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

by Bacon, John U.

  But for Spider Caldwell and Kirk Diehl, one big question still hadn’t been answered: Would the lettermen accept O’Brien’s one-week-old plan to put the players’ names on the jerseys, or would they mutiny?

  “I was grimacing and grinding my teeth all day,” Spider confessed. Whenever former players come to town, their first stop is Spider’s equipment room, to say hello and find out what’s going on. “To hear them complaining about [the names] every time,” Spider said, “and for me to have to explain the coach’s reasoning every time, would be very draining.

  “They had all heard about the names, and after the speeches, they came up to me and were all so supportive of it, saying, ‘What a great idea.’

  “They all realized, too, that we’re in uncharted waters.”

  • • •

  O’Brien and company had pulled a few rabbits out of their hats that week, but everyone knew they could still lose their team at almost any moment.

  A few players did leave, of course, including kicker Anthony Fera, who transferred to Texas to be closer to his mom, who suffers from multiple sclerosis; and Justin Brown, a wide receiver and kick returner who transferred to Oklahoma. While they did not constitute a critical mass, it could quickly become one.

  The key, everyone agreed, was Silas Redd. A week after the sanctions, he still hadn’t left—but he hadn’t committed to staying, either.

  During the first weekend after the sanctions, between the Big Ten Media Days and the Lettermen Night, USC’s Lane Kiffin flew Redd out to LA—presumably after learning his name—where Snoop Dogg’s picking him up at the airport in a limousine apparently made an impression.

  The suspense finally ended the day after the lettermen spoke, when Redd called Zordich: “Z-man, don’t tell anyone, but I’m going to USC tomorrow.”

  “I was his fullback,” Zordich told me. “He’s lived with us. He’s been our roommate. It was a special relationship. So when he tells you to keep it private, you got to be a man about it and keep your word. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  Losing their best offensive player was undeniably bad news, but they could accept it if Redd’s departure did not start the dominoes dropping. If, in other words, Zordich and Mauti’s theory that the longer the players stuck around, the more likely they were to stay, proved true—and O’Brien was right to take their advice.

  Eight days after the sanctions hit, Silas Redd proved to be a domino of one. No one followed that day, or the next.

  Days later, a few players did leave, but no one of great importance to the team’s prospects. Pete Massaro, the senior defensive end who “freaked out” when he heard how many teammates planned to transfer just hours after the NCAA sanctions were announced, did some final accounting: “The freshman I talked to listed a ton of people in those two classes who were going to leave—and only two of them left. Those meetings helped. A lot.”

  • • •

  But just to be sure, O’Brien had one more card to play: Rick Slater, who had walked on to the Penn State football team a decade earlier when he was already in his late twenties. He went on to join Navy SEAL Team Six. Yes, the very same unit that killed Osama bin Laden.

  Slater walked to the front of the team room, wearing cargo shorts, a brown T-shirt, and a brown flannel shirt. Then he very deliberately emptied his pockets of his cell phone, his keys, and his wallet, leaving them all on the table, then grabbed the podium.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is an honor to be here.”

  He told them why: as great as it had been playing an important role on Navy SEAL Team Six, walking on at Penn State was a greater honor.

  He then pulled his belt from his cargo shorts to show them the proof: a navy-blue belt, the exact same kind the Penn State players use to hold up their practice and game pants.

  “This belt,” he said, “I pulled from my pants after my last game at Penn State. And this is what I wore when we went on our mission against Osama bin Laden.”

  Needless to say, Lieutenant Slater had their undivided attention.

  He then told them of SEAL Team Six’s mission to Pakistan, and how things had not gone according to plan. A vital chopper had crashed, just as two had in President Carter’s failed mission to free the hostages in Iran in 1980. When that happened, the SEALs knew from their training, they were required to ask, “Can we finish the job, or do we pull out now?” They called base camp and quickly got this reply:

  “Charlie Mike.”

  “That’s the military alphabet,” Slater explained, “for ‘CM.’ For us, that means ‘Continue Mission.’

  “So we did.”

  The room erupted. They got the message.

  The Penn State players’ cause was not taking out an evil terrorist, just winning a few college football games—but they believed in it.

  “Everyone who’s still here,” Urschel told me, “has made a choice.”

  A clear one. As Leo Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  The players who were unhappy departed for a wide variety of reasons: family or opportunity or freedom from sanctions or just better weather. But the ones who stayed all stayed for the same reasons. They knew what they were up against, but they also knew why they wanted to stay: for Penn State, for the football program—past and present—and for the coaches, but mainly for each other. A little over a week after the sanctions hit, the players who remained shared an uncommonly uniform set of beliefs.

  “People think we’re gonna lose games, that we’ll be lucky to go six and six,” Zordich told me at the time. “People think we forgot how to play football. They don’t know us! This team is stronger than it’s ever been.

  “Our whole thing is—all this crap—we’ve been the ones suffering the consequences. When we talk in public these days, we walk a fine line. We can’t say much. But somebody has to pay the price for what we’ve been through. We can’t do it through the media. We can’t do it in the courts. So we will do it on the football field.

