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

by Bacon, John U.

  O’Brien was all for staying calm under pressure, but he was smart enough to recognize the odds had shifted. He told his coaches and his offense they would go for it on everything but “fourth and ridiculous”—or even better, not need to kick at all.

  After warm-ups, O’Brien walked into the players’ room on his way to the coaches’ room and told the players at least three times they needed “laserlike focus” and said “Do your job!” at least four times. “Focus on every play, all day!”

  Mac McWhorter followed up with “There is a huge difference between just hustling, and straining on every play! That’s what we need.”

  Some teams might have felt more pressure before a bowl game—but not this one.

  Jordan Hill, the usually quiet defensive lineman, had a towel on his head, stewing. Then he jumped up and walked through the locker room. “Both sides of the ball. We’re going to work today, y’all! We’re going to work—all day, every play! You heard me! And when we come back in here, we’re gonna have a party!”

  • • •

  Penn State won the coin toss, and as O’Brien promised, they made the unconventional decision to take the ball first.

  Starting on his own 28-yard line, McGloin went to work, finding Garry Gilliam in the flats to get out to the 40—which also got the hungry crowd going and allowed the players to take a breath.

  After McGloin ran for 7 to the 49, setting up a third and one, O’Brien called for the quarterback sneak. They had gone over this simple play in great detail all week, breaking down film of Tom Brady doing it again and again. “Look it up,” O’Brien had told McGloin. “In twelve years in the NFL, Tom Brady has not failed once on a quarterback sneak. Not once.”

  McGloin took the snap and—just like Brady—staggered his back foot, waited one beat, got his pads as low as he could, and drove forward right behind his center. He got his 2 yards, and a first down.

  With a new set of downs, McGloin pumped, freezing defenders in place, then launched a 45-yard bomb to Robinson on the left side, who had blown so far past the coverage, he had to wait for McGloin’s pass and was tackled at the 14. On second down, on a play-action fake, McGloin rolled to his right, stopped, then passed to true-freshman tight end Jesse James, a carpenter’s son from Pittsburgh. Touchdown.

  Navy then called a time-out—possibly to ice Ficken. His extra-point attempt was weak, but it made it over the crossbar—enough for a big cheer. Penn State, 7–0.

  Penn State’s defense—driven by the highly motivated duo of Mike Mauti and Jordan Hill—stuffed the Midshipmen in short order, giving the ball back to McGloin, who faked to the right, turned left, and then, smooth as silk, flew another long pass to Robinson at the 20, who cut right, lost his man, and glided into the end zone for the score. With 6:40 left in the first quarter, Penn State led 14–0.

  No one on the sidelines or in the stands looked terribly relaxed, however. They knew their problem wasn’t getting the lead, but holding it. When Navy marched down to Penn State’s 5-yard line, their fears seemed justified. But on third down, Penn State blitzed, forcing Navy quarterback Trey Miller to toss one up in the air, which Gerald Hodges easily intercepted.

  McGloin took advantage, leading his team on another long drive, capped by a floater over the middle for an easy touchdown. After Ficken’s point-after attempt went wide right, however, O’Brien knew he would not be attempting many 40-yard field goals anytime soon.

  Taking a 20–0 lead into halftime would have pleased another team, but not this one. “One thing’s for sure,” Roof said to his fellow coaches, “this thing ain’t over!”

  “We gave up only three points our first two halves, and we lost ’em both,” Coach John Butler added. “We haven’t won a second half yet.”

  When O’Brien addressed the offense, he told them, “We’ve been in this position the first two games, and we didn’t finish the deal. Finish the deal today! Finish the deal today!”

  After O’Brien’s chalk-talk, the veteran Gerald Hodges said to rookie Jesse James, “You got yourself a nice little touchdown there, eh?” James just nodded and grinned, but Hodges already knew James would remember that moment the rest of his life. Even with all the weight on them, at times the Penn State players could still just be players.

  O’Brien addressed the team before going out. “Defense: Keep running around and getting after them like I told you. They can’t handle you. Offense: Keep moving the chains. Now get in here. Finish on three.

