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

by Bacon, John U.

Given all this, you just might have to concede that, by 2012, the state school in Columbus had, in fact, become The Ohio State University.

  Curse that Archie Griffin, anyhow.

  • • •

  Such academic ambitions, naturally, did nothing to lower the temperature of the seat Urban Meyer found himself sitting on. If anything, the university’s growing stature and confidence—and the football program’s central role in sparking it—only put more pressure on Meyer’s new position.

  The legions of Ohio natives who have bolted north to Ann Arbor includes Heisman Trophy winners Desmond Howard and Charles Woodson, plus dozens of All-Americans. But Craig Krenzel is one of the few native Michiganders who chose to play for Ohio State, and he did so in memorable style, quarterbacking the Buckeyes to their first win in Ann Arbor in fourteen years, breaking a streak that dated back to Earle Bruce’s last game in 1987. Then he led Ohio State to the 2002 national title, its first since Woody Hayes’s 1968 team. Along the way, Krenzel earned a 3.75 GPA in molecular genetics.

  He decided to leave the premed path for business and now provides commentary for 97.1 The Fan in Columbus, alongside Mike Ricordati.

  “Is coaching Ohio State the biggest pressure cooker in the country?” Krenzel asked. “It’s up there. But that all depends on how you perceive pressure, and where it comes from.

  “When you play at Ohio State, the fans don’t expect more from you than you do. Those are the kinds of players this place attracts, and if you don’t have that mentality, you don’t last very long here. If you have that mentality, it’s a pressure-packed situation, no doubt, but it’s pressure packed because you’re a perfectionist.

  “What I just described is exactly how Urban Meyer is wired. He is as intense as it gets. I look at how he coaches, his expectations, his transparency, and I think it’s a breath of fresh air in this age. Recruits are usually sugarcoated and schmoozed, but he just says, ‘You’ll earn everything you get. I’ll make you a better football player—but you’re gonna earn it.’

  “Nobody expects more out of him than he does. The man is a perfectionist.”

  • • •

  At Ohio State, in the wake of NCAA sanctions and a 6-7 season, Meyer only ratcheted up his perfectionist tendencies, seeking not only to run the table, but to do so with high graduation rates and little drama. To do what Tressel did, in other words, minus the headlines and headaches.

  Meyer already knew the price he could pay for his perfectionism: his family and his health. But instead of backing off, he just added two more goals to the list: more time with his family, and more sanity at season’s end.

  “I’ve always had a great fear of being that old guy who says, ‘I missed out,’ ” he told me. He was not talking about failing to win a Big Ten banner at the school he grew up cheering for, or suffering a near miss for his third national title. He was talking about his family.

  The previous generation of coaches—Woody, Bo, and Bear’s—made no apologies for being utterly consumed by the endless duties of their jobs, which they expressed regret over only after they retired. But this generation—squarely including Fitzgerald, Hoke, and O’Brien, who are all committed husbands and fathers—is determined to do it differently. Yes, the job is still consuming, but they stubbornly insist on protecting time with their wives and kids.

  At midcareer and midlife, Meyer was attempting to join his peers in being a full-fledged father. He credits Bob Stoops, the Oklahoma coach, for being the first to say, “ ‘I’m going to take my kids to school.’ In this business, you usually get chastised for that. Legendary coaches never did things like that.” Because of Stoops, and those who followed in his footsteps, Meyer said, “It’s starting to change.”

  It is now common for these coaches to invite their families to practices, team dinners, and other functions that were strictly off-limits in the old days, and Meyer planned to take advantage of the new norms to avoid sacrificing his family life during the madness of a Big Ten season.

  Meyer knew none of those goals would be easily achieved, especially given his starting point on each front.

  To the Buckeye faithful, however, it all looked like a no-brainer: plug in a high-powered coach to a high-powered program, and national titles will surely follow. Meyer knew it wasn’t that simple—witness the quick divorce between Michigan and Rich Rodriguez just eleven months earlier.

