Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

by Bacon, John U.

  About Joe Paterno, the Penn State players had decidedly mixed feelings. But about Jay, I found no such division of opinion. It all came to a head that afternoon.

  In the midst of Bolden’s breakdown, defensive captain Drew Astorino had seen enough. He picked up the headset to yell at Jay in the press box, “Get that motherfucker out of this game right now!”

  At halftime, the players made a full sprint for the locker room. “Lot of guys were looking for a fight,” Zordich recalled. “They’d been waiting for this.”

  Jay Paterno played right into their hands, storming into the defensive meeting room, yelling, “You motherfuckers! You think you can get on this headset and talk to me like that?!”

  In a room full of angry defensive players waiting to explode, Jay Paterno provided the match. The players jumped up and charged him, throwing chairs out of the way to get to him. Were it not for a respected assistant coach pulling Jay out, then holding his hands on the doorjambs to block the players from getting to him, many players believe Jay wouldn’t have gotten out of the locker room unharmed.

  “That dude,” Mauti concluded, “was an example of everything a coach should not be.”

  In the game’s final three minutes, McGloin directed an 80-play drive, capped by Silas Redd’s three-yard touchdown to give the Lions a 10–7 win—Joe Paterno’s 409th career victory, thereby surpassing Eddie Robinson as Division I’s winningest football coach.

  Six days later, the Penn State players’ private unhappiness would be eclipsed by one of the most public tragedies in the history of college sports.

  • • •

  The weekend of November 5, 2011, the Lions had a bye week, so the players, coaches, and staffers enjoyed that rarest of things: a fall weekend free of football. Most of them left town, including longtime equipment manager Brad “Spider” Caldwell, who headed up to his camp on a beautiful lake in Vermont to enjoy a few days of peace and quiet and to mow the lawn for the last time that year.

  “No phone, no TV,” he said, smiling. “Love it.”

  As a result, however, he didn’t hear anything of Sandusky’s arrest that Friday. Finally, at four-thirty Saturday afternoon, Spider was sitting on his riding mower when his neighbor walked over with his iPad.

  “Hey, Brad,” he said tentatively, “I don’t know if you’ve seen this.”

  When he showed Spider the article—Sandusky arrested, athletic director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz stepping down—Caldwell couldn’t believe it. Months later, recounting the day in the equipment room, he began shaking his head, and his eyes reddened.

  “Your first reaction,” he said, “is to look around and realize you have to put it all on hold. Our world is going to change. This is going to get ugly.

  “Then you think of the kids. You just can’t believe it. I just felt so bad. Just devastating news.” No Penn Staters I talked to ever forgot, however they were affected by the NCAA’s sanctions, who the real victims were.

  Caldwell spent the rest of the November weekend reading what he could, and crying.

  Most of the players didn’t even know who Sandusky was until they saw his picture on TV. Only then did some of them recognize him as the “old guy who worked out here once in a while.”

  Their reactions were pretty swift. “They used to hang people at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte,” Mauti said, “and frankly, I would have been okay with that. Hell, give us the rope, and we’ll do it for you.”

  This would prove to be the reaction of Sandusky’s jury, eight of twelve of whom went to Penn State or worked there and spared him little.

  • • •

  Many of the Penn State people I talked to were sad to see Athletic Director Tim Curley put on administrative leave while he awaited his trial. They understood why: he was technically Paterno’s boss, and Sandusky was on Curley’s payroll during the first part of Curley’s eighteen-year run as athletic director. Far more damning, Curley had been accused of perjury, which didn’t give the university much wiggle room to retain him.

  But as a State College native who’d worked his way up from the equipment room to become athletic director, he’d made many friends along the way, and no enemies I discovered. Most believed he got caught up in the decisions made by others and didn’t have the strength to speak up. In this, he was far from alone.

  His likability might have been his downfall. He worked to avoid confrontations and tough decisions. As one colleague said, “Tim was so indecisive, if he was offered steak and potatoes on one plate, and chicken and rice on the other, he’d starve.”

