are a little bit outmanned or a little bit out-experienced or something like that. That's the attitude I have to take.”

Paterno continued to take hits from the media. And some of the writers and talk-show hosts now demanded that Morelli play at Columbus on Saturday.

It seemed logical. Mills was ninety-fifth in Division I-A passing efficiency and was still groggy from the concussion. Robinson had turned the ball over the last three times he touched it. And unless the Nittany Lions somehow won their final four games, they weren't going to be going to a bowl anyway. So why not play the promising freshman? Hadn't Paterno said that his decision not to redshirt him was made because he hoped to give the young QB some experience? Here was his chance.

Apparently, given the coach's emphatic answers at his weekly news conference, either his thinking or his assessment of Morelli's ability had changed.

“Do you think Anthony Morelli is adequately prepared to play against Ohio State should you need him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He isn't adequately prepared.”

“Does he not know the plays?”

“He isn't adequately prepared.”

The truth was somewhat different. The coaches had inserted some plays for Morelli into the Ohio State game plan. But Paterno was hoping
not to have to use him. He didn't want to get Morelli killed. The offensive line had already allowed two mature quarterbacks to endure serious beatings.

“I think they lost a little confidence in themselves because they have had some breakdowns in key situations,” Paterno said of the line. “I just think we have to get a little bit more confident, consistent, don't make so many mental mistakes, concentrate a little bit better, and not get discouraged if you get licked every once in a while, because we are going to get licked every once in a while.”

Pep rallies. Inspirational movies. Soft words. Harsh words. Nothing Paterno had attempted could get his team over the hump. But he was too stubborn and too competitive to stop trying.

Two days before the Ohio State game, at the end of a long and grueling practice, he addressed the team in a T-shirt. It was a replica of a shirt that Boston pitcher Curt Schilling had worn during the just-completed American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox overcame a 3–0 deficit to defeat the New York Yankees in seven games. The shirt's message read
WHY NOT US
?

“Why not us?” the coach, who grew up in Dodger-crazed Brooklyn despising the Yankees, asked the players. “We got four games left. We can win 'em all and wind up with a winning record and a bowl game. Don't worry what people think. You think anybody but the Red Sox thought they were going to come back and win?”