Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  Then Paterno saw the first sign that the plan would work. On third down and 2 at the Penn State 28, Testaverde threw a long pass into the end zone that was incomplete. That made it fourth down, and Miami was in field goal range. But they were not interested in kicking field goals. The Hurricanes had worn battle fatigues; they had walked out of dinner; they had compared themselves to the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. All season long they had gotten in various kinds of trouble off the field. They had come to Arizona to score touchdowns and win big and show everyone in America that they were invincible. They went for it on fourth down, and Charles Henry dropped a pass over the middle to give the ball back to Penn State.

  “You have to understand something about Joe,” Bauer said. “He didn’t care how much we won by. Ever. He didn’t care what the game looked like. He didn’t care who got the credit. He didn’t care what anybody said about it. All he cared about was playing to win—one point, seven points, thirty points, absolutely no difference to him.”

  This was at the heart of the Paterno plan engineered by Sandusky: Penn State wanted to win; Miami wanted to destroy. So the Penn State defense would back up, back up, let Testaverde see the field, let the receivers catch passes, let Alonzo Highsmith gain yards. But they would never give Testaverde the same defensive look. When the receivers caught those passes, the Penn State defenders would hit with such force that receivers would think twice about catching another. And as for Highsmith, Paterno gambled that Miami would be too impatient and single-minded to run the ball every time. “If Miami had given Highsmith the ball forty times,” said Bauer, “we wouldn’t have known what to do. But they didn’t. And Joe knew they wouldn’t.”

  The second time the Hurricanes had the ball, they were driving down the field again when Testaverde completed a pass to Irvin over the middle. Ray Isom, Penn State’s short but powerful safety, rushed in, pounded Irvin, and forced a fumble. It was one of a couple of huge hits Isom had in the game. Irvin was shell-shocked by the hit. He would drop five or six passes in the game before it was over. After the game, he would claim the ball was slippery.

  The third time the Hurricanes had the ball, they were driving again. But on third down, Testaverde grew impatient—not for the last time—and threw the ball downfield, where it was intercepted by defensive back Duffy Cobbs. The first quarter was over. Miami had not scored. The intensity was overwhelming; both teams felt it. They screamed at each other and cursed at each other and a couple of fights almost broke out. At one point, a Miami player hit Shaffer late in what Paterno called “the worst cheap shot I’ve ever seen.” But his plan was working. Frustration was building on the Miami sideline.

  Miami did score a touchdown in the second quarter when Shaffer fumbled deep in Penn State territory. Paterno groaned. As he had told coach Fran Ganter, the offense had to hold on to to the ball or the plan could not work. But Shaffer promptly led the team on a long scoring drive to tie the game. He completed two critical third-down passes—two of only five completions he would make all night—and he ran for the touchdown himself after faking a pass. The score was 7–7. NBC’s Bob Costas spent halftime on television interviewing President Ronald Reagan.

  In the Penn State locker room, Paterno told his team that the plan had gone brilliantly; if not for the fumble, it would have been perfect. He knew that Miami’s players and coaches were fully ensnared in their own pride. He knew, absolutely knew, that the Miami players were angry, baffled, and determined to come out in the second half and end this nonsense. And this was exactly how the plan worked. They would come out even more impatient and distracted. Penn State had pounded and confused the Hurricanes into a state of panic, and the Nittany Lions had dozens and dozens of new looks to unveil in the second half.

  When Miami got the ball at the start of the second half, Paterno got his confirmation. Highsmith dropped a pass. Irvin dropped a pass. The next time Miami got the ball, Testaverde tried to throw a bomb once, then got sacked trying to throw another. The next time, Testaverde slipped and threw a pass that Shane Conlan intercepted.

  It was like hypnosis. Though Highsmith was running free—he would gain 119 yards—and though the game was tied, Johnson and the other Miami coaches refused to give him the ball. They were still going for the knockout. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Testaverde threw another interception, this time to Penn State linebacker Pete Giftopoulos.

