Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

Sandusky did take the retirement package, but he had a series of demands, another sign that the 1998 investigation was not the reason for the retirement. It’s hard to imagine his being in a position to negotiate if that was the case. He negotiated his deal almost entirely with Athletic Director Tim Curley. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper, the New Era, reported in 1999, “Interestingly, Sandusky said he never informed Paterno of his decision. Instead, he went to Penn State athletic director Tim Curley . . . . In fact, Sandusky and Paterno didn’t confer on the subject very much at all, even before a decision was made. ‘We talked some, but I didn’t talk to him that much about it,’ Sandusky said.”

  Sandusky wanted to maintain an office on campus and access to various athletic operations. This was something several other coaches had been granted on their retirement. But he had other, more formidable demands, the big one being the chance to coach the Penn State defense for the 1999 season. It was obvious why he wanted this: the 1999 defense was one of the most talented in the school’s history. Sandusky still aspired to be a head coach, and he knew that coaching this defense could make him an attractive prospect to other schools. Paterno’s concession on this is harder to figure; he would say before he died that he thought Sandusky had earned the right to coach the 1999 team because of his many years of service. In other words, he acquiesced out of loyalty. Undoubtedly, Paterno was also being practical; Sandusky retired in May, and it would have been disruptive to replace a defensive coordinator so late in the year. Whatever his reasons, Paterno allowed Sandusky to coach the 1999 season, something else that seems unlikely had he been conscious of Sandusky’s secret life. But even for reasons having solely to do with football, letting Sandusky coach was a decision Paterno would deeply regret.

  THE 1999 SEASON, SO FULL of promise at the start, developed into a disaster. Paterno had long believed that the Penn State program tracked through peaks and valleys. He saw the 1999 team as potentially his last great peak. The defense was anchored by defensive end Courtney Brown and linebacker LaVar Arrington, who would make history by becoming the No. 1 and No. 2 picks in the 2000 NFL draft. (This was just the third time in the sixty-four year history of the draft that the top two picks had come from the same school.) There were future NFL stars all over the roster. That team was bursting with talent, so much so that Sports Illustrated ranked Penn State the preseason No. 1 team in America. “Joe knows this can be a special year,” an unnamed player told the magazine’s Tim Layden, “and doesn’t want anything to mess it up.”

  The tension between Paterno and Sandusky gurgled just below the surface. At the team’s Media Day in August, the defensive players said they wanted a photo taken with Sandusky. As Paterno walked out of range, Sandusky barked out, “I’ve waited thirty years for that.” He laughed. Paterno did not.

  Still, with so much talent, and with the hope that Sandusky would refocus in his final year, Paterno felt optimistic. Penn State opened the season by destroying fourth-ranked Arizona 41–7. A week later, even Paterno’s best efforts at sportsmanship could not prevent his team from scoring 70 points against Akron. As November began, Penn State was 9-0 and had defeated four teams ranked in the top twenty. But Paterno sensed there was something wrong. The defense was not dominant; they had not put together a shutout, and with this kind of talent, Paterno thought, this team should be pitching shutouts. The defense gave up 23 points to Miami, which had an excellent offense, but then gave up 24 to Indiana and 25 to Purdue. Reporters made clear in their stories that Paterno was edgier than usual.

  On November 6, Penn State played Minnesota. It was Paterno’s 400th game as head coach. It was also Penn State’s homecoming. There were almost 97,000 people in the stands. Minnesota was coached by Glen Mason, who idolized Paterno so intensely that he began wearing ties on the sidelines to be like Joe. It seemed like a nice setup for Penn State, but the game did not go as expected. With less than two minutes left, Penn State led 23–21 and had the ball on the Minnesota 33-yard line on fourth down. Paterno could have had his kicker try a 50-yard field goal (the wind would have been at kicker Travis Forney’s back), but he didn’t feel good about the chances. He decided—and he never wavered from the rightness of this decision—that the best chance he had to win the game was to punt the ball and make Minnesota drive the length of the field against the most talented defense in America. “I didn’t think they could do it,” he said.

