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

by Bacon, John U.

  The Red Cedar glowed. Walking over it, I could still hear loud talking and laughter and music thumping, but I couldn’t see the people, gathering in hidden pockets scattered throughout the green paradise.

  The gorgeous campus didn’t seem to know its team had lost.

  • • •

  The Wolverines had the week off. They had finished the nonconference schedule at 2-2, which put them at the bottom of the Big Ten, but with plenty of company. Four other conference teams started league play at 2-2, four at 3-1, and three were a perfect 4-0: Ohio State, Northwestern, and Minnesota.

  In the first week of Big Ten play, Nebraska won a thriller over Wisconsin, 30–27, to move to 4-1 and a No. 21 national ranking. That set up a showdown with the No. 12 ranked Buckeyes in Columbus the next weekend.

  Northwestern took care of Indiana, 44–29, to remain undefeated at 5-0. The Wildcats were just one win off their total from 2011. They would sneak into the Top 25 at No. 24—another indication of the lack of respect the Wildcats typically receive. They would get their chance to make their point in Happy Valley, where the Wildcats hadn’t won since 2004.

  Just to make that game worthwhile, however, the Lions had some work to do. After their ignominious 0-2 start, most of the pundits had written them off, but the players didn’t bail.

  Their first Big Ten opponent, Illinois, entered the game with the same 2-2 record as the Lions, with bad losses against Arizona State and Louisiana Tech. The Illini were led by first-year head coach Tim Beckman—the man who flew eight coaches out to State College in late July to scoop up as many transfers as he could get. Despite the effort, he got exactly one: freshman Ryan Nowicki, a scout team offensive lineman. Beckman did, however, manage to become the focal point of the Penn State players’ rage, which they intended to release in full when they visited Memorial Stadium on September 29.

  “They were basically trying to break up our team,” said Jordan Hill, who actually drove around Penn State’s campus like a cowboy herding cattle when he heard Illinois’s coaches were afoot. “And really, not only our team, but our brotherhood.”

  “I’ve never seen a locker room so intense, so on a mission,” Spider Caldwell said, grinning. “I almost felt sorry for Illinois. I knew what was coming. And our guys did not disappoint!”

  Mauti led the charge, getting a sack, forcing a fumble, and making two interceptions. One of them he returned 99 yards before getting tackled by their wide receiver on the 1-yard line.

  Mauti—still overflowing with anger—stayed out for Penn State’s punt team and launched himself downfield on a 60-yard sprint. The Illini sent a receiver to block Mauti, who launched the poor guy into next week, then blew up the returner. “There’s no better feeling than that.”

  Well, maybe one.

  Before the game, Mauti promised himself he would find Coach Beckman and personally tell him to fuck off. When Mauti finally caught eyes with him, however, he opted for a bit more discretion, spitting on the ground in front of him. That, and Mauti’s sack, forced fumble, and two interceptions, he reasoned, “are the best fuck-yous available.”

  The players might not have realized it at the time, but the bigger statement made that day was for themselves: they were unified, they were not going to go quietly, they were going to fight back. Every day.

  The plane ride home was happy and relaxed, but with No. 24 ranked, undefeated Northwestern coming to Penn State the next week, there wasn’t much time to celebrate.

  CHAPTER 14

  INFERNO AT THE HORSESHOE

  Friday Night, October 5, 2012: The night before No. 20 ranked Nebraska’s nationally televised night game against undefeated Ohio State, the Buckeyes’ biggest game to date, there was only one place to go: Plank’s Café & Pizzeria, deep in Columbus’s historic German Village, just south of downtown.

  Open the old wooden door that reads PLANK’S 1939 and you enter a Buckeye fan’s paradise: dark and warm, with low ceilings, wooden walls and pillars. You have to look hard to see the wood, though, because just about every flat surface is covered with framed, autographed photos of Woody Hayes, Jim Tressel, or Archie Griffin; the most extensive collection of college pennants I have ever seen; and dozens of personalized license plates nailed to the wall with stamps like USBUILT and IMABUKI.

