Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  Paterno wanted eight players in front. He figured that with eight close to the line of scrimmage, his team could attack the offense in a whole new way. The most devastating offensive play of the late 1960s was the option, where the quarterback runs parallel with the line and then either turns upfield himself or (as an option) pitches the ball to a trailing running back. A good offensive football coach, like a good general, figures out ways to outflank the defense, to get outside of them (to “break contain,” in the language of football), and this is how so many of the biggest offensive plays happen. Paterno believed if he had that eighth man up front, his defense would not be outflanked, and teams would be unable to run around them.

  Of course, he was not the first coach to think of putting an extra man up front; coaches had long done that when it was clear the opponent wanted to run the ball. But as far as Paterno knew, nobody had kept eight up front for entire games, and the reason was obvious: doing so would leave only three in the back. How could a team defend against the big play with only three in the secondary? Wouldn’t quarterbacks complete deep pass after deep pass? Wouldn’t teams break long runs against a secondary spread too thin?

  This, then, was Paterno’s challenge: to turn three players into four. He was designing a magic trick. This was what kept him in a spare bedroom fifteen hours a day, what prompted him to ignore his family for weeks at a time, what sent him into such a deep level of obsession that friends worried about him.

  “This was how Joe’s mind worked,” Sue said. “It was always like that. He would have something in there, and he just had to work it out. It was like a train coming through.

  “I remember that some days that summer he would work something out in his mind, and he would come out and be like a human being again. He’d be joking and fun again. He would ask us to name some of the new plays, and that was fun. Then, another train would come through, and he wouldn’t say another word to us for two weeks. There were times after that when we saw that side of him, but I don’t think he was ever quite like that again.”

  What Paterno worked out came from different places in his life, but his most important breakthrough came from baseball. He had grown up watching the Brooklyn Dodgers—he had even been an usher at Ebbets Field one summer—and he was fascinated by the way outfielders worked in tandem. When a ball was hit to left-center field, for instance, the left fielder and center fielder would go after it. But the right fielder would also run in that direction to back up the play. This, of course, left no one in right field. But the team obviously did not need anyone in right field: the ball wasn’t there.

  But was this concept true only for baseball? Paterno did not think so; he believed that it was true in all sports. The defense followed the ball. All that mattered was the ball. And this inspired in Paterno a four-word phrase that he would scream at his players so many times through the years that they would swear to hearing it in their sleep.

  “Go to the ball,” Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Ham said.

  “Go to the ball,” All-Pro linebacker Shane Conlan said.

  “I heard him say it a thousand times at least: ‘Go to the ball,’ ” All-Pro linebacker Matt Millen said.

  “Go to the ball,” Penn State star and Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris said. Those words had a particular effect on his life. As a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Harris was the key player in what came to be called the “Immaculate Reception.” In the final seconds of a playoff game, the ball deflected into the air and Harris ran to it (“Go to the ball!”), caught it, and scored perhaps the most famous touchdown in pro football history.

  Go to the ball. Paterno devised an ever-shifting rotation of his defensive backs based on where the ball was most likely to go. He had his players attack the middle of the field in waves so that runners could not break through. He changed the way his defense looked to the quarterback before the ball was snapped, which confused matters even more.

  “Confusion,” Paterno would say, “plays defense.”

  WAS IT REVOLUTIONARY? WHEN IT comes to sports—and life too, probably—there is always somebody who claims to have done something first. In baseball, there are at least a half dozen people who could claim, with some credibility, that they invented the curveball. In football, there are several who may have invented the option play. Paterno’s defensive innovations would in time become widely copied; his design would be at the heart of the two-deep zone defense that many consider the soundest ever developed. But Paterno would not claim that he invented any of it. “You know what they say: There’s nothing new under the sun.”

  What is undeniable is that his new defense worked wonders for Penn State. There were some doubters at first, even among his own coaches and players. The assistant coaches challenged Paterno, threw countless imaginary scenarios at him, and some were dubious about his answers. The players, especially the older ones, wondered if such desperation was a sign that their coach was cracking. Penn State played tentatively and without confidence and lost the first game of the 1967 season to Navy. Paterno lost all patience. “I’ve got to get rid of those older guys,” Sue remembered him saying. “We can’t win with them.”

  The next game, at Miami, Paterno gradually removed many of his senior players and replaced them with talented younger men. But it wasn’t their talent he was thinking about. He sent in the younger players because they believed in what he was teaching. Penn State beat Miami 17–8 in a spectacular defensive show. That surprising and dominant performance won over some fans and reporters. What Paterno did after the game won over the team.

  At the airport after the game, Paterno saw two of his seniors having a beer in a bar. This was against a Paterno rule; football players were never to be seen in a bar during the season because it reflected poorly on them and the team. The players—not unreasonably, perhaps—pointed out that they were of drinking age and they did not think the no-drinking rule carried over to a Miami airport. Nobody knew them in Miami. It was just one beer. Paterno was unmoved. One of the players had been in minor trouble before, and now Paterno threw him off the team; he suspended the other for two games.