  Miami did manage a field goal in the fourth quarter, on a drive built around two long Highsmith runs, to take a 10–7 lead. But on their next possession, they were again throwing downfield, and again Testaverde’s pass was intercepted, again by Conlan, who ran the ball all the way to the Miami 5-yard line. Penn State offensive lineman Keith Radecic recovered a fumbled snap, and D. J. Dozier scored on a 6-yard run. It seemed impossible to just about everyone watching. Penn State led 14–10.

  Miami’s panic increased: their next series ended with a fumble. The one after that ended when Testaverde’s deep pass fell incomplete. Finally, it came down to the last series of the game. This was where the Paterno–Sandusky plan reached its limit. “We knew,” Paterno said, “that at some point we would have to stand up. Miami was too good. We knew they would have one great drive in them. The question was: Could we stop them when they made that drive?”

  Miami made that drive. Well, first, Trey Bauer dropped a sure interception. “We had to win that game twice,” he muttered later. On fourth down from deep in their own territory, Testaverde completed a pass to Brian Blades, who shook off his defender and raced 30 yards. For an instant, it looked like he might score. Ray Isom was outraged at linebacker Eddie Johnson, who had reverted to his usual instincts and had gone for the interception. “What are you doing?” Isom shouted at Johnson.

  “Ray, stop yelling, call a play!” Conlan yelled at Isom.

  “Everybody focus!” Bauer yelled at all of them.

  Miami moved the ball to the Penn State 5-yard line with less than a minute remaining. On the next play, Penn State’s defense was a bit confused, and a couple of receivers broke open, but just as Testaverde was about to throw, Penn State’s Tim Johnson came rushing from the blind side, grabbed the bottom of Testaverde’s helmet and pulled him hard to the ground. The ball was at the 13-yard line. There were twenty-five seconds left.

  TREY BAUER KEPT A PHOTOGRAPH of the moment in his office. It was a photograph of the sideline, with Miami just a few yards away from the end zone and time running out. There they were—Bauer and Sandusky and defensive assistant Jim Williams and Paterno—and they were faced with perhaps the toughest call of their lives. They had to keep Miami out of the end zone. Sandusky was at a loss. He stuttered and looked around nervously. He had no idea what to do.

  That’s when Paterno walked over. “What are you guys running?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” Bauer answered.

  Paterno looked at him, at Sandusky, nodded, and walked away.

  “It was the only time—the only time—I ever saw him at a loss for words,” Bauer said. “I look back and think about it, and I think it was the ultimate sign of trust. The play didn’t really matter. He just thought: ‘You’ll find a way.’ ”

  On third down, Testaverde threw a panicked pass as he was falling backward that fell incomplete. That led to fourth down. Testaverde dropped back, looked left, and threw into a crowd of Penn State players. It was the last confused pass of a broken quarterback. Any of a number of Penn State players might have intercepted the ball, but it was Pete Giftopoulos who actually did. He ran awkwardly for a few steps. “Get down!” Bauer and Isom and Conlan all yelled at him at the same time, though Giftopoulos really couldn’t hear anything.

  Then Giftopoulos fell to the ground slowly, awkwardly, like a child trying to hide under his bed during a thunderstorm. And Penn State fans rushed onto the field.

  JEROME BROWN, THE MIAMI PLAYER who stripped down to fatigues and shouted about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor, went into the Penn State locker room after the game to congratulate his oppo
nents. He called Penn State a great team. Just five years later he died in a car wreck. John Bruno, the Penn State punter who joked about Japan losing the war, died of cancer that same year.

  The game lived on. Miami players, many of them, would always insist that they should have won the game. “The better team did not win,” running back Melvin Bratton said in the immediate aftermath, and that would be a theme. Many years later, an ESPN documentary about Miami football took it for granted that Miami was indeed a much better team than Penn State and would have won easily if not for its seven turnovers.