  “One-two-three finish!”

  • • •

  Penn State had to pay for getting the ball first, and Navy seemed determined to make the price high. The Midshipmen started on their 34 and soon faced a fourth and 1 on their own 43. Showing admirable guts, Navy went for it, ran the triple option—and got 17. Penn State kept the pressure on Miller and came within a whisker of sack after sack, but Miller almost always got free to make the play. But on fourth and 16, from Penn State’s 35, Penn State’s blitz forced Miller to throw it away.

  With McGloin’s confidence growing before the crowd’s eyes, he led his offense down to Navy’s 25-yard line, then tossed a pass over the middle. Tipped! But right into the hands of Robinson, for another touchdown—the negative of the play against Ohio that had turned that game around. Luck was finally going Penn State’s way.

  Up 27–0 in the third quarter, even the Lions thought they had the game in hand, and the happy chants started.

  “Bill O-Bri-en!”

  The band played, “Heyyyyyyy, hey, baby! I wanna know, oh, oh—if you’ll be my girl,” to which the students inevitably added, “Just for the night!” For the first time in almost a year, Penn Staters could enjoy the simple, goofy fun of a college football game.

  Ahead 34–7 in the fourth quarter, O’Brien sent in the backups—hoping they would be encouraged not to transfer—while the sun set between the press box and the end-zone balcony. It had been a near-perfect day.

  The ticker-tape scoreboard flashed a few results from around the league. The Big Ten was running through its patsies that weekend, winning ten of twelve games. Indiana lost to Ball State, 41–39, which didn’t count for much, but tenth-ranked Michigan State was upset by nineteenth-ranked Notre Dame, which did. Northwestern beat Boston College, 22–13, while Ohio State had to fight off an unranked Cal team at home, 35–28, suggesting the Buckeyes’ dream of a perfect season was probably delusional.

  The ticker reported Penn State’s attendance at ninety-eight thousand. This would have brought heartbreak to the Michigan crowd, which had never dipped below one hundred thousand since 1975. But the Lions’ six-year streak had already been broken at the opening game of the 2011 season, months before Sandusky was arrested, thanks to the overpricing of tickets through a misguided and ill-timed seat-license plan called the “Step Program.” This had caused attendance to drop by about three thousand a game in 2010, when the program was introduced, again in 2011, and would again in 2012.

  The ticker scrolled more news: “Penn State student-athlete graduation rate: 88 percent. D-I average is 80 percent,” which drew one of the bigger cheers of the day.

  When the game ended with a reassuring 34–7 outcome, the Lions joined the Midshipmen to sing the Navy alma mater, then ran to the other end zone to sing Penn State’s song with their student section.

  On the song’s fourth and final verse, which eerily states, “May no act of ours bring shame,” the students didn’t mumble or skip it. They shouted it.

  For some, it was a reminder. For others, a declaration.

  In the locker room, the mood was less joy than deep relief. “Great job, men!” O’Brien said. “But that’s just one! That’s just one! Like I told you last night, we can get on a roll here if we stay sharp, stay hungry, and stay together!”

  “Yeah!”

  “The game ball,” O’Brien said, “goes to Michael Zordich!”

  In the coaches’ room, Coach Mac bellowed, “Any win’s a good win!” Then, almost immediately: “If it wasn’t for the las
t drive, with Hodges going the wrong way, then I’d be happy.”

  Eight seconds is all it took to dispense with “any win is a good win.”

  They were back to normal.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE RICHEST RIVALRY

  On the fourth Saturday of the 2012 season, September 22, the Michigan football team would take on Notre Dame for the fortieth time, in a rivalry that went back 125 years—the oldest in major college football.

  Michigan and Notre Dame started going at it when they first met in 1887—by accident. The Michigan football team was traveling to Evanston to play Northwestern when they learned the “Purple” were backing out. So they got off the train at South Bend instead and literally taught those Notre Dame boys how to play football.