  Back on campus, the Penn State captains, Tom Sherman and Bill Lenkaitis, went to Paterno to protest. They told him the team had discussed it, and they believed his ruling was unfair. Paterno addressed the team. “I told the team that all their life they would have to live by rules, whether they agreed with them or not. They might not see the wisdom in a speed limit or in getting taxes in by midnight on tax day. I told them that the rule was there to protect them, but it didn’t matter if they agreed with me. There are consequences for breaking rules. And by breaking those rules you are accepting those consequences.”

  He then challenged the team: “If you can’t live with it, go.” Paterno walked out to give the players a chance to leave. He returned a couple of minutes later. Every player stayed.

  Penn State lost the next week to a UCLA team ranked No. 3 in America, but this time they scared the heck out of Tommy Prothro. UCLA needed a blocked punt to squeak out a 17–15 victory. The Other Thing defense had again proven commanding.

  Penn State did not lose again for almost three years.

  { Intermezzo }

  Here is how a Joe Paterno after-dinner story came about: Penn State won eight of ten games in 1967 and so was offered a chance to play in a bowl game. This was not an insubstantial thing in 1967; there were only nine bowl games. Years later there would be so many bowl games that almost every Division I football team in the country with a winning record received an invitation. But in the late 1960s bowl invitations meant something.

  Penn State played Florida State in Jacksonville and dominated the game for the first half, leading 17–0. The defense had overwhelmed Florida State’s players. Then, with less than a yard to go from their own 15-yard line, Penn State faced a fourth down. The obvious decision was to punt the ball; in fact to call it an “obvious decision” is to undervalue the word “obvious.” A punt was more or less the only call,
so much so that Paterno’s friend Jim Tarman would always remember the reaction in the press box of Penn State’s athletic director Ernie McCoy and President Eric Walker (as recalled in Ridge Riley’s book Road to Number One).

  “Joe’s going for it,” Tarman said.

  “He’d never,” McCoy said.

  “He’d better not,” Walker said.

  He did. Near the end of his life, Paterno would talk nostalgically about his decision to go for a first down, as if remembering the choice of an old friend. “I’ll tell you what I was thinking. I was still a young coach, understand. And I had convinced myself that the only way to win was to be unafraid of losing. That’s what I used to tell the guys.”

  With this Paterno stood up. We were in his kitchen, and he had just been released from the hospital after breaking his pelvis. He was going through chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He had lost weight, and his face sagged a bit, and that beautiful voice of his had grown faint. But now he stood up.

  “You can’t be afraid to lose!” he shouted with a jolt of force, and he pointed at me. “You will not win all the time in life. Sometimes the other team’s gonna lick ya. But you have to believe you will win. You know who wins in this world? I don’t care if it’s football or politics or business. The bold people win. The audacious people. People who are afraid to lose, they beat themselves. They lose before they ever get started. They have their excuses before the game is even played.”

  Then he sat down. The fury had subsided. “I went for it on fourth down because I refused to be afraid to lose,” he said softly. “But what I didn’t understand then is that while you don’t want to be afraid of losing, you want to have a healthy respect for it.”

  Paterno’s gamble failed. Penn State was stopped on fourth down—or anyway, that’s how the officials saw it. Penn State’s quarterback Tom Sherman would always believe he had gained the first down. He dived forward and felt sure he had pushed the ball well past the first-down line. But the officials gave the ball to Florida State, which put together a rather remarkable comeback. At the end of the game, Florida State was in position to gamble, to go for victory on fourth down, but Seminoles coach Bill Peterson decided that his team had played too well to lose, and so they kicked a field goal and the game ended tied 17–17.

  Media people sided with the conservative Peterson and attacked Paterno. Sports Illustrated called his decision to go for it on fourth down the bonehead play of the year. Columnist after columnist confirmed the brainlessness of the decision. Sue Paterno found herself on an elevator with a man who was muttering to himself, “Stupid. Stupid.” Even Paterno himself said after the game, “It was my call. I blew it.”

  On the plane ride home, he was despondent. Though he would forever after talk about how that bold and fateful decision served a larger purpose by convincing his team that they should always play to win, he felt humbled by the moment. He had allowed his bravado to cost his team a game. He blamed himself for allowing Florida State to tie the game.

  Paterno would recall two versions of what happened next. In the first version, Jack Curry, an excellent Penn State receiver, walked to the back of the plane, where Paterno was sitting, and said, “Joe, the guys wanted me to tell you something.”

  Paterno looked up. He waited for the consoling words.

  “You blew it,” Curry said. “Everybody on the team thinks so.” And he turned and walked off.

  Over time, Paterno would add details, build up the drama, and punch up the punch line until the second version became one of his after-dinner staples:

  Most of you are too young to remember this, but I was once the dumbest coach in America. Some people would say I’m still the dumbest, but believe me, I’m smarter than I used to be.

