The Lion in Autumn (29 page)

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.

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 relationship 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.

“And then I got to the point where I don't trust some of them,” he explained. “I just literally don't trust them. I used to trust them. I didn't care if they said something and we had a couple beers and wanted to clown around. I don't trust a lot of these guys right now. That's maybe my fault but I just don't trust them. They're just looking for a controversy. . . . The environment has changed so much. It isn't what it used to be for me. Friday nights were a waste of my time because I didn't enjoy it. And it was a waste of their time because I wasn't about to tell them anything.”

What seemed to really get under his skin was the fact that many of the most critical writers on the Penn State beat were so young and inexperienced. Heather Dinich, the
Centre Daily Times
's beat reporter, seemed to bother him more than the others, probably because Paterno subscribed to her paper and because she was twenty-seven, a half century younger than himself. Dinich frequently questioned the coach's methods in print, and whether he read it or not, word got back to him.

“I sit there and I've got to answer questions from a young lady who's never played football,” he said, without naming Dinich. “She's got all the answers. She's twenty-seven years old and she's quizzing me. ‘Why did you this? Why did you do that?' Challenging this and that. Fine, she wants to make a reputation. She wants to do a job. But I'm not going to pay attention to her.

“I don't want to be bothered by that. If Bobby Bowden wrote me a letter, and said, ‘Joe, I watched your game and you ought to do this, this, and this,' well, then I'd listen. Because every once in a while some coach will write me and say, ‘Hang in there. Do this.' Try to give me something helpful.”

The more Penn State lost, of course, the more necessary it became for the writers to ask the questions that irritated him most. Generally, they were smart enough and respectful enough to drape them in a polite tone.

At one of Paterno's late-season weekly teleconferences, for example, Bob Flounders of the
Harrisburg Patriot-News
phrased his one allotted query like this:

“Coach, what is your definition of progress for this team in the final two games, and if the team doesn't meet it, do you deserve to be back?”

Paterno had been playing this game a long time. As he frequently told friends, he was adept at avoiding questions he really didn't want to answer. This clearly was one of those.

The coach said he hadn't heard the second part of the question, then began answering the first. Flounders, ninety miles away in Harrisburg and limited to one question, interrupted and started to ask it again.

Paterno cut him off. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “you were asking me
about progress.” He then started talking about the Nittany Lions' strong defense and how his team had hung together despite the adversity.

“So,” Flounders recalled later, “I finally decided I needed to be a little blunt because either he was trying to pretend like he didn't hear my question or he simply didn't want to answer it. So I said, ‘Do you deserve to be back next year?'

“Knowing he would turn seventy-eight in December, it was a legitimate question. . . . I tried to ask the question delicately, tying it to improvement over the final two games, but it was clear to me Joe was intent on avoiding it. So I took the direct approach after two failed tries because I believed Joe had some explaining to do regarding the decline of his program.”

The directness of the question caught Paterno off guard. There was a slight delay, a moment of collective disbelief among those in the hushed media room with the coach. The emperor had been asked if he were wearing any clothes. Paterno appeared to mentally sift through his options before, in a tone that combined hurt, disappointment, and anger, he spat out a most uncharacteristic reply.

“You write your own story,” he said. “I really don't appreciate that question, to be honest with you. After fifty-five years to have somebody tell me that, I don't appreciate that.”

The online transcript of the interview session posted on Penn State's Web site later that afternoon omitted that exchange. But it made it into newspapers all across the state the next day.

Flounders, whose paper circulates in the heart of Nittany Lions country, calculated that he received nearly a hundred responses.

“I would say roughly ninety-five percent of the people were glad the question was asked,” he said. “I was surprised. I expected a lot of hate mail, but it was just the opposite.”

When an attorney in York, Pennsylvania, read about the question, Paterno's reaction, and the Web site's censoring, he decided the time had come to act. Joseph Korsak, a 1971 Penn State graduate and longtime football season-ticket holder, contacted the
Daily Collegian
. He paid $350 for a half-page ad that appeared the day before the Northwestern game.

“He had his little hissy fit and they just erased it,” Korsak explained. “He's treated like a dictator in a banana republic.”

In large, bold type, the advertisement proclaimed,
TIME FOR JOE TO GO
. Above that phrase, in smaller print, were nine stinging words: “The talent is there. The coaching is an abomination.”