  After the Wolverines won that first contest, 8–0, Notre Dame treated their guests to a hearty banquet. The mood was so friendly that Notre Dame president Thomas Walsh felt compelled to give a toast, assuring the Michigan players that a “cordial reception would always await them at Notre Dame.”

  Promises, promises.

  No self-respecting Michigan or Notre Dame fan cannot repeat the history that follows. This synopsis is for the rest of you.

  In 1895, representatives from seven schools—Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, Chicago, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—met at the Palmer House in Chicago to create what we now call the Big Ten. Because Notre Dame was still an embryonic team at a small, struggling school, no one considered inviting them to join.

  Notre Dame’s relationship with the Big Ten became more complicated after coach Fielding Yost arrived at Michigan, and a player named Knute Rockne enrolled at Notre Dame. In 1910, Yost accused Notre Dame of using ineligible players and cut the series off. On the various all-American teams that big-name coaches selected in 1913, only one coach left Rockne off his list—and that man was Fielding Yost.

  Things got worse after Rockne became Notre Dame’s coach in 1918, and then blew up beyond repair in 1923—at a track meet. Yes, a track meet. Rockne got into a shouting match with Yost over the distance between the hurdles Michigan had set up. Yost vowed then and there that Notre Dame—which had desperately been trying to get into the Big Ten—would never be admitted.

  The animosity between these two giants ran at a fever pitch the rest of their lives. When a Spalding salesman tried to get Rockne to order new equipment, Rockne kept repeating that he was already overstocked with everything he needed. Finally, just before turning to go, the clever salesman sighed and said that was a shame, because Yost liked Spalding’s new footballs so much he’d ordered three dozen.

  “He did?” Rockne snapped. “Then I’ll take three dozen and a half.”

  • • •

  The teams ended the embargo during World War II, when they split two games, before cutting off the rivalry again. Another tradition that goes back almost as far as the rivalry is the mistrust between the teams’ leaders. Like all great traditions, this one has outlived its originators. Michigan’s Fritz Crisler didn’t trust Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy any more than Rockne trusted Yost. Pressed to explain why, Crisler cited this example: Whenever someone asked Leahy if he wanted a cigarette, he’d say yes, then just play with the thing without ever lighting it. “Why,” Crisler asked, “doesn’t he just say he doesn’t smoke?”

  This might sound like the silly stuff of family squabbles, and in the intimate realm of college football rivalries, that’s exactly what they are.

  • • •

  What makes Notre Dame so different from other teams?

  “I can’t put my finger on it, but all I know is it’s here,” Father Theodore Hesburgh told me. He should know, having served as president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, transforming Notre Dame from a middling college into a world-class university. “You’ve got to call it spirit. Notre Dame is both a mystery and a miracle.”

  But if you look at Notre Dame’s history, its image, and its students, the mystery is a lot easier to understand.

  Today, with more than 100,000 Catholics marrying non-Catholics each year, it’s hard to appreciate how ostracized Catholics were until just a few decades ago. Before World War II, store signs reading IRISH NEED NOT APPLY were common. In areas where few blacks lived, Ku Klux Klan members frequently substituted the Irish and Italians as targets for their hatred—especially in Indiana, where the Klan flourished.

  It did not matter to the Klan that Notre Dame has always made a point of welcoming anyone who cares to visit or attend the school. In 1842, when Reverend Edward Sorin founded Notre Dame, he admitted anyone who could pay even partial tuition, often in livestock, regardless of their race or religion.

  This is the environment Knute Rockne entered when he took over the Notre Dame football program in 1918. To establish his team’s legitimacy, Rockne badly wanted to join what is now the Big Ten. The conference schools, led by Yost, not only refused him, they banned member schools from playing Notre Dame.

  The reasons were complicated. Many resented Rockne’s habit of bending eligibility rules, but many of them had bent the same rules before cleaning up their programs in the 1920s, Michigan included. At least some of the coaches—most notably U-M’s Fielding Yost—despised Catholics, Rockne, and losing in equal measure, and playing Notre Dame meant facing all three. Rockne’s all-time winning percentage of .881 remains the best mark in college football history.

