Crime, punishment and a happier Valley

The scope of Penn State's football recovery from 2011 is in full view.

Bill O’Brien at Penn State

Four of college football’s biggest-footed programs are getting ready to settle this thing. Penn State plays Notre Dame Thursday, Texas plays Ohio State Friday. The winners meet in Atlanta, for the College Football Playoff championship, on the night of Jan. 20, at about the time our new president orders a popular clothing line to rename itself “Tommy America.”

All four of the contestants have had their missteps and misfortunes over the past few years. But it’s interesting, if not astounding, how recently it was that Penn State self-deported into football purgatory, and how quickly we’ve forgotten.

Only 13 seasons ago, Happy Valley turned into Ground Zero. Jerry Sandusky, the popular and skillful defensive coordinator, was charged with sexually abused 52 boys that he had encountered in his Second Mile, a widely-praised charity that he founded to look after foster children. President George H.W. Bush had cited Second Mile as one of his “thousand points of light.” Sandusky was indicated on Nov. 5, 2011. Almost immediately, the chancellor, vice president and athletic director at Penn State were forced out, and all were convicted of child endangerment. Sandusky, now 80, was convicted of 40 counts of sexual abuse and will almost undoubtedly die in jail.

And then there was Joe Paterno, he of the 409 wins and two national championships, conductor of the “Grand Experiment” that purported to prove that football excellence and academic integrity were not contradictory. Paterno was forced out four days after Sandusky was indicted, and died of lung cancer 74 days later. A report by former FBI director Louis Freeh determined that Paterno was at the nerve center of the coverup, failing to report to police what he and the other officials had been told about Sandusky, and continuing to allow him to use Penn State facilities.

In June of 2012 the NCAA dealt Penn State a punishment surpassed only by SMU’s “death penalty,” in which football was discontinued. The Nittany Lions were banned from postseason games for four years, fined $60 million, and docked 20 scholarships a year through 2015.

The fury of those days still crops up from time to time. Just this year, the school trustees had to vote down a suggestion to change Beaver Stadium to Paterno Field. A statue of Paterno was dismantled, although, to be sure, the millions that Paterno raised to contribute to the school library were never returned to the family.

The remarkable part is how the punishment didn’t stick. Penn State has had only one losing season since that traumatic week. This year the Nittany Lions made their first appearance in the College Football Playoff, which was expanded from four to 12 teams, even though they lost to Ohio State, and then to Oregon in the Big Ten championship. Irony isn’t dead; Paterno had four undefeated teams that were denied unanimous national championships in wire-service polls. In 1969 President Nixon declared Texas was his choice for No. 1 even though no one had beaten Penn State. Four years later, Paterno said, “I’d like to know how the President knew so little about Watergate in 1973 and so much about football in 1969.”

This season was not aberrational. In six of the past nine seasons Penn State has won at least 11 games. In 2016 the Nittany Lions won the Big Ten championship and had a two-touchdown lead over USC in the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl before they lost, 52-49. The only team the Lions finished below .500 in the post-scandal era was in the Covid season of 2020, going 4-5. In 2014, when the scholarship deficits left the Nittany Lions at their youngest and most vulnerable, they were 2-6 in the Big Ten.

The comeback is detailed in Chris Raymond’s meticulous oral history, “Men In White,” which begins in the rubble of the winter of 2012. Coaches from around the country parachuted into Happy Valley, recruiting Nittany Lions who might be untethered. Illinois brought its whole coaching staff. Silas Redd, the Lions’ best running back, opted for USC. Stephon Morris rebuffed Michigan’s invitation and was told, “You sure? Because you might not even have a team.”

According to Raymond, the heroes were Michael Mauti and Michael Zordich, sons of former Nittany Lions, who recruited their teammates to stay, sometimes at high volume. Eighteen seniors refused to budge. By then the Nittany Lions had hired Bill O’Brien, the former offensive coordinator of the Patriots, who didn’t know how tough the sanctions would be. Suddenly there was a cadre of “run-ons,” walk-on players at high speed. Anyone who could catch a punt had a chance at promotion.

Raymond also has high praise for O’Brien, who refused to let the Nittany Lions wallow in pity, who transferred the intricate Patriots offense to a tough, under-recruited quarterback named Matt McGloin. In his first meeting he said he was accustomed to running an offense that averages 35 points, so why are you guys thinking about playing anywhere else? The players, sick of corporate babble and wide-lapeled hypocrisy, endorsed the bluntness and swagger.

Rick Slater was a former Penn State walk-on who re-enlisted in the Army after 9-11, and he wore his narrow black football belt on all his combat missions in the Middle East. He came back to talk to the holdovers and soon they were wearing “Charlie Mike” T-shirts, which meant “Continue the mission.”

O’Brien’s connection with those players got stronger when he proposed to put their surnames on their jerseys. This was standard procedure most places, but heresy at Penn State, at least to the fan base. But when O’Brien explained that he wanted to honor the players who defied the naysayers and decided to stay, everyone bought it, even Karen Caldwell, wife of equipment manager Spider Caldwell, who spent many late nights sewing on those names.

O’Brien’s teams rose from the dust and went 7-5 and 8-4. Then he left to coach the Houston Texans. The new coach was James Franklin, who had actually won at Vanderbilt. He hadn’t been through the troubles, and his approach was more holistic, less NFL-oriented. Franklin never found a treaty with quarterback Christian Hackenburg, a high-rated recruit who was victimized by Penn State’s depleted offensive line.. There also was tension between the veterans and the job-hungry freshmen and sophomores.

But Franklin turned out to be flexible. He spent one off-season having dinners with each of his players and softening the tensions. He also hired Joe Moorhead, an attacking offensive coordinator who thought any team with Saquon Barkley and Trace McSorley was always in the red zone.

Moorhead soon left to coach Mississippi State but Penn State kept winning. This is Franklin’s 11th year. He is regularly ridiculed for losing to elite teams, which is what most everyone does to elite teams, because that’s why they’re elite. But the fact that some Penn Staters are grumbling about 11-2 seasons was a sign that normalcy was back.

The NFL has drafted 28 Penn Staters in the past four years. Barkley, Micah Parsons, Chris Godwin, Joey Porter Jr., Pat Freiermuth, Arnold Ebiketie, Mike Gesicki and Donovan Smith are only a few that represent the Lions on Sunday afternoons. On this particular team, linebacker Abdul Carter will hear his name called before sunset on Draft Night 2025, and quarterback Drew Allar is a formidable runner-passer. Penn State hasn’t run into a heavyweight while negotiating its way through the first two rounds of the Diluted Dozen, but it dealt with SMU’s Kevin Jennings and Boise State’s Ashton Jeanty as no one else had.

The NCAA tacitly showed its penalties were too extreme when it rescinded them after two years. The Paterno family angrily disputed the conclusions of the Freeh Report, but it dropped its suit against the NCAA in 2017. As Mauti repeatedly told everyone during the intensifying crisis, “This program wasn’t built by one man and it sure as hell isn’t going to be torn down by one man.”

Conspiracies and collaborations have that in common. Each is a team effort. The men in the minimalist jerseys are back, as if nothing had ever happened, or maybe because everything did.