  I came for the beer, the pizza, and the ambience, but this being Plank’s on a Friday night before a big game, it wasn’t too surprising to run into some fellow ink-stained wretches: Kyle Rowland, who writes for the popular Buckeye blog Elevenwarriors.com, Jeff Svoboda, who writes for Buckeye Sports Bulletin, and a friend of theirs, Aaron Stollar, a former sports editor of The Lantern, Ohio State’s student newspaper.

  Stollar compared the previous week’s Ohio State–Michigan State 17–16 slugfest to West Virginia’s wide-open 70–63 win over Baylor, the highest-scoring game in Big 12 history, and concluded, “It looks like two different sports out there.”

  His snippet of stats pointed to a bigger issue: the Big Ten against the World, with the first round—Michigan-Alabama—going to the World in a landslide. Stollar further predicted college football would go the way of college baseball: that is to say, South, literally, a shift that was about to accelerate since Southern high schools had started exploiting seven-on-seven leagues and other loopholes to play year-round. This was not merely the boast of a Southerner, but a cold, hard look at the future from an Ohio State alum, speaking from the short side of the equation.

  The bigger picture wasn’t much brighter, with the gathering class-action lawsuits against the NCAA to compensate players for brain injuries, an issue that was causing many parents to prohibit their kids from playing the game in the first place.

  “Will football soon be rugby, or bullfighting,” Stollar asked, “just a niche sport that’s too dangerous for ‘civilized’ Americans?” On his list of niche sports, he could have added horse racing, boxing, and IndyCar racing, whose popularity had diminished greatly over the decades—with all three downfalls triggered by greed.

  It might seem like a strange question to ask while drinking beer in a shrine to the sport, but Stollar was actually going easy on college sports by leaving out Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA for selling the athletes’ likenesses to EA Sports video games, among other things—just another death star whizzing toward Planet NCAA.

  While we chatted away over jukebox standards, an older man kept scurrying from the bar to the tables. He was such a sight it was hard to focus on the conversation. He had white coconut hair, chomping on an unlit cigar at the end of his amusingly sinister smile—similar to the Joker’s—and wore a white shirt, a green bow tie, green floral-print suspenders, green pants rolled up like plus fours, and white-and-green, horizontally striped socks. Predictably, a few patrons called him “the Leprechaun.”

  “I don’t give a damn what I look like!” he barked, then cackled.

  The man was no hired hand but Tommy Plank, grandson of Walter Sr., the bar’s founder, and son of Walt Jr., who had passed it on to the next generation. The family has since opened two more bars in town.

  Tommy often crashed on a couch in the upstairs office, and not just because he was so dedicated. He used to “pound a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and a case of beer every day,” according to Tom Montell, a regular patron and friend, who’d joined us. Having stopped cold turkey years ago, Plank rechanneled his energy to gardening, and he was so good at it, Better Homes and Gardens gave his backyard, “Enchanted Forest,” a five-page photo spread.

  Another surprise: Tommy used to play shortstop for Ohio State. “Good fielder,” he said. “Couldn’t hit a watermelon.”

  Plank initially came off as impatient and irascible, but if he liked you—and ultimately, he seemed to like most people—he became incredibly generous. After a friend and I talked to him for a while, he said, while dashing off to get something, “George! Make sure they get another beer. I know a hobo when I see one. And you two aren’t hobos!”

  “Walter Sr. had been the head of th
e Buckeye Boosters for years,” George said, recounting the bar’s history while pulling two complimentary mugs of Yuengling, “America’s oldest brewery.” “A lot of our regulars grew up in this neighborhood. This is where we came when we were in college, and where a lot of us met our wives.

  “Then folks moved to the suburbs—Dublin, Upper Arlington, Bexley—but for all our big events, they come back here. Games, sure, but also birthdays, christenings, rehearsal dinners, weddings, graduations. And deaths. Hey, the family needs to have dinner between viewings. And we do a good wake.

  “But never, ever, schedule your wedding for a fall Saturday. You’re going to have a hundred pissed-off people packing the living room or the banquet hall’s kitchen watching the game. You just don’t do that!”

  Buckeye fans also appreciate it if you don’t have the poor taste to die on a game day, too.