  That 1923 track meet gave Yost the opportunity he needed to blackball Notre Dame for good.

  Unfortunately for the Big Ten, the ban worked.

  • • •

  Notre Dame’s leaders initially cursed their independent status, but not for long.

  “Independence has meant so much to us,” the late Reverend Edmund Joyce, Notre Dame’s athletic director for thirty-five years under Hesburgh, told me in 1997. Without being tied to a regional conference schedule, the Irish have been free to play teams all over the country. “That made us into the single national power with a national following.”

  That started with Rockne himself. No sports figure in modern times did a better job of making lemonade from the lemons he’d been handed than Rockne. Once Yost made it clear Notre Dame had no chance of joining the Big Ten while he was alive, Rockne didn’t waste any time licking his wounds. Instead, he scheduled the best competition in the biggest stadiums in the largest cities—where most Catholics lived.

  When the Irish came to town, the hard-luck Catholics got to see an unapologetically Catholic university dominate that most red-blooded of American games, football. What Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson did for African Americans, Notre Dame did for Catholics. So many Catholics listened to Notre Dame games on the radio, you could walk down the street in the Catholic section of any big city and not miss a play.

  He also scheduled games in Yankee Stadium—in front of the national media—and in Los Angeles, in front of Hollywood hotshots.

  And that’s why Notre Dame didn’t shrink without the Big Ten, but grew into the only college team with a national following.

  Well, that, and hundreds and hundreds of victories.

  As the football team’s fortunes rose, so did the school’s reputation. Reverend Joyce was right: the team’s independence allowed it to become the nation’s only squad with a national following.

  But it took President Hesburgh to figure out how to transfer Notre Dame’s success on the field to success in the classroom. What started out as a podunk private school that would accept live cattle for tuition is now among the most respected universities in the world.

  While Notre Dame’s academic reputation was steadily rising, the reputation of its football team—which made it all possible—was steadily falling. The Irish earned at least one national title every decade from the twenties to the eighties—eleven total—but not another since 1988.

  But there is good news for Notre Dame: in 2012, U.S. News & World Report ranked Notre Dame the seventeenth best university in the country—a higher ranking than the football team had enjoyed in years.r />
  Coach Rockne must have been spinning—but Father Ted was surely thrilled.

  • • •

  For the next thirty-five years, arguably the sport’s two most legendary programs, situated just three hours apart, did not play a single game—but once again, Notre Dame seemed to fare pretty well without the Wolverines, winning six national titles during that span.

  At a banquet in the late sixties, Notre Dame athletic director Moose Krause leaned over to his Michigan counterpart, Don Canham, and said, “Don, Michigan and Notre Dame should be playing football.” They were the two winningest teams in the game’s history, they both had earned reputations for doing it the right way, and they were only three hours apart. Canham couldn’t argue against the logic of it.

  After a few years of touchy negotiations, they relaunched the rivalry in 1978, and it was an immediate hit. The games were so good Sports Illustrated put the rivalry on the cover four times in a decade, plus four features—each time eclipsing the NFL’s opening weekend, and tennis’s U.S. Open.

  The rivalry has everything college football fans love: in addition to history and tension, it boasts classic uniforms and stadiums, and unequaled parity. The night before the rivalry restarted, Moose Krause said, “When we look back twenty-five years from today, we will probably see that Michigan won half of the games and Notre Dame won half of the games.”

  Going into the 2012 rematch, since Krause made his prediction, Michigan had won fourteen, and Notre Dame thirteen, with one tie. Guess Mr. Krause knew something.

  For most of the past thirty-four years, the game held a special place at the beginning of the season, giving Michigan a perfect symmetry of rivals: Notre Dame to start, Michigan State in the middle, and Ohio State at the end. But the Notre Dame rivalry might be the most interesting: it is Michigan’s oldest; it is Michigan’s only real rival outside the Big Ten; and it’s the one game that’s guaranteed to attract national attention every year, even when both teams are down. For years, it also kicked off college football nationwide and gave even casual fans a marker of the seasons: when Michigan played Notre Dame, fall had begun.