  “Yeah,” Bob White said twenty-five years later, “and if a frog had wings he wouldn’t have to hop around on his butt all day either.”

  Trey Bauer said, “I think the fact that so many of them still think they should have won tells me they still don’t get it. They didn’t just make mistakes. We forced them into making mistakes. I said after the game, and I still believe it, ‘If we play them ten times, we win nine of them.’ You know why? Because we knew how to win. And Joe would have figured out a way.”

  Rhythms

  Joe Paterno set his clock to the rhythms of college football. Those rhythms lifted him and dropped him, thrilled and frustrated him. His teams hit spectacular peaks at fairly regular intervals: they were great in 1969, again in 1973, and again in 1978. They won national championships in 1982 and 1986. It seemed like every four years or so, a special group of seniors would take hold, a group of juniors and sophomores and even a few freshmen would mesh their talents, the breaks would bounce right, and the team would win week after week. Paterno would tell recruits that if they came to Penn State, they would be part of at least one magical team that had a chance at a national championship.

  The autumns in between magical teams varied. Some impetuous freshmen did not become talented sophomores; some talented sophomores did not become skilled juniors; some skilled juniors did not become senior leaders. Sometimes the breaks broke bad. In 1988, Penn State finished 5-6, its first losing record since Paterno became head coach. He turned sixty-two that year, and so, of course, the talk was of time passing by the old man. Paterno had dealt with much skepticism and doubt throughout his life, but this was the first time that such talk clanged at a high volume, and he didn’t like it. He told friends that he was determined to have one more great team, one more national champion. In 1991 Penn State finished the year ranked third in the nation. In 1992, they finished 7-5 and Paterno admitted that he and the coaches had lost control of that team. Again people shouted that Paterno had lost his stuff. He turned sixty-six that year.

  Penn State started playing football in the Big Ten Conference in 1993. The school had officially joined the conference in 1990, after a contentious and uneasy negotiation. On the surface, the marriage made a lot of sense. For the conference, Penn State brought football prestige and the power media markets of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, not to mention New York. For Penn State, the Big Ten brought stability and shelter. Paterno had been one of the first to understand that college football was becoming too expensive for a school to go it independently. A conference could negotiate big money deals with television networks. A conference could work out long-term relationships with bowl games. Paterno had tried in the late 1970s to spearhead an eastern conference featuring Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and others, but the talks had fallen apart. (Paterno had raw feelings about those failed negotiations; the Nittany Lions even stopped playing longtime rival Pittsburgh after 2000.) By the late 1980s, Paterno realized that because of the costs, the day of the college football independent was over. He was right: Before long, football powers like Florida State and Miami had joined conferences—only Notre Dame, with its national appeal, could go it alone. Paterno and Penn State administrators decided that the Big Ten, with its strong academic standing and sports prowess, would be a good fit and would raise the entire athletic department and the rest of the school.

  But while it looked good on the surface, there were a lot of reasons it was not a good fit. Remote State College made any road trip for other Big Ten schools difficult. Indiana’s basketball coach (and Paterno’s longtime friend) Bob Knight griped, “It’s a camping trip up there.” Although Paterno believed the Big Ten could be good for his football team—could help with recruiting and push them to play better football by consistently playing better teams—he knew that the conference was set in its ways and might make decisions that were contrary to Penn State’s best interests.

  Still, a number of people, Paterno among them, decided that Penn State should be in the Big Ten. It was a sloppy process. First, there were secret dealings among the Big Ten presidents and athletic directors. There was an awkward “invitation in principle.” There was some loud skepticism from some of the Big Ten athletic directors and coaches. There was fierce voting by the school presidents and the outcome was uncertain until after the final negotiations. Then came the actual invitation. And even after the invitation, several coaches and administrators in the Big Ten complained about it. “Perhaps if we had to do it all over again,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said, “we’d use a different process.”