  • • •

  Unlike most Big Ten universities, whose presidents pick their athletic directors, at Penn State replacing the AD fell to the trustees. That was yet another unique problem Penn State faced.

  At Michigan, state voters elect two regents to the eight-person board every two years, for eight-year terms. At Ohio State, the governor appoints nineteen members to the board for nine-year terms, except the two student members and three charter trustees. At Northwestern, the twenty-person executive committee appoints fifty more members to a board, but because it’s private, they are immune to the Open Meetings Act and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). More important, the Northwestern board divides the duties up into smaller committees, and those appointed have no conflicting agendas, so the university runs as smoothly as any in the country.

  Penn State, however, is governed by a board of thirty-two trustees, composed of the university’s president; the governor; the state secretaries of education, agriculture, conservation and natural resources; six appointees by the governor, nine elected by alumni, and six elected by Pennsylvania agricultural societies—harkening back to the school’s founding as a land-grant college. Six additional trustees are elected by a board representing business and industry enterprises. It’s safe to conclude that Penn State’s board is the most unwieldy in the Big Ten.

  After Curley stepped down, the board named one of its own, David Joyner, to replace him. Joyner had been an all-American defensive lineman who was also an NCAA finalist wrestler at Penn State in 1971. He graduated from Penn State’s medical school and became an orthopedic surgeon, focusing on sports medicine. He worked with both the World Football League and the USOC, and was elected to Penn State’s Board of Trustees in 2003, 2006, and 2009, taking one of the nine seats reserved for alums, voted on by alums.

  Nonetheless, Joyner was an odd choice for athletic director.

  That Joyner had no experience working in an athletic department was an obvious weakness, but one university presidents had overlooked elsewhere, including at Michigan, in favor of business experience. But what business experience Joyner had wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for his candidacy. In 2002, he founded a company which operated a chain of gyms called C-5 Fitness. In 2006, the company filed for bankruptcy. Joyner and his wife, Carolyn, were out of money themselves and lost their home.

  When the board, on which Joyner still served, put Curley on administrative leave, Joyner lobbied to become the acting athletic director—which paid $396,000 a year—and thanks to his colleagues on the board, he got it. Billionaire trustee Ira Lubert arranged for the Joyners to stay in one of his homes in State College, and another in Hershey.

  This attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania auditor general, who released a report a year later, in November of 2012, stating, “This movement gives rise to reasonable public perceptions of insider influence and conflicting interests, particularly when the movement involves persons at executive levels.”

  Penn State ignored the warning.

  • • •

  If Joyner passed muster with his colleagues on the board, he didn’t fare as well with the players.

  After losing their second game of the 2011 season to third-ranked Alabama, the Lions went on a roll, rattling off seven straight victories to earn a tie for first in the Big Ten, and a No. 12 ranking nationally, with just three games left. They seemed poised to take another Big Ten title
and send Paterno off a winner.

  Then the scandal broke.

  They lost the next weekend to Nebraska, 17–14, and got shellacked the final weekend by Wisconsin, 45–7. In just three weeks, they dropped all the way from a possible berth in the Rose Bowl to the lowly TicketCity Bowl in Dallas. What would normally be a disappointment became, in the leaderless program the players suddenly found themselves inhabiting, a dilemma: Should they decline the bowl invitation?

  To answer the question, captains Devon Still and Drew Astorino called a players-only meeting in December of 2011 with just one item on the agenda: to stay or to go.

  “It was a very diplomatic meeting,” offensive lineman Mike Farrell recalled. “We were leaning toward going, but there was a solid faction against. But the arguments on both sides were great. The guys who didn’t want to go were saying, ‘Hey, we go down there, and our coaches will be freaking out. They don’t know if they have a job when they come back, or where they’ll be next year. How will they be able to coach?’ ”

  While this discussion rolled on, former all-American linebacker Shane Conlan—captain of the 1986 national title team, and former teammate of Mike Zordich’s father (also Mike)—was on campus and caught wind of the meeting. He asked one of the players going in to bring out Mike Mauti.