  And Meyer knew something the fans didn’t: when summer practice began, unlike Fitzgerald, Hoke, and even O’Brien, Urban Meyer still didn’t have his team.

  “The kids wouldn’t let us coach them,” he told me. “There was pushback.”

  Hardworking senior cocaptain Zach Boren “was actually one of the biggest offenders. He was always asking, ‘Why are we doing this? We didn’t do it this way before! We won games and went to the Rose Bowl!’

  “Whenever you take over a new program,” Meyer said, “there’s going to be pushback. But this was getting old.”

  Going into the 2012 season, Meyer had plenty on his plate, by any standard: expectations of a perfect season, a cleaned-up program, a high graduation rate, and a historic, university-wide fund-raising campaign, plus his own hopes of maintaining a healthy, happy family life.

  But he would be unlikely to achieve any of those goals if he didn’t win the hearts and minds of the men wearing the gray helmets.

  When fall camp started, he still hadn’t.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE OUTSIDER

  When Bill O’Brien signed his name on that dotted line, he might not have had any more idea what the NCAA had in store for Penn State than Penn State’s new leaders apparently did. But he had no illusions that their troubles were behind them—the court cases alone could drag on for years—and he already knew how tricky coaching could be even under normal circumstances. And these were far from normal circumstances.

  For their part, Penn State’s leaders might have been whistling past the NCAA graveyard, but to their credit, they got a few things right. Even they knew enough trouble lay ahead to conclude they had no choice but to hire someone outside the family for their next football coach, and to give him a free hand in hiring an almost completely new staff. O’Brien wisely kept stalwarts such as coaches Larry Johnson Sr. and Ron Vanderlinden, and equipment managers Spider Caldwell and Kirk Diehl. But as for the rest of Paterno’s staff, most of whom had served with Sandusky, Penn State avoided the problem of having a dozen coaches still on payroll who might have to answer more questions about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did or didn’t do about it—which could keep even the best coaches hopelessly distracted from doing their jobs.

  But Penn State’s leaders did not fully recognize why this would be the mother of all transitions: no football program was so haunted by both its past and its future. If this coaching transplant was going to take, O’Brien and his players would have to outrun both.

  • • •

  At major college football programs, smooth transitions are still the exception, not the rule, especially when the new guy is following not just a legend, but a suddenly tainted one.

  Unlike their NFL counterparts, the best college coaches are not interchangeable parts. You don’t simply install one here or there, flick a switch, and watch them light up the college football world. Too often, schools embark on a blind date, with neither party knowing enough about the other before heading to the altar. Las Vegas weddings tend to end in Las Vegas divorces—just ask the people at Michigan. Both sides had better know what they’re getting into and be ready, willing, and able to bridge the gap between them.

  Tradition can be a great help here. No matter what sordid stories would emerge—and as Penn State’s lawsuits roll out, those could only get worse—the uniforms, the mascot, and the band were blameless and could be leaned on by the faithful to remind them of the values they hold dear.

  • • •

  When they introduced Bill O’Brien on January 6, 2012, as the school’s fifteenth coach—and only its third si
nce 1950—famed lettermen such as Franco Harris, Todd Blackledge, and LaVar Arrington publicly complained the university had just picked a man with no ties to Penn State’s celebrated tradition, and no experience as a head coach. Of course, both charges were true and resonated with many alums and lettermen.

  But the current players—many of whom had secretly grown unhappy with the program they had joined—immediately took to the unassuming, energetic O’Brien, his cutting-edge football formulas, his pedigreed staff, and his benignly insane strength coach, Craig Fitzpatrick, who led them on predawn conditioning runs in the dead of winter wearing a T-shirt and shorts. By the time of the annual Blue-White game on April 21, marking the end of spring practice, O’Brien felt close enough to his players to end his halftime locker room speech by telling them, “Now let’s give the fans something to look forward to this fall. Keep it moving, keep it sharp—and, hey, don’t cheap-shot your teammates . . . assholes!”