“I've been going to Penn State games for years,” Korsak later said. “The people I sit with have been complaining about the coaching for a long time. But nothing happened and it dawned on me that Paterno was being treated like the uncle with cancer. We weren't addressing the issue, we were talking around it. So I wanted to bring focus to the discussion.”

And though he didn't read the papers, the coach had somehow spotted Korsak's ad too.

“The hardest thing about anything you do in life is you can get overcome with a lot of people who really don't know what the situation is,” Paterno would say. “Some guy puts an ad in the paper that says ‘Fire Joe Paterno' and pays three hundred and fifty dollars and now everybody knows who he is. I mean, the guy's a celebrity.”

If nothing else, the ad seemed to give voice to those last few in the Penn State community who had been holding their tongues on the subject.

On a student-run radio station in State College, The Lion 90.7–FM, two young men were talking about music the day the ad appeared. When asked a question, one of them hesitated.

“Sorry,” he said, “I had an Alzheimer's moment.”

The other interrupted. “You mean a Paterno moment.”

The chatter on sports talk shows became overheated, “More venomous,” said Jed Donahue, the host of one in State College. “It's the toughest coaching situation I've ever seen, pro, college, or high school.”

On ESPN Radio's nationally syndicated
Dan Patrick Show
, which was heard in State College, the subject had been discussed so thoroughly that week that by Friday it was all played out.

“I'd have some more former Penn State players on if I thought they'd say anything about Joe other than ‘He deserves to get out when
he wants to,' ” Patrick said that day. Then he played an audio clip from Washington Redskins defensive tackle Brandon Noble, who said exactly that.

Paterno said he was touched by such shows of support.

“I know there's been a lot of media that's been critical of me and the coaching staff and the team and certain players,” Paterno said that week, “but I've just had so much mail and people who stopped me on the street and say, ‘Hey, hang in there a little bit.' It's been very encouraging.”

His friends and neighbors in State College displayed compassion on those increasingly rare occasions when they encountered the workaholic coach. It was, he said, “people from out of town that hassle me.”

“Once in a while alumni come back and bring kids that want their pictures taken with me,” he said. “That's flattering. In fact, I go around looking for people to take pictures with me these days.”

The day he was insulted by Flounders's question was also Election Day. Paterno had been to the College Heights polling station earlier that morning. There he was able to vote, presumably, for George W. Bush, but not for his own son, Scott, whose Seventeenth Congressional District did not include State College.

Politically, Paterno's moderate Republicanism was probably more in line with Nelson Rockefeller's than George W. Bush's. “Joe is a liberal person who has conservative values,” his brother George told biographer Michael O'Brien. President Ford and others had tried to convince him to run for office over the years, but he had always declined. His close affiliation with the GOP, however, had earned him criticism from those who felt it was inappropriate behavior for a coach at a public university.

“I won't get into politics,” he said to the press that day, “but I just hope we pick the right guy. . . . I woke up this morning on Election Day thinking about my dad. My dad was a diehard liberal Democrat. I had a younger brother who died in infancy who was named Franklin
after Franklin Roosevelt. If he knew he had a grandson running in the Republican Party for Congress, he would jump out of that grave, call me up, and give me every dirty Italian word you could ever think of.”

Scott Paterno, as his father had anticipated, lost to Holden. He got 112,242 votes (thirty-nine percent) to the victor's 170,449 (fifty-nine percent). Bush, meanwhile, won Centre County but lost Pennsylvania by a wide margin.

That week a caller to his radio show jokingly suggested that perhaps the Paterno name had hurt Scott. If Penn State had been 6–2 instead of 2–6, he said, maybe the thirty-one-year-old candidate would have fared better.

“Thanks a lot, buddy,” Paterno replied in good humor. “No, he had a tough opponent. I think it was a good experience for him and he gave it a good fight and I'm proud of him. I've got five great kids and all of them have got a little moxie. . . . I used to tell them all the time that a turtle can't cross the road unless they stick their head out. So they're all willing to stick their heads out.

“The guy he ran against is a good guy. He's a good congressman even for . . .” His voice trailed off, apparently before he could say “a Democrat.” “He's a five- or six-term incumbent. He knew it was going to be tough. . . . I called him and told him when Abraham Lincoln lost his first election somebody said to him, ‘How do you feel?' And he said, ‘I'm too big to cry and it hurts too much to laugh.' ”