  “What the fuck are you all doing?” Conlan asked Mauti. “You better get these guys to go. You’d all be seen as spoiled brats.”

  Mauti returned to the room and asked to speak. “I just talked to Shane outside,” he told them, “and he was telling me what it would look like to these former players if we didn’t play. If we stand for the values that Penn State stands for, we have to eat it. We have to go. There’s no choice.

  “So here it is, majority rules,” Mauti said. “Who wants to go? Raise your hand, right now.”

  “Boom,” Mike Farrell said. “It was eighty or ninety percent. Obvious.”

  “Okay,” Devon Still said. “We’re going.”

  Facing a nation that had turned on them, at a university that suddenly had no leaders—with the interim president, Rod Erickson, and the acting athletic director, Dave Joyner, not daring to say a public word on their behalf—the players managed to conduct a civil town-hall meeting and come to a mature decision. All seem settled.

  Until, that is, Mauti walked outside the room to retrieve Dr. Joyner, who had been cooling his heels outside while the players were deliberating.

  “ ‘We’re ready for you,’ ” Mauti recalled saying. “He didn’t ask me how it went, or anything. He was just all pissed off because he’d been waiting outside for twenty minutes.”

  Joyner marched to the front of the room, visibly agitated, and said, “I thought I was coming here to talk to a group of men, but I didn’t realize there was a bunch of children in here, whining about not going to a good bowl game and getting screwed!”

  “Before he could finish that sentence,” Farrell recalled, “Devon made a sound, and stood up to stay something. But Gerald [Hodges] stood up first and said, ‘Hold up, hold up, hold up! We’re in here talking like men, to make this decision, and you come in here disrespecting us!’ ”

  This set Joyner off on another tour of his biography, which they had already heard a few times in his first few weeks on the job. “Everyone was selling him to us,” Mauti said. “All-American wrestler, football player, doctor. Look, honestly, we didn’t care. We’re getting blasted by the media, and Erickson and Joyner were nowhere to be found. Joyner was a former member of the board. The suit was already on him. What we needed was someone to stand up.”

  Instead, Joyner made an ill-advised argument that, because the school had to pay the NCAA $60 million, the bowl payout was a good way to get some of that back. This elicited more sounds and comments from the players, and the meeting devolved from there. Players complained that Joyner had gone AWOL while the program was getting ripped by the national media, and Joyner repeated his list of accomplishments before becoming the acting athletic director.

  “You better show me some respect!” he demanded.

  By this time, Gerald Hodges was standing up and pointing back at Joyner. “No, no, no. My father said, ‘I’m only going to respect someone who respects me.’ ”

  The two started walking toward each other, creating a commotion loud enough for Coach Larry Johnson Sr., waiting outside, to come into the room, hold Hodges, and literally escort him out.

  Finally, Devon Still had his chance to speak. “We already decided,” he told Joyner. “We’re gonna go.”

  “Oh,” Joyner responded.

  “From that point,” Mauti recalled, “Joyner was apologizing to us. ‘We’re sticking up for you guys, and we’re fighting for you guys out there.’ ”

  “And no one said anything,” Zordich said, “because we knew nothing needed to be said. They weren’t doing anything to stick up for us. Not on TV. Not on campus. Anywhere.”

  After O’Brien was named the head coach, the entire senior class told him they did not want to see Joyner or Erickson on the field before the games. Joyner must have felt some contrition—or embarrassment, take your pick—because he respected their wishes, not setting foot in front of the team again until the 2012 banquet.

  • • •

  After the Lions dragged themselves to the TicketCity Bowl in Dallas, where they lost to the Houston Cougars, 30–14—their third loss in their last four games—the media chorus declared Penn State’s collapse would continue into the next season, if not longer. But Spider Caldwell’s right-hand man in the equipment room, Kirk Diehl, saw the seeds of their renaissance after the team’s last bowl practice, on December 31, 2011.