  Minnesota did do it. The Gophers stumbled down the field, overcoming a sack by Arrington and a crushing hit by David Fleischhauer. They found themselves facing fourth down and 16 on the Penn State 40-yard line. Minnesota quarterback Billy Cockerham flung the ball downfield, all the way to the Penn State 13. The ball might have been tipped by Penn State’s Derek Fox; it definitely deflected off Minnesota receiver Ron Johnson. Then, somehow, the ball was caught by another Minnesota receiver, Arland Bruce. When asked after the game if the play involved luck or skill, Cockerham did not hesitate. “Luck,” he said. Three plays later, just before the clock expired, Minnesota’s Dan Nystrom kicked the field goal that beat Penn State.

  The press pounded Paterno for not having tried the field goal. “Young athletes can make mistakes under pressure and so can veteran coaches,” Joe Lapointe wrote in the New York Times. “In his 400th game as coach of Penn State today, Joe Paterno made a difficult decision that might have cost his team a chance for a national championship.” Other reporters followed suit. Closer to home, the Daily Collegian published a column blasting Paterno for not having tried a field goal.

  But Paterno, as self-critical as he was, did not blame himself for this loss. In his mind, he had done exactly the right thing: he had relied on what was supposed to be a great defense, a defense that would never allow a team to drive the length of the field in the final minutes, lucky play or not. “It wasn’t just Jerry,” Paterno would say. “It was all us coaches. That should have been a great defense. And it wasn’t.”

  Things got worse. A week later, again at home, this time on Senior Day against Michigan, Penn State built a 27–17 lead with less than ten minutes left. Once again Paterno felt sure that his defense would not blow the lead. Once again, he was wrong. Michigan’s young quarterback, Tom Brady, scored a touchdown and threw for another to give Michigan a 31–27 victory. Again the press blamed the offense, which was indeed anemic (Penn State had just 7 yards rushing for the game) and sloppy (they lost three fumbles). Even LaVar Arrington seemed to suggest that the offense could have helped out more. “It seemed like we were out there a lot,” he told reporters.

  Again, though, Paterno’s fury focused on the defensive failures. How could the team win when it gave up 31 points? When Penn State lost again the next week—this time a 35–28 embarrassment to Michigan State, with the Spartans’ T. J. Duckett scoring four touchdowns—the collapse was complete. Years later, Paterno would call 1999 his worst coaching job. “We let those kids down,” he admitted. When I asked him if Sandusky deserved the lion’s share of the blame, he shrugged. “We all deserve the blame.”

  Penn State played Texas A&M in the Alamo Bowl, and for this game the team was motivated. Penn State won 24–0. This kind of dominant defensive performance only made Paterno angrier; it suggested what the season might have been. When the game ended, the players gave Sandusky the game ball. “Man, it was like a Hollywood script,” Arrington told reporters.

  “Will you miss Joe Paterno?” Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum asked Sandusky.

  “Well, not exactly,” he replied.

  WHEN THE SEASON ENDED, THERE were various celebrations for Sandusky. Paterno was conspicuously absent. He released a statement on the day Sandusky’s retirement was announced: “We can’t say enough about what he has brought to the football program as an exceptional coach, a fine player and a person of great character and integrity.” But he did not answer questions, and he did not say much publicly about Sandusky. He did not even offer the expected nice comment about Sandusky for Jack McCallum’s Sports Illustrated story. At the team banquet, P
aterno usually called up the seniors individually and said something about them, but this time he told Guido D’Elia that he would rather not. D’Elia recalled, “He told me, ‘We let those players down. We did a terrible job coaching them. I can’t stand up there and just act like it’s a celebration.’ ”

  Paterno appeared briefly at Sandusky’s retirement celebration in April; he left early, claiming a “prior commitment.” Shortly afterward, at Penn State’s Media Day, he unloaded on Sandusky’s coaching deficiencies, while carefully not using his name:

  • People don’t realize that we have not been a good defensive team since we’ve been in the Big Ten.