  “We’ve done all this, we’ve got to make it worthwhile. We can’t do all this, then say, ‘Seven and five is good enough.’

  “It’s not.”

  CHAPTER 7

  WE KNOW WHO WE ARE

  The people running the Big Ten, of course, had other things to worry about.

  Surrounded by a sea of tsunamis, in which everything you thought just yesterday was going to be there forever was blown away a day later, the nation’s oldest college conference increasingly looked like an island of sanity and stability.

  • • •

  Nationwide, the long-static conferences started shifting about two decades ago, when college football’s Division I independents began looking for conferences to call home, and most found them. That included Penn State, after Paterno failed to convince other regional independents like Boston College, Rutgers, Syracuse, West Virginia, and Pitt to create their own conference, only to see them join the Big East. The Big Ten eagerly accepted the Lions for a few reasons, one of which was “Northwestern insurance.” Concerned that the Wildcats—still deep in their Dark Ages, and flirting with the Ivy League as a possible out—might fail to emerge from the depths, the Big Ten thought adding an unwieldy eleventh team was a small price to pay to ensure it wouldn’t be stuck with an even more awkward nine teams.

  When these independents joined conferences, it made college football more stable, not less so. But the next round of moves would not have such a calming effect on the sport.

  All seemed relatively secure in the college football world until 2010, when the conservative Big Ten—which had added exactly one school in the previous half century, Michigan State, and lost none—reached out to Nebraska.

  • • •

  Neither party entered the dialogue lightly. The Cornhuskers were one of the charter members of the conference that became the Big Eight. The conference dominated the Great Plains for almost a century and featured some of the greatest rivalries in college sports: Missouri
-Kansas, rooted in the Civil War, and of course Oklahoma-Nebraska, one of the sport’s best running duels. From 1912 to 2010, those two teams played eighty-six times, including every year from 1928 through 1997.

  The string stopped not because of any lack of fan interest—which was still sky-high—but a lack of opportunity. In 1996, the Big Eight accepted four schools, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor, from the Southwest Conference, which had disbanded under the weight of its own corruption. The Big 12 put Oklahoma and Nebraska in different divisions, which caused them to skip their series five of the next thirteen years.

  Other problems quickly arose, particularly with Texas, which demanded and received a larger slice of the revenue pie than the schools that had been in the conference from the beginning. Things went from bad to worse when Texas split off entirely from the conference TV contract to sign a separate deal with ESPN, worth an unheard-of $300 million over twenty years.

  For the Cornhuskers, the writing was on the wall.

  When Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany met with Tom Osborne, Nebraska’s legendary coach-turned-athletic director, Osborne explained the Big Eight thought it was expanding, while the Texas schools thought they were merging. “So, who’s in charge? There was no congealing.”

  “Tom said it was an eye-opener,” Delany told me. “You always have your disagreements and your aggressive coaches [in any conference], but there was always a sense of a common purpose among people in the Big Eight, and they had generally gotten along remarkably well.”

  The Longhorns’ money grab poisoned the waters, prompting a number of Big 12 schools to consider new homes. For Nebraska, the Big Ten looked especially appealing.

  “Relatively speaking, we’ve always had more sharing than other conferences,” Delany said. “We’ve never had any special deals. Everyone gets the same slice of the pie, always has, and no one has seriously questioned that.”

  To the people at Nebraska, that meant they would be treated more equitably in their first year in the Big Ten than they had been in their hundredth season in the conference Nebraska helped found. Their welcome included a check from the Big Ten Network for $22 million—almost twice as much as the Big Eight would pay.

  For the Big Ten’s part, they were not looking, but they were curious.

  “Eleven is not the best number in the world,” Delany said. “It’s a prime number, is about all you can say about it. But it was just going to be that way for a while because we weren’t looking to add a school just to make a nice round number. We were not going to add a school that didn’t have strong research elements, that didn’t aspire to be good in a lot of areas, and didn’t have a broad-based athletic program. Sports like baseball, women’s volleyball, and wrestling don’t always have big popularity, but they do have an incredibly loyal fan base.”

  Nebraska had all of those elements, and something more: a compatible personality.

  “I knew,” Delany recalled, “after meeting with the Nebraska people after just a couple hours that there was a fit there, partly because we were talking the same language. There was an immediate congruency.

  “Neither side needed the other—neither side was desperate—but we felt we could both benefit. And they understood, we were offering an expansion, not a merger.”

  Tom Osborne and company concluded Delany’s offer sounded pretty good—and certainly better than what they were getting from the Big 12.

  • • •

  The courtship couldn’t have gone better. Big Ten fans almost universally applauded the addition of Nebraska, and Nebraska fans were relieved to jump from the Big Eight to the Big Ten. But the marriage’s first year presented some bumps in the road.

  If you’re the Big Ten, and you suddenly have twelve teams, what do you do—change the name to the Big 12? No, because that name was already taken by Nebraska’s former conference—which, naturally, now had ten teams. So the Big Ten decided to keep its name—and change everything else, starting with the logo.