  While Diehl was cleaning up the locker room, Massaro and Mauti were finishing their rehab. They asked him, “What’s going to happen in January?”

  “You always try to have an answer for them, but I didn’t,” Diehl recalled. “I said, ‘We don’t have the slightest idea. But I know it’s going to take you guys, as fifth-year seniors, to hold this team together. When a new coach comes in, it’ll come down to how you guys respond to it.’

  “And they said, ‘Okay, when do we get started?’ ”

  The players were in. They just needed a coach.

  • • •

  With Graham Spanier, Gary Schultz, and Tim Curley out of office, and Joe Paterno dying, the lettermen naturally sought stability. They wanted Joyner to stay inside the family by hiring defensive coordinator Tom Bradley, who had assisted Paterno since he’d finished playing for Penn State in 1978. But if Joyner felt compelled to clean house, the lettermen hoped he would go after Penn Staters Al Golden, head coach of the Miami Hurricanes; Mike Munchek, the NFL Titans’ head coach; or Greg Schiano, the head coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whom many had thought would succeed Paterno years earlier.

  But one of the trustees suggested Joyner reach out to the offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots. How unknown was he? When Sports Illustrated’s veteran NFL writer Peter King was asked what he knew about Bill O’Brien, he said, “I wouldn’t know him if he walked into this room right now.”

  For his part, O’Brien knew more than a little about Penn State. He had followed his father and brothers to play football at Brown, Paterno’s alma mater. After he became a graduate assistant, in 1992, he wrote to Paterno directly, on Brown University stationery: “Dear Coach—congratulations on a tremendous season. . . . I am at Brown coaching the inside linebackers. I have enclosed a résumé. I would be extremely interested in any grad assistant positions. Regards, Bill O’Brien.”

  Paterno replied with a handwritten note in the margin: “Hi Bill—thanks for this. I’ll keep you in mind if we have something that would be appropriate for you. All the best, Joe Pa.”

  When the O’Briens were packing up to move to State College, Bill’s wife, Colleen, shouted, “You won’t believe what I found!” The letter is now framed, and hangs on O’Brien’s office wall.

  When O’Brien first told New England Patriots head coach
Bill Belichick about Penn State, Belichick encouraged O’Brien to apply. “It’s still Penn State,” Belichick said.

  Joyner asked for O’Brien’s résumé and a cover letter, which O’Brien sent via FedEx, per Joyner’s request. After hearing nothing back for eight days, O’Brien called Joyner, who said they had never received the envelope, although FedEx had recorded it as signed for. O’Brien gave Joyner the tracking number, and a staffer eventually found the envelope in a mailroom. For a program that was about to see one of its most revered assistant coaches get what amounted to a life sentence for raping boys, the lack of due diligence was stunning.

  Penn State liked O’Brien enough to pick him up in the school’s private plane and start the interview on the flight back to State College. O’Brien had gotten on the plane equipped with a thick binder, full of his plans for Penn State. At Belichick’s insistence, O’Brien had also practiced interviewing with him for hours, even as the playoffs approached.

  “I could never repay him for that,” O’Brien said. “And let’s face it, if I don’t work for Bill Belichick and I don’t coach Tom Brady, I don’t get this interview. I work hard—but a lot of guys work hard. If I don’t have those two guys, I don’t have this opportunity.”

  After Joyner and company finished their questions, O’Brien had a few of his own, including the elephant in the room: How would the ramifications from the Sandusky scandal affect the program moving forward?

  While they admitted they were probably going to face expensive lawsuits and settlements, they assured him these were all criminal matters, and beyond the jurisdiction of the NCAA.

  In their defense, precedent seemed to be on their side. Whenever a college athletic program got itself in trouble with the law—big trouble—the NCAA usually steered clear, sticking to how many minutes a week student-athletes are allowed to stretch, the distance they can travel in a car with an alumnus, and whether they are allowed to put cream cheese or jam on their free breakfast bagel. (They are not.)