  • My biggest concern is for us to get back to where we’re a good defensive team.

  • You win by forcing turnovers, not getting stupid penalties, and the team that plays tough, hard-nosed defense ends up winning most of the time.

  • If we’re going to be a better football team, we can’t be seventieth [nationally] defensively.

  And perhaps most pointed:

  • We’ve got to improve on defense. We’ve got to do things better as a coordinated defense than we did at times last year.

  That word, coordinated, was the direct hit. Sandusky, after all, had been defensive coordinator. Paterno was so eager to eliminate Sandusky’s fingerprints from the team that he got rid of the defensive coordinator title and instead called Tom Bradley assistant coach in charge of defense and cornerbacks. He later regretted making his feelings about Sandusky so public, and he tried to clear the air a bit by telling reporter Gordie Jones of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer, “Jerry did a great job.” However, even in that story, he could not keep himself from saying that the team had to recruit better because Sandusky had “not done a lot of recruiting in recent years.”

  By then, Sandusky and Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley had worked out the final details of a retirement package, which included professor emeritus status, access to athletic facilities (including the locker rooms), an office near the football building, a parking pass, and access to Penn State email. Paterno was not directly involved in the negotiations, and he would say at the end of his life that he was opposed to allowing Sandusky access to the football program, simply because he did not want the potential for distraction. When I told Paterno that people would find it hard to believe that he could not have influenced Sandusky’s retirement package, he said, “People like to give me too much power. That’s Tim’s department. I told Tim how I felt. He worked out the deal as he saw fit.”

  Through the years, Paterno worked with a lot of coaches. Some retired. Some left for jobs at other schools. Some, like longtime offensive coordinator Fran Ganter, found jobs in athletic administration. It was business. In Paterno’s mind, Jerry Sandusky was no longer his concern.

  Joe Paterno at a rally in State College for Adam Taliaferro (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  Adam

  Paterno felt sure that with Sandusky off the staff and with a few changes, everything would feel new and exciting again. Everyone talked about how energetic he seemed as the 2000 season started. He tinkered with everything. He had the players’ sheet of rules and regulations rewritten so that it was a little bit stricter but also a little bit fresher. (Paterno added, “As they said in The Lion King: Remember who you are.”) He worked hard to be more active in practice, to challenge coaches more, to do anything to eliminate the bad taste of the 1999 season.

  But the 2000 season turned out to be the worst of Paterno’s career. It crashed before it even began. In May, Penn State quarterback Rashard Casey and a friend were arrested for aggravated assault against an off-duty police officer outside a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey. What made matters worse was that it appeared to be a racial incident; Casey was black, and the police officer, who was white, was with a black woman. Casey went to see Paterno in his office. “Rashard looked me in the eye and said, ‘Coach, I didn’t do anything,’ ” Paterno recalled. “I knew Rashard. I knew what was in his heart. And I believed him.”

  Paterno announced that he would not discipline Casey and would start him in the first game of the season. This set off a firestorm, with columnists across the country calling Paterno a hypocrite and a sellout. “Just a guess,” a Pittsburgh columnist wrote. “If the Penn State long snapper had been charged with assault, he would have been kicked off the team.” Most of the stories that criticized Paterno’s decision to play Casey also mentioned that Paterno was only seven victories away from passing Bear Bryant for most victories by a Division I-A coach. “People rush to judgment and they want to believe the worst,” Paterno responded.

  At the end of the season, it was announced that Casey would not be indicted. In time, he would be awarded a settlement in his own lawsuit against the Hoboken Police Department for malicious prosecution and violation of his civil rights. Paterno had been right; Casey was not guilty. “May they burn in First Amendment Hell!” Casey’s lawyer Dennis McAlvey said of all the people who had convicted Casey in the press. Paterno did not say anything at all. By then few Penn State football fans even cared.