  At the bar, the talk returned to football, a subject Plank complains he hears too much about each fall, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

  “When Terrelle Pryor sold his gold pants, are you kidding me?” Montell asked indignantly. “The guys from the seventies said, ‘He did what?!’ ”

  After Pryor’s blasphemy became public, Archie Griffin himself brought the players to his home to explain to them the value of Ohio State football tradition. You could argue, however, that if Pryor could sell a pair of tiny gold pants for $3,000, he didn’t need the lesson. He knew better than anyone else exactly what Ohio State football tradition was worth. In that sense, he was doing exactly what the athletic directors, the league commissioners, and the NCAA were already doing—selling the fans’ favorite traditions back to them. Of course, when Pryor did it, it wasn’t considered smart business, but scandalous.

  “Money can’t buy you love,” Montell’s friend Lenny Smith added.

  True, but it can help pay your mother’s rent, which is why, Pryor told the media, he needed the money. It was a clever move for someone I hadn’t heard a good word about in Franklin County, because who could go after a guy paying for his mom’s rent?

  There, in a nutshell, you have both the foundation of college football—the fan’s unconditional love for tradition—and one of the battalions attacking it: players who resent businessmen exploiting their performance and the fans’ devotion. (After all, someone was willing to pay $3,000 for that trinket.)

  Money can also buy you facilities, and Ohio State’s are “top-notch!” Montell said, and he was surely right about that. “And, hey, it’s cold here in the winter!” he said, explaining the $19.5 million Ohio State had spent in 2007 to renovate the twenty-year-old Woody Hayes Athletic Center. “This is not USC. We need facilities! And if you need facilities, you should get the best. We are Ohio State!” he said, banging his mug on the counter for punctuation.

  “Everyone hates us,” Smith said. “But you gotta understand—we’re not that bad!”

  And they’re not. They’re not even that different—if you take out the 5 percent who seem to have been raised by wolves.

  But, in a weird way, the Buckeyes were flattering themselves. Yes, the rest of the Big Ten hated them. And for the most part, the Buckeyes liked it that way. But given the Big Ten’s two national titles since 1968, it’s unlikely that the people at USC, Texas, or Alabama spend much time hating the Buckeyes, let alone Michigan or Penn State—or even thinking about them.

  In fairness, however, the Buckeyes don’t give those teams in the South and West much thought, either. They’re too obsessed thinking about their beloved Buckeyes.

  • • •

  “At Ohio State hockey games,” Michelle King told me over breakfast with her husband, both Michigan graduates now living in Columbus, “no matter who’s playing, when they say, ‘There is one minute remaining in the period,’ the crowd yells, ‘Michigan still sucks!’ ”

  “Last spring,” Kevin King said, “we went to a Division III basketball game in Bexley [just outside Columbus] to see a friend’s kid play for Capital University. This was an important game for them, it was close, and they still stopped to yell, ‘And Michigan still sucks!’ And I swear—I swear—I saw the point guard mouth the words.”

  “That’s when it hit me,” Michelle said. “The point guard for a D-III basketball team loves his school less than he hates Michigan.”

  Across from us at our shared table, a smart-looking, thirty-one-year-old grad student named Andy Pfeiffer, wearing a long-sleeved, white T-shirt with OHIO STATE in small letters on the left, was reading the paper. He told us he was from Dublin, a posh suburb of Columbus, and had gone to Duke for undergrad. He was now getting his MBA at night at Ohio State.

  “Duke and UNC, that’s a good rivalry,” he said. “But UNC’s a good school, a nice place. There’s respect between them. But Michigan . . . ?” He chuckled. “Let’s just say there’s less respect.”

  I had to follow up on Michelle’s observation. “Would you say you love Ohio State more than you hate Michigan, or vice versa?”

  “I love Ohio State more,” he decided, but only after taking a few beats to think about it. “But you have to understand that, during the Cooper Era, we really built up a lot of anger.” And less toward Cooper, apparently, than Michigan.

  This, to me, was the beauty of a great rivalry: yes, the inevitable bad patch does generate bitterness, but it can actually be absolved by the next generation, by dragging your rival through an equally bad patch. Players who might have been four or five during the losing streak can erase the stains on the souls of those who came before.

  Glory is transferable.