  Paterno would sometimes regret joining the Big Ten. He did believe the conference challenged Penn State in good ways—the beautiful Bryce Jordan Center was built in large part to give Penn State a basketball arena good enough for Big Ten play—but he also thought that the other schools in the conference did not share many of Penn State’s interests. Some of his many notes contain the question “Get out of Big 10?”

  PATERNO HAD ONE MORE UNDEFEATED team and one more losing battle with the college football polls. The 1994 team was unlike any in the school’s history. The offense was unstoppable; a reasonable case can be made that it was the greatest college football offense ever. Paterno had built a reputation, one he took more than a small measure of pride in, as a conservative offensive thinker. For years, Joe Paterno golf balls were sold in State College with the slogan (which Paterno loved) “Like the Penn State offense, three out of four are guaranteed to go up the middle.” It was a bit of a myth—Penn State’s 1982 national championship team had a fast-paced and high-scoring offense—but it was mostly true.

  The 1994 offense was so overloaded with speed and skill and the ability to make big plays that Paterno simply gave in to a daring and attacking offensive strategy. Running back Ki-Jana Carter had a staggering combination of power and speed; he ran for more than 1,500 yards, scored twenty-three touchdowns, finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting, and was the first pick in the NFL draft. Quarterback Kerry Collins was six-foot-five and had such a strong arm that two Major League Baseball teams drafted him as a potential pitcher. Collins finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy balloting and was the fifth pick in the NFL draft. Tight end Kyle Brady was an All-American and a top-ten NFL pick. Wide receiver Bobby Engram was an All-American and would win the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s best receiver. It was an embarrassment of riches. All year, Penn State never scored fewer than 30 points in a game. They scored 61 on Iowa, 63 against Ohio State on homecoming, and 59 against Michigan State. It looked nothing, absolutely nothing, like a typical Paterno team. “He didn’t adapt for 1994,” boasted All-American offensive lineman Jeff Hartings. “Honestly, we were just that good.”

  They were that good—certainly on offense—and by late October they were ranked No. 1 and seemed destined to win Paterno’s third national championship. But three strange circumstances conspired to move Penn State down in the rankings.

  First, the defense was not good. Trey Bauer loved telling players on the 1994 team that they could not beat his 1986 champions because they “couldn’t stop anybody.” Paterno was not happy about this, and he knew who was mostly responsible: Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky. In 1993, Paterno wrote what the family would sometimes call the “Why I Hate Jerry Sandusky Memo.” In it Paterno complained that Sandusky had stopped recruiting, seemed constantly distracted, had lost his energy for coaching, and was more interested in his charity, The Second Mile. “He w
ould gripe about Jerry all the time,” one family member said.

  The defensive issues were not an especially big deal in 1994 because the offense was so good. They gave up 27 points to Rutgers. So what? They scored 55. The week after their homecoming destruction of Ohio State, however, the defensive lapses did matter, at least aesthetically. Penn State led Indiana by 21 points late in the game. In the last two minutes, led by a backup quarterback, Indiana scored two touchdowns, the second on the last play of the game. Indiana added a 2-point conversion on that final touchdown to make the final score look extremely close: 35–29.

  “The Indiana people looked like they won it,” Paterno joked after the game, but it was no joke. The sportswriters and coaches who voted in the polls were not all aware of the details; they simply saw that Penn State had beaten a weak Indiana team by a mere 6 points. Penn State dropped to No. 2, behind Nebraska.

  The second factor involved Nebraska and its respected coach Tom Osborne. He had never won a national championship. He had come close in 1983 with a team many, even then, called the best in college football history. But his team had lost to Miami in the Orange Bowl when Osborne went for a 2-point play at the end rather than settling for a tie. He and Paterno were friends, and they shared some of the same philosophies of coaching: “I think, I hope, that Joe and I tried to remember what’s really important,” Osborne said. “You can really influence football players. A kid might sleep through history class, but he won’t sleep through football practice. He is invested. And so you have a chance to help develop his character. It’s a responsibility, one I tried to take very seriously, and I know Joe took it very seriously too.”