  The reason few cared: Penn State kept losing. The Nittany Lions began the season ranked twenty-second in the country, but in their first game they got pounded by Southern California. Then, in perhaps the most shocking loss of the entire Paterno era, they lost to Toledo 24–6. In retrospect the loss was not so shocking: Toledo was a very good team, probably better than Penn State. But at the time it suggested a colossal shift in college football. Penn State was supposed to destroy teams like Toledo. After the game, Penn State running back Larry Johnson (son of assistant coach Larry Johnson Sr.) did something perhaps even more shocking than the loss: he ripped the coaching staff. “Everything we do is too predictable,” he told reporters. “Everybody knows what we are doing. The system has been around too long. We’ve got coaches who have been here for thirty years, twenty years, it seems like things never change.”

  Penn State lost again two weeks later, to Pitt, and suddenly there was a lot of talk about Paterno’s age. He was seventy-three. His team looked out of sorts. He was still six victories away from passing Bear Bryant’s record, and many people thought that record was what motivated him. His son Jay thought he knew better: “The people who think that Joe cares about the wins record just don’t understand what makes him tick.”

  Paterno downplayed his age and the slow start. “I work harder at coaching today than I have ever worked in my life,” he told the New York Times, one of several news organizations that sent someone to State College to find out what was going on with Penn State football. When asked on his weekly radio show how he maintained his composure through the tough start, he answered, “I guess I’m philosophical.” Paterno figured if he just kept pushing and demanding and insisting, things would get back to normal. It had always worked before.

  ADAM TALIAFERRO WAS A BRIGHT and talented freshman who grew up outside of Philadelphia. His story is familiar to anyone who follows Penn State football because it is the story of so many of Paterno’s players: he was recruited by numerous schools, by flamboyant and charismatic coaches, but he was drawn to Penn State by Paterno’s honesty. “Coach Paterno didn’t make me any guarantees. He didn’t tell me, ‘You will start as a freshman’ or ‘You will be an All-American.’ Other coaches said that stuff. But he just told me that Penn State was a good place for me, that I was more than a football player, that I could do anything and that he would always help me.”

  The Taliaferro path was like hundreds of others. Paterno was as hard on him as he was on every freshman, telling him on more than one occasion that he was useless and not Penn State material. “Play like that,” Paterno told him once, “and I’ll send you back to New Jersey.”

  As mentioned, one of the great dilemmas of Paterno’s coaching life was how to handle freshmen. He believed deeply that freshmen were not ready physically (in most cases) or emotionally (in all cases) to play college football. Yet he played freshme
n. He would say he had little choice if he wanted Penn State to be competitive. And he did want that very much. “I’ve been a hypocrite about that my whole life,” he said. “I always knew that it was wrong to play freshmen. But I did it. True, I did it less than most people. But I still did it.”

  He did do it less than most. For years, other coaches would tell eager high school seniors, You don’t want to go to Penn State. They don’t play freshmen. But as time went on, Paterno played freshmen more and more. He knew that playing freshmen was the new reality of college football, and he did not deny that he was making another concession for success. The last great coaching surge of his life would be powered by freshmen.

  But before that, in 2000, he played freshman Adam Taliaferro. “It was actually a bit surprising,” Taliaferro said. “I really didn’t think I would get a chance to play much as a freshman.” Taliaferro had shown a great sense of the game, a great feel for what to do in confusing moments on the field, and this was what mattered most to Paterno. Before the 2000 season, he had given his players a score sheet that showed exactly how he and the other coaches would grade them. It looked like this:

  Attitude (10 points). This means behavior off the field, class attendance, grades, appearance, maturity, respect for teammates and other people, and being on time for meetings and appointments.

  Athletic ability (10 points). This is a tough one . . . . Remember, if you have the essential quality—attitude—our evaluation of your athletic ability will be based just on that and nothing else.

  Speed (8 points). No explanation needed.

  Toughness (8 points). It isn’t only physical, but also mental toughness.

  Durability (8 points). If you cannot practice or you cannot stay healthy, you really don’t have much of a chance to be a significant part of a great team. This is not to say that there are not legitimate injuries, but I do mean to say that some people are more prone to injuries than others.