  Because Pfeiffer seemed like an intelligent, reasonable person, I had to ask, “Why do you hate Michigan so much?”

  He smiled, he chuckled, then he wiped the grin off his face, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “Because my dad raised me right.”

  I do believe he meant it.

  • • •

  Because the Nebraska–Ohio State game wouldn’t start until 8:00 p.m., after our late breakfast we watched some football at the Kings’ home. Michigan put away Purdue in the first quarter, 21–0, en route to a 44–13 stomping, to push the Wolverines to 3-2 overall. Most important to the staff and players, however, Michigan stood at 1-0 in the Big Ten, with a weak 2-4 Illinois team coming next. Their quest for a Big Ten title had just begun.

  The Northwestern–Penn State game was far more compelling—even before they kicked off. The Wildcats’ goal was to stop their four-year slide and prove, yet again, that they could play with the Big Boys. At 5-0, with three victories over BCS conference teams, they were making a strong case, but they still didn’t get the kind of respect they deserved.

  When I asked Northwestern’s head coach, Pat Fitzgerald, “You’re no longer everyone’s favorite homecoming opponent, are you?” he said, “Oh, we still are. But now we’ll ruin your homecoming.”

  Sure enough, Penn State had scheduled Northwestern for homecoming weekend. Could the Wildcats come through on Fitzgerald’s promise and ruin the Lions’ day?

  Tough call. Penn State had won three straight to return to a respectable 3-2.

  Only then were they willing to admit that “after those two losses, we were terrified that everything people said would happen to us—that our program would all fall apart—might come true,” Zordich told me. “It was a possibility—and that’s what kept us going.”

  “Short and sweet,” Mauti said, “we knew we’d better win, or we’d look like the world’s biggest blowhards. After saying all that stuff on ESPN, we had established ourselves as the spokesmen. If we’re going to be up front when it’s good, we’d have to get up there and represent when it’s bad. That’s a big double-edged sword.”

  Yes, they were riding a three-game winning streak, but they knew “those teams weren’t the best teams,” Zordich said. “We couldn’t stop there and still make our point.”

  The Lions’ oft-stated belief that if they could just win a few, they’d get on a roll, would be tested on the season’s sixth Saturday. A loss to
Northwestern, however, with Ohio State, Nebraska, and Wisconsin still on the docket, would almost certainly doom Penn State to an indifferent 6-6 season, or worse.

  The fans of both teams would be watching intently—in person and on TV—but this was a players’ game.

  • • •

  Former walk-on quarterback Matt McGloin entered the game leading the Big Ten in passing, and he looked good from the start, giving his team an early 10–0 lead. But Penn State dropped another punt—echoes of the opener against Ohio University. Kain Colter, who set Northwestern’s school record of 704 total yards against Indiana the week before, quickly converted Penn State’s mistake into a touchdown, 10–7.

  Near the end of the first half, Penn State moved the ball to Northwestern’s 34-yard line, but not close enough to dare a field goal attempt with their shaky kicker, backup-turned-starter Sam Ficken, who had gone 1 for 5 against Virginia four weeks earlier. So, on fourth and four, O’Brien went for it, but on a broken play, McGloin chucked an ill-advised pitch-pass to Zordich, who couldn’t gather the low toss.

  The cameras showed O’Brien throw his head back in disbelief, Jordan Hill drop his face in his hands, and Zordich, his palms up, look back at McGloin: Really?

  Northwestern—a program built on calculated risks—went to the air, gaining a dubious pass-interference call. An injury brought O’Brien onto the field, ranting at the refs. Pat Fitzgerald walked out, too, put his arm around the ref, and said with a grin, “I know he coached Tommy Brady and the Pats, but you don’t have to listen to his NFL bullshit.”

  That got O’Brien—who had great respect for Fitzgerald, and vice versa—even hotter. “Screw you, Fitz!” Or words to that effect.

  The TV cameras showed the shouting match, and it blew up accordingly. But to the guys on the field, it was just some good, old-fashioned trash-talking between former linebackers, whom they knew had great mutual admiration. The coaches themselves described it as a couple Irish Catholic guys from Chicago and Boston engaged in a little jawing, like pigs in mud.