  Now, to handle all this, they could have asked regional artists to draw on the Big Ten’s unparalleled 115-year history and come up with something simple, honest, and authentic, or paid one of the league’s thousands of art students a hundred bucks to make a new logo, the way Nike did years ago to create the swoosh. Or it could simply have opened up a contest to the league’s 17.5 million fans, who would have jumped at the chance for nothing.

  Instead, the Big Ten gave the assignment to high-priced international image consultants—“branding experts”—and then let them tell Big Ten fans what they were supposed to like. The conference hired Pentagram Design—a “multi-disciplinary design firm with offices worldwide,” in London, New York, Austin, and Berlin, whose “culture of interchange . . . adds tremendous value to all creative thinking,” and whose “core competencies” include “futurizing.”

  For about the salary of a Big Ten athletic director (at the time, anyway), Pentagram Design put their best people on this assignment—and after months of experimenting, their seven-person Project Team emerged from their undisclosed location to give us the solution: put the word BIG over the word TEN. It was sobering to realize we helped subsidize this expensive effort through tax breaks for the nonprofit Big Ten and its member institutions.

  The logo Pentagram came up with turns the I in BIG into a 1, and makes the G look like a zero, like this: B1G. Right below the number 10, they put the word TEN, which is how many teams were in the Big Ten from 1953 to 1992. The color they picked for this avant-garde logo is a strange shade of light blue—the kind your printer makes when it’s running out of ink—which might explain why not one of the twelve Big Ten teams has ever put that color anywhere near their uniforms.

  The response was immediate—and negative. Time magazine said the logo “looks as if it needed an elementary-school stencil and an oven timer to complete.” One sports website, in a piece titled “New Big Ten Logo Looks Like It Took 25 Seconds to Make,” wrote, “The Big Ten unveiled a new logo on Monday, and it looks, well, it looks like someone was assigned the redesign, completely forgot about it and then scraped something together on Microsoft Paint a few minutes before it was due.”

  The fans were less forgiving.

  The league’s most beloved traditions—from trophies like the Little Brown Jug and Floyd of Rosedale, to Wisconsin’s “Jump Around” and Ohio State’s “Hang on Sloopy,” to Michigan’s banner and Penn State’s whiteouts—were created spontaneously and organically. The process to create the logo was the opposite—and fans responded accordingly.

  Having come up with an expensive, wildly unpopular logo, the Big Ten turned its attention to naming its two new divisions. They threw out suggestions such as East and West—they had swapped a couple teams out of alignment—and others such as Lakes and Plains, and Hayes and Schembechler (in honor of two of the league’s greatest coaches), and settled on Legends and Leaders, which stand for nothing and nobody.

  The normally stoic Big Ten fans once again went ballistic—and this time, the Big Ten’s actual leaders heard them.

  “We’ve had enough experience with names and expansion and development of divisions that we know that you rarely get a ninety percent approval rating,” Delany told WGN 720 AM in Chicago. “But to get a ninety percent nonapproval rating was really surprising. It showed that we didn’t connect with our fans in a way that we wanted to. It’s humbling, to say the least, because we’re trying to build fan bases, not push them away.

  “We’re still listening and trying to figure things out. We’ll try to do a little education, let it breathe a bit, and then probably revisit it after the first of the year.”

  But they didn’t, and the names stuck.

  The league had much more success actually creating the divisions, which was no small trick. Delany and his staff had to solve a logic game with a dozen conditions, including geography, rivalries, and competitive balance. After Delaney gave his team the ground rules, he left for the Big Ten Media Days luncheon kickoff and was amazed to d
iscover they had managed to get the whole thing sorted out before he returned.

  “Of our seventeen main rivalries,” he told me, “we were able to keep twelve, and the five we didn’t keep annually, they’ll get them about half the time due to crossover play.”

  Even geographically it worked out better than expected, with only Michigan and Michigan State moved to the “western” division, and Wisconsin and Minnesota to the “eastern” side. The rest stayed on their side of the dividing line.

  Of course, no such divisions can be perfect. “Geographically, Wisconsin was hurt the most,” Delany told me, “and they lose their rivalry with Iowa and potentially Nebraska—but there was just no way we could draw a line, East and West. Barry [Alvarez, Wisconsin’s AD] has provided great leadership.”

  Alvarez had also been a good sport, understanding that not everyone could get what he wanted and that each had to put the greater good first—the very spirit that was lacking in the Big Twelve and threatening to break it apart.

  • • •

  But the divisions presented another potential pitfall, and a big one: they threatened the Michigan–Ohio State rivalry.

  Ten years ago, ESPN viewers voted the Michigan–Ohio State football game the best rivalry in the nation. Not just in college football, or football in general, but in all sports. Since 1935, it’s held a privileged spot as the last game of the Big Ten season. More college football fans have seen this rivalry, in person or on TV, than any other.

  But when the Big Ten added Nebraska, the rivalry’s future was in jeopardy.

  So that raised a few possibilities—not to mention plenty of rumors and fears. If they kept Michigan and Ohio State in the same division, the teams could never meet in the title game. But if they put them in different divisions, they might have to play again in the title game just one week later. One rumor had the league moving the game from its traditional date at the end of the season to October—or even interrupting the rivalry, without any guarantee of playing every year.