  He turned to the door with perfect comedic timing. The players cracked up, snapped their straps, and jogged out the tunnel behind their new coach. He had them.

  But having them under those conditions—tough as they surely seemed at the time—looked positively simple compared to having them in the rough seas ahead.

  • • •

  On Sunday, July 22, 2012, O’Brien got word that the NCAA would be issuing its punishment sometime the next day. The coaches debated canceling the Monday-morning training session, but the players urged them not to. Their summer work had built up to their “max out” day to set their personal records before taking a week off, then returning to start a month of full-blown practice and three months of games.

  Monday morning, Coach O’Brien walked through the weight room while the players were lifting to let them know he had just learned the sanctions were going to be announced at ten, right after their training session ended. He told them they would meet as a team in the players’ lounge to watch the press conference.

  “But that only jacked us up, like we needed to get ready for the news, to prepare ourselves,” recalled starting defensive lineman John Urschel, a redshirt junior who was already pursuing his master’s degree in mathematics, with a 4.0. “We just had a ton of great, positive energy—one of the best lifts we’ve ever had.”

  After they set a pile of personal bests, when they sat down in the players’ lounge to watch Mark Emmert announce Penn State’s punishment, their energy was quickly redirected.

  “Guys were getting pissed, yelling at the TV,” Urschel told me. “It was pretty severe—a lot more than we thought it would be.”

  Just two years earlier, Emmert himself had held up Penn State as a pillar of all that was right about collegiate athletics. Just one year earlier, you’d be hard-pressed to find a university or a state with greater pride in its football program, which stressed “Success with Honor”—and seemed to live up to it.

  Now it was the football program that threatened to bring down the very university it had helped build.

  For the people watching in that players’ lounge the question, stripped down to its essentials, was this: Could Penn State’s program, and the traditions that went with it, survive the season intact? Did they have a future worth fighting for?

  O’Brien immediately led everyone into the team room, where he draped his left arm over the podium and spoke directly to his shell-shocked squad.

  “I just remember how matter-of-fact and truthful he was,” longtime equipment manager Kirk Diehl recalled. “He was probably as surprised as anyone, but he didn’t sugarcoat it. He said—and I’ll never forget this—‘We’re not here to understand the rules. We’re here to follow them. It’s my obligation to tell you that you are free to go anywhere you want, with no penalties. However, if you stay, I promise you, you will never forget it.’ ”

  “He really felt for us,” Urschel said. “He didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. He didn’t try to minimize what the NCAA had just done. He didn’t beg us to stay. But he stressed the positive: ‘You still get to play football in front of 108,000 rabid fans. You still get to be on TV. And most important, you will still get a great education.’ ”

  The bond between the new coach and his players had grown stronger, but if O’Brien was going to keep his team together, he still had lots of work to do—and not a moment to spare.

  “Were we in danger of a complete collapse?” seventeen-year defensive-line coach Larry Johnson Sr. wondered aloud. “No question. The threat was as real as it could be.”

  • • •

  It quickly became obvious that Penn State’s interim president, Rod Erickson—a nice guy who had been an effective provost, but was clearly in over his head in his new role—its acting athletic director, Dave Joyner, and its deeply dysfunctional board of thirty-two trustees, who did not even know each other’s names, were too busy working damage control for their university and themselves to spend any time defending the current players. It is not a stretch to say the survival of Penn State football would be left almost entirely to the coaches and the players.

  That Monday night, O’Brien set up a conference call with the parents of his 120 players. From this town-hall phone meeting an idea came to him—a simple one by the standards of every other college football program, but not Penn State’s. The next day, O’Brien walked down to see Spider Caldwell in his equipment room to follow up on this idea. “How difficult would it be,” O’Brien asked, “to put these guys’ names on the backs of their jerseys?”

  At Penn State, this was tantamount to asking if it would be a big deal if the pope replaced his ceremonial miter with a backward baseball cap.