  My second year as coach, we went to the Gator Bowl. That was my first bowl game as a head coach, and I really wanted to win it. We went up 17–0, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was thinking, “Hey, we must be pretty good.” Then we had fourth down and one from our own 15-yard line. And the players were saying, “Go for it!” Well, players always want to go for it. Every time they come off the field, we could be fourth and 100, the quarterback will tell me, “Coach, we can get it.”

  But this time, I was feeling pretty good. And I thought, “Yeah, we can make that. It’s less than a yard.” So I say, “What the heck! Go for it!” I wanted to be unconventional.

  Of course, we don’t make it. I’ll never forget that. We don’t make it, and Florida State comes all the way back and ties us 17–17. Now I feel terrible. I cost my team the game. Most of the guys said, “That’s okay.” But they’re really thinking, “Paterno, you blew it.”

  I’m sitting in the back of the plane, feeling sorry for myself. I’m sitting there with Sue, and then Jack Curry comes back. Jack was the team clown. He was a great guy and a great receiver. So he comes back, and he said, “Don’t feel bad about it. There’s good in everything.”

  I look up at him. And he says: “Before the game started, nobody knew who coached Penn State. But after you went for it, everybody in the country shouted: ‘Who in the hell coaches Penn State?’ ”

  So what’s the real punch line? Jack Curry said neither version is accurate. In fact, he says, it wasn’t even Paterno’s idea to go for it on fourth down. He said that Paterno sent the punter onto the field, but the players themselves sent the punter back to the sideline and went for it. “Joe took the blame,” Curry said. “But there was nothing he could do about it.” So there was no reason to say anything at all to Joe on the plane.

  But Curry didn’t mind the stories Paterno told. He especially liked the “Who the hell coaches Penn State?” version. It made a lot of people laugh.

  Paterno at Beaver Stadium in the late 1960s (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  The Grand Experiment

  When the 1968 college football season began, Joe Paterno was virtually unknown outside of Penn State. Within five years, he would be the most famous and admired coach in America. He would become more than that, really. Rich men would throw absurd sums of money at him. Editorial pages across the country glorified him. Many students looked to him as an example of sanity. So did their parents; thousands wrote letters to Paterno asking for guidance and perspective and even salvation for their sons. Paterno, with his thick glasses, wisecracking Brooklyn accent, and seemingly unshakable ethics, stood for something people feared had been lost.

  It is hard for any man, even a plainspoken Brooklyn kid determined never to lose his bearings, to hold on to what matters when people start to see him as a saint.

  THE WINNING CAME FIRST. PATERNO had miraculous teams in 1968 and 1969. The Nittany Lions did not lose a game either year. Their 31-game unbeaten streak eventually would capture the attention of President Nixon (though not exactly in the way Paterno wanted). Their deceptively simple and conservative offense—run the ball, run the ball, run the ball—overpowered opponents. Their ever-shifting defenses folded and unfolded and left quarterbacks and coaches bewildered. This was how Paterno had imagined football in the many hours he spent scribbling plays and thoughts on graph paper, devising The Other Thing; his teams in 1968 and 1969 seemed to spring directly from his imagination. The Nittany Lions outplayed team after team, and if they could not outplay a team on a certain day, well, they helped those teams beat themselves.

  It was this—making teams beat themselves—that marked Paterno’s career, not only in the late 1960s but throughout his coaching life. Time after time teams would lose to Penn State and leave the field believing that they should have won. “We had a chance to beat Penn,” Miami coach Charlie Tate said after a 22–7 loss in 1968. (Notice how he called Penn State “Penn.” It would be a few years before Penn State became a brand name.) “But the injury to [our quarterback] and the blocked punt hurt.”

  “The big thing is they didn’t make mistakes,” Kansas State coach Vince Gibson said after his team lost 17–14.

  “The fumbles kille
d us,” Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder griped after his team’s 15–14 loss.

  Two words, if only, haunted Penn State opponents for more than forty years. If only we hadn’t fumbled. If only we hadn’t committed that penalty. If only we had made that field goal. This was no accident, and because it happened time after time, it was not luck either. Paterno’s overriding philosophy was simple and boring, and through the years fans often complained about it: Your best chance at winning is not losing. You prevail in football and in life by making fewer mistakes than your opponent. You triumph not with grand heroics and individual brilliance and the sorcery of strategy. No, football teams win, he told his players again and again, because of the small details you get right and the other guys get wrong. You trust your teammate a little bit more than the other guy trusts his. You sacrifice a little bit more for the good of the team. You hold on to the football, and you don’t take unnecessary chances, and you don’t jump offside in the big moment.

  Again and again, over and over, Paterno told them: Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.

  “I know it’s boring,” Paterno would say. “I know fans don’t want to hear it. They want to win every game 55–0. They want to throw the ball all over the field. They want gimmick plays. Sometimes that stuff will work. But that’s not how you win championships. That’s not how you get to the top. If there’s one thing I learned it’s that teams lose games far more often than they win. A good punt will win you more games than a great catch. I know people will say, ‘Ah, Paterno, you’re full of it.’ But I’ll take my chances with my way.”