  Caldwell, who started working in the equipment room as a student in 1983, recoiled. “My first reaction was ‘Oh, no, the lettermen are going to go bonkers.’ And I knew Bill had promised, originally, never to change the jerseys. That nameless jersey is so sacred to our former players.

  “But when I heard the reasoning behind it—that he wanted to honor the guys who stayed, and it will mark a break—I thought it was a great idea. But I wasn’t at all sure the lettermen would agree.”

  O’Brien’s relationship with the old guard, which could create a chain reaction of problems if it went sour, was a real concern. But that first frenetic week, it was easily eclipsed by the fear of an exodus of players, with no time to replace them before Penn State’s first game, against Ohio University on September 1.

  The lettermen and the current players might have had different perspectives on Paterno and O’Brien, but they had far more in common than not, including being the first groups to grasp the full threat Penn State football faced.

  • • •

  Tuesday, July 24, 2012: The morning after Emmert’s announcement, Mike Zordich woke up at six to work out at seven. “First thing I do, I look at my phone, and I already had a bunch of calls from [opposing] coaches. Fuck. That meant everyone else was getting them, too.”

  When he first saw Mauti in their living room, “Dude” was all he had to say. “I looked at him, looking at his phone, and he’s got the same thing happening. And I said, right then and there, ‘Look. I’m staying.’ And once I’m staying, he’s staying, so now the question is, who else is gonna stay?”

  Convinced of the program’s impending doom, the two went straight to their favorite sanctuary: strength coach Craig Fitzgerald’s office. It was attached to the weight room, which looked out onto the emerald practice field of real grass, surrounded by pine trees and the Nittany Mountains beyond—one of the most beautiful settings in the Big Ten, and the league’s only campus with mountains. But they knew scenery was not going to save their team.

  “What are you guys hearing?” Fitzgerald asked.

  The two seniors cut to the chase, rattling off all the teammates they’d heard were leaving. “We just started writing names on legal pads,” Zordich said, “listing who was in and who was out, trying to figure out if this guy leaves, is this guy gonna follow, so will it trickle down? We practically made a playbook of
who’s getting calls, from where, and who’s gonna stay.”

  Fitz looked at the list. If even half the players they had listed on the “Gone” side of the ledger actually left, Penn State might not have enough players to run a decent practice, let alone compete on Saturdays.

  Fitzgerald muttered, “Holy shit,” then grabbed his phone to call O’Brien in his upstairs office. Not long after he started relaying what the seniors had told him, O’Brien interrupted Fitzgerald: “Hold it. I’ll be right down.”

  Bill O’Brien left his spacious, carpeted office, dashed down the stairs, and joined Fitz and the two seniors in the smaller, rubber-floored room. O’Brien knew this was no time to stand on ceremony.

  He saw Mauti and Zordich, normally as upbeat as any players he’d coached, slumped in the couch against the window.

  “When Coach showed up, our body language, sitting around, was basically ‘We’re screwed,’ ” Mauti recalled. “We weren’t hiding anything. It was too late for that.”

  While O’Brien and Fitzgerald sat and listened, the two seniors started reading the names of dozens of teammates they had learned were about to bolt to other campuses. O’Brien had coached these players for only six months, but he had no reason to doubt them. He’d been hearing most of the same things they had, and some they hadn’t.

  He looked at them, then at Fitzgerald, then exhaled. He knew he had to make some big decisions—decisions that could determine the very fate of Penn State’s football program—and he had to make them fast.

  “The four of us sat there,” Mauti recalled, “and started making a new list, going over everyone we knew about. Then we started strategizing on what to do—who would call who, all that. And then we just started calling everyone—players, parents, roommates, everyone we could think of—basically re-recruiting our own team to stay.”

  The four men agreed on virtually everything, except one seemingly minor point: O’Brien thought he should set a deadline for players to declare whether they were in or out. How could they run an effective fall camp without knowing who would still